Adrift in the South

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 a decade spent moving between the garment mills and electronics factories of China’s fast-growing southern cities.
Adrift in the South is the account of the ‘twenty-three dreamlike years’ Xiao Hai spent as a migrant labourer, working twenty-two jobs in eight different cities across China. He made iPhones and baby clothes, hand-stitched football shirts and cut plastic into radios; he worked as a courier in Shanghai, a popcorn vendor in Suzhou, and as a second-hand clothes salesman in Beijing. Here he reveals the workplace from a workers’ perspective: the alienation and tedium of factory life, the small indignities and indifference of the larger system. But he also tells the story of how the poetry he began writing on the factory floor 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.

2026-05-07

Granta Books

320

9781738536269