A Poet on the Factory Floor: On Daily Life in China’s Industrial Centers

on the pristine production floor

the air you breathed was just another product

sitting at workstations wearing antistatic rings

you let out the stench of rust

let in the summer breeze

and revived, inside

is industrialized marrow, and the Tang

Dynasty’s crescent

*

I walked across the production floor at two in the morning, past coworkers dressed in their dustproof coveralls, dustproof hats, antistatic gloves and masks. The place felt surreal, as if we were Kafkaesque characters who could never get a minute’s rest, even though no one quite understood why exactly we needed to be working so hard. The production floor was a boundless spiderweb and we had been entangled effortlessly within it.

It was now the summer of 2015. I had once again landed a new job, this time at BOE, an electronics factory. I was assigned to a semiautomatic cleanroom, where my work crew manufactured screens for one of the best-selling phone companies in the world. My role was to polish the screens with a microfiber cloth dipped in rubbing alcohol until they were immaculate. It’s possible that the screen of your very own phone was produced at the same factory during some 3 AM night shift. The whole world relied on our labor, but none of us felt any sense of accomplishment. We were all wrapped tightly in our uniforms, showing only our eyes. No smiles, no frowns, no fluctuations of body warmth. I couldn’t even tell whether my workstation neighbors were women or men. During my first month at the factory, I failed to meet anyone but the other members of my work crew and my roommates.

The moment my coworkers and I arrived and donned our dustproof coveralls, our bodies no longer belonged to us. Our blood and muscles became integrated into the machines.

When I’d joined BOE I’d told myself I wouldn’t write on shift any more, and for a while at least I managed to keep to that. I’d write a few lines on the morning shuttle on the way in, but that was all. A full month had passed now without my writing a poem. It wasn’t that I was short on ideas, but once the machines were turned on I no longer had any time or headspace to think, let alone to pick up a pencil and jot down words. Back in the garment factories I’d been paid based on the number of items I made, and the worst thing that could happen if I paused to write a poem was that I’d earn a few yuan less that day. BOE was different, they worked us hard, and we were constantly supervised. The conveyor belts were running, and if an unfinished product passed your workstation you had to pick it up and fix it. When you fell behind, the crew captain always noticed. “Get those hands moving! Stay focused!” our managers said again and again. “Don’t forget our production goal for the night!” My thoughts billowed in my heart, as they always had, but I couldn’t get them down on to paper during work hours with our captains constantly policing us.

Above the factory floor, the big bosses determined our production goals for the day, as usual. My shift ran from 8 PM to 8 AM. The moment my coworkers and I arrived and donned our dustproof coveralls, our bodies no longer belonged to us. Our blood and muscles became integrated into the machines, when we pressed the start buttons we too powered on. Our toilet breaks were strictly timed. And if we failed to meet the production goal? Overtime without pay.

*

It was after Lunar New Year in 2014 that I finally decided to leave Suzhou, along with two friends I’d made in the dorms, Song Changtie and Yang Li. The three of us moved to yet another fabrics factory in the neighboring city of Changshu. We had heard that our new factory offered far better pay. And it did. For a while life improved significantly, and I even had enough leisure time to learn how to smoke. During lunch breaks, my new coworkers and I would gather by the front gate to chat and enjoy a few cigarettes. One of them was generous enough to share his pack with me, and I discovered that tobacco could alleviate my stress and melt my woes. Before then, I’d only bought cigarettes for matchmakers and my matches’ families. I hadn’t wanted to waste money on smoking myself. But in Changshu I learned that smoking was an act of meditation and forgetting. A few sunflower plants grew across the street, and I took pleasure in watching them every day as I went out for cigarettes with my coworkers. I witnessed them growing taller, developing heads filled with seeds that attracted colonies of bees.

One afternoon I handed my phone to a coworker and asked him to take a photo of me in front of the marble wall by the factory. The photo resolution was quite poor, but it was my first picture with a factory building in the shot since I had moved to the south. I could barely make out the text on the wall:, FABRICS CO. LTD.

But the good times didn’t last, and soon enough I was bouncing between factories again. Finally I ended up back in Suzhou, where I found another job at BOE. My decade of factory labor had started to take a heavy toll on my health. The human body isn’t designed for routine twelve-hour-long shifts, whether sitting or standing. My calves and thighs often throbbed, my waist ached and my knees swelled. The worst place at a factory to work for was always the screen-printing department, the hot metal and lacquer thinner produce pungent toxins that workers have no choice but to inhale. Back in Shenzhen, I had a female coworker who had lost the ability to bear children, she eventually learned the reason was that lacquer thinner vapor had accumulated in her body over the course of her hundreds of shifts. Fabrics factories, on the other hand, had the most workers with spinal injuries, as we had to hunch our backs in front of our sewing machines most of the time. I’d desperately needed a change from working in the garment industry, if only for the sake of my own health.

How long had I been living like this now? Over twelve years.

*

It was July, and the weather was unbearably humid, despite the rainstorm earlier in the evening I was still sweating profusely, my T-shirt clinging to my skin. My coworkers and I had just finished our “midnight lunch” at the cafeteria and were heading back towards the production floor.

“There’s no way we’ll get out on schedule,” Changtie was saying. “The crew captain said there’s still a batch of products that need reworking.”

“He never taught us the technique right in the first place,” Li said. “And now he wants us to stay up later so we can wipe his ass for him? What the hell, man?”

Changtie, Li and I had joined the factory together, and we were all assigned to the same assembly line. I listened to my two friends complain and stayed silent. I didn’t want to talk any more about the job outside working hours than I had to. At this point I was conditioned to the idea that things always went wrong on shift. But there was another reason I stayed quiet: my feet had a fungal infection, and I didn’t know what to do about it.

The previous week my production crew had moved into a new building. It was a long way from the dorm, and that was when I started having to take a shuttle to get to and from work every day. Two days before, my shuttle had been caught in traffic and I was late for my shift. When I arrived at the dressing room I discovered that my dustproof shoes were gone. This had happened to a bunch of us.

Our floor manager yelled, “You’re all late! Stop making a fuss about your shoes. Just grab any pair you can find and put them on.”

We did what he said and reached for the nearest shoes on the communal shoe rack. At least the pair I found fit. Then we helped each other clean our uniforms with lint rollers, like we always did, and hurried into the air showers. At last the door to the cleanroom opened, and we went in to work.

The next morning, my feet began to itch like mad. My roommates told me that it might be a fungal infection, which sounded so harmless that I paid no attention to it, unaware that it would just get worse. Now I felt as if a colony of fleas were grazing on my soles.

Changtie brought out a seven-yuan pack of Hongtashan and handed Li and me a smoke. I took a few drags. “This damned life,” Li sighed. “Will it ever end?”

I finished my cigarette and flicked the butt into the night sky.

We swiped into the dressing room and changed into our dustproof uniforms.

“Where the hell did my shoes go?” Changtie howled.

“Stop complaining!” Li said, even louder. “Nobody wears their own shoes. Just find a random pair and put them on.”

Not again, I thought, and picked up a new pair of shoes. Now I was the one spreading the fungus around.

I still found night shifts incredibly rough. At around three I fell asleep sitting upright. I woke to my work crew captain landing a hard slap on my back.

“Why didn’t you get enough sleep during the day?” he demanded. “This isn’t the time for dreaming.”

I knew what I needed to do. Write a poem. I didn’t care how many phone screens piled up on my workstation. I didn’t care if my captain fired me. In that moment it no longer mattered.

I startled awake and tried to get back to work, dazed with exhaustion. That intense itchiness started up again at my feet. I’m supposed to be asleep at this time of day, I thought. Why the hell am I awake? I felt awful, and the pressure built and built.

I couldn’t stand it any more. Screw it, I thought. I knew what I needed to do. Write a poem. I didn’t care how many phone screens piled up on my workstation. I didn’t care if my captain fired me. In that moment it no longer mattered.

I went over to one of the quality-control workers, who was seated in the row behind me, borrowed a pencil and scavenged a ball of paper from her trash can. Back at my workstation I flattened the paper out and started to write, in a script so messy I could barely read it myself:

I was lured by the freedom in the thorns

plagued by the splendor of youth

I didn’t forget that I was at work. I picked up my microfiber cloth and kept scrubbing phone screens, but only when I needed a break from the writing. Dabbing the cloth in rubbing alcohol, working away the dirty blots on the glass, waiting for the haze in my head to focus, and a new line to come to me.

While I worked, and wrote, I thought back on the year I spent assembling language-learning devices in Shenzhen, the nights I worked overtime at the fabrics factory in Dongguan, and that difficult time in Ningbo when I was taking the bus into the job center every day. I remembered the Sundays I spent feasting on wild lychees with Liushun, and the many evenings I spent talking with Mister Vintage late into the night, or eating popcorn with Wu and his crew of sculptors. It all seemed better than what I was doing now, but that was always the way it was with the past. I couldn’t help but agonize again over the problem of work, the challenge of finding any freedom in life, and Fang, who always came into my mind at times like this. I picked up my pencil again and went back to my wrinkled sheet of paper:

I once believed that I could live with pride

But had to endure the beating storm

like a stalk of weed

a sallow, sooty blade of weed

I laid down my pencil at 7 AM and let out a long sigh. Finally, I thought. The poem’s done. I was happy with it, it felt right, and writing it out had made me feel a little better. It distracted me, at least. Then I noticed the enormous pile of phone screens stacked in front of me. My crew captain noticed too. He marched over to me, and caught sight of the wrinkled paper in front of me.

“What the hell is this?” He snatched the paper and glanced at it. Then he exploded, “What are you doing, working or sitting here drawing magic spells?” He tore the paper up and threw it into the garbage. “You’ve been slacking off,” he said. “And what about those phone screens? Are you going to be the one held responsible for their defects? You aren’t leaving without paying a fine.”

He grabbed a blank ticket and went to fill it out. My coworkers had all heard the captain roaring at me, and they’d all turned around to watch, casting me strange looks. I was used to that by now. I leaned forward and recovered my poem from the trash can, gingerly taking out one scrap of paper after another. Thankfully it was still readable. I folded it up and tucked it into my dustproof shoe.

My captain returned with a 100-yuan ticket. I said nothing, and signed. When I finished the last stroke, I pressed the pencil down so hard that it tore through the paper.

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From Adrift in the South by Xiao Hai, translated by Tony Hao. Copyright © 2026. Available from Granta Books.