Adrift in the South
Xiao Hai author Tony Hao translator
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Granta Publications Ltd
Published:7th May '26
Should be back in stock very soon
A new title from Granta Magazine Editions: A first-hand account of a migrant-worker's journey along the factory floors of southern China.
When Xiao Hai turned fifteen, his family paid a vocational-school teacher 1,200 yuan to find him a factory job in Shenzhen. So began fifteen years spent moving between the garment mills and electronics factories of China's fast-growing southern cities. Adrift in the South is a memoir of life as a migrant labourer in the twenty-first century, making iPhones and baby clothes, hand-stitching football shirts and cutting plastic into radios. Here, Xiao Hai reveals the alienation and tedium of factory life, the small indignities and indifference of the larger system. And he tells the story of how poetry led him somewhere unexpected: to join a small community of artists living, working, and studying together on the outskirts of Beijing. This memoir is a landmark text from China's migrant worker literature movement, a grassroots group of writers providing an unvarnished account of what life is like for the 300 million migrant workers powering the world's second-biggest economy.
At fifteen, the writer Xiao Hai left his home town to find work in the factories of southern China. This deeply affecting memoir, which is strung like a wire between the alienation of the assembly line and the dignifying promise of literature, documents his experience. * The New Yorker *
The garments on our bodies, the instruments and the gadgets all around us, so much of it comes from China. But who made these commodities, and under what conditions? In Adrift in the South, Xiao Hai offers an unstinting account of his labour, and a youthful life spent on the factory lines of China. But he also shares his loves, especially the love for writing that resulted in this memoir. * Amitava Kumar *
Readers of works such as Leslie T Chang's Factory Girls will be familiar with the intermingled sense of ambition and listlessness among China's manufacturing workers. Xiao Hai's account, in a sparse but effective translation by Tony Hao, stands out for its retrospection . . . an account of the world behind the "Made in China" label and a potent reminder of the humans powering the manufacturing boom. * Financial Times *
Then, there is the path China did take: the helter skelter modernization of Reform and Opening. Artists and writers - such as the author of this volume, Xiao Hai, born in 1987 - toiled for years on factory floors, creating for China the wealth they fantasized about sharing in. Adrift in the South, a memoir of Xiao Hai's life on and off the assembly line, is a snapshot of that era. -- Alexander Boyd * China Books Review *
Nightmarish... A sombre, sometimes bitter account of the world behind the "Made in China" label and a reminder of the humans powering the manufacturing boom * Financial Times *
ISBN: 9781738536269
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
320 pages