He Worked 10 Years and Still Can't Figure Out How Migrant Workers' Lives Came to This | Housing and Our Lives 17

Suzhou is usually seen as a city of gardens, and its industrial side gets overlooked. We're telling three stories about a place called Shenxiang Village, a microcosm of industrial Suzhou. This is the second.

Quan Guirong, a native of Guilin, is thin, serious in photographs, and quick to laugh in person. Of his 37 years, 10 were spent as a migrant worker and another 10 running Starlight Home, a nonprofit for migrant workers. Two questions have stayed with him the whole time: why do migrant workers' lives turn out this way, and where is the way out? So far he hasn't found an answer.

His life as a migrant worker began in 1999, two years after he finished junior high, and took him through Guangdong, Zhejiang, Fujian and Jiangsu. Along the way came a few upheavals — getting sucked into a pyramid-scheme operation, or sitting in a police station over a temporary residence permit. Looking back, Quan Guirong figures he can say he has "lived in every kind of place and done every kind of job," though most jobs didn't last long and most were low-skilled manual labor. That usually meant 12-hour days, bad working conditions, wages that barely moved, and a life that never settled.

He summed up those 10 years in one line: "It's as if no matter how many years you work in a place, that place will never belong to you — you're always just an outsider passing through."

In 2009, with help from a labor organization, Quan Guirong got in touch with the Hong Kong foundation Oxfam and found a space of about 60 square meters in Shenxiang Village, in Mudu Town, Suzhou, renting for more than 10,000 yuan a year. There he founded Workers' Home, a place where workers living nearby could meet and unwind, and which also offered legal aid on workplace injuries and unpaid wages. Besides Quan Guirong himself, the permanent staff were "Xiao Ye," who handled legal consultations, and "Sister Hua," who looked after the female workers. In 2013, Workers' Home was formally registered with the Suzhou Civil Affairs Bureau as the Suzhou Starlight Home Social Work Service Center.

People move through Shenxiang Village constantly, and Starlight Home is one of the few public spaces that belongs to the workers. Everyone who comes calls him "Xiao Quan," and that is how most people here address one another — "Xiao" in front of a surname. Called that way, even strangers will drop their guard and sit down for a chat.

The back of the building is a table-tennis room, with two guitars hanging on the wall; the front is a reading room, with a long wooden table in the middle and a few benches around it. The books include foreign and Chinese literature, along with some more practical technical-training manuals.

In Shenxiang Village, Quan Guirong has lived "in every direction — east, west, south, north." For him, moving from room to room became a kind of survey, and literature became his main way of expressing and recording it.

He shared with QDaily a set of short poems called A Six-Square-Meter Rented Room. The first one reads: "Rent of 240 yuan / One yuan a unit for electricity / Ten yuan a month for water / That's what six square meters is worth / A bed, a small table, a small window, a door / One incandescent bulb / A bag of clothes, a few hangers / That's everything I own for now."

Literature may also be a way for Quan Guirong to work things loose. He talked about a novel he has been writing for several years. On a productive day he can write 6,000 characters, all of it drawn from his time at a mobile-phone-keypad factory in Shenzhen. "I went from an ordinary worker there to an assistant engineer, and I saw a lot — I feel like there's a fairly complete story I could tell." More than any wish to publish it, this is his way of settling the questions in his own head.

He also kept coming back to another plan: an "ethnography" of Shenxiang Village, past and present, centered on the condition of migrant workers. But he keeps feeling he isn't up to it, and wants to find people to ask and books on anthropology and ethnography to read.

Running a nonprofit has never been easy. In April 2016, the National People's Congress passed the Law of the People's Republic of China on the Administration of Activities of Overseas Non-Governmental Organizations in the Mainland of China, which requires overseas NGOs to file or register with the authorities before operating in China and made funding a nonprofit a more tangled process. Luo Changfa, who runs the Qidian Community Service Center in Shengpu Town in the Suzhou Industrial Park, told QDaily that money has been harder to find ever since. Last year Qidian's funder was the Shanghai United Foundation, which focuses mainly on the floating population. Thirty or forty organizations applied; eight were approved.

Quan Guirong is in a similar bind. Oxfam Hong Kong, which funds his project, has cut its support by about 30% this year, and Quan Guirong plans to stop drawing a salary from Starlight Home and go back to factory work. Behind that is another calculation: his family has been through a run of trouble lately. His child has just turned one; last year his mother-in-law died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage; and this year his father-in-law was found to have bowel cancer, with medical bills of at least 10,000 yuan a month, on top of a mortgage payment of 3,800 yuan.

Bringing this up, Quan Guirong's tone stayed flat: "Elders above you and a child below you — it's a real headache."

We recorded our conversation with him in his own words:

"It Felt Like Going Back to the Old Society"

I finished junior high in 1997. I stayed in my home village outside Guilin for two years, then went to work in Puning, Guangdong.

Puning was full of weaving mills and garment workshops, mostly family operations — the small ones had one or two people, the big ones a dozen or so. It was only after I got to the factory that I realized being an ordinary worker really isn't easy. I used to think an ordinary worker's life meant you still had your own time outside work, or room to study. It wasn't like that at all. Like the indentured laborers of the old days, it was work and sleep, work and sleep, with no time left for study or amusement. It felt like going back to the old society.

I started out as a weaving-machine operator, 12 hours a day, day and night the same. After a week I didn't want to do it anymore — though the pay was actually decent for the time, 400 or 500 yuan right from the start. A workmate at the same factory said, hey, bear with it a bit longer, you'll get used to it. And sure enough, once I gritted my teeth it stopped feeling so hard. But staying on, it was still crushing. You'd think, "We're a socialist country, we're in the primary stage of socialism — so why are workers still in this state?" It made no sense. Working and living like that, you felt like a tool.

When my first pay came — they didn't pay it all out, the boss held most of it back, so it was only one or two hundred yuan a month, basically living money — I went and bought a book, The Complete Works of Lu Xun. It cost about ten yuan, and I found out later it was pirated. I'd always been interested in literature, and Lu Xun wrote a lot of stories about ordinary people, plus plenty of essays attacking the ills of his day. I wanted to understand why he said and wrote what he did — whether what I was living through could be written the same way, and what to do about the state we were in. I also bought some high-school textbooks to study on my own. It was all confusion and worry. Before I left home, I really had believed workers had it all right.

Some people from my hometown were working in Zhongshan and Dongguan, and they had it worse than me — a few of them worked a whole month for about a hundred yuan. But farming back home made even less. In the countryside in the 90s it was hard to make any money at all. In junior high I had a few pen pals, and my family was so poor we didn't have the spare change for stamps. The family burden was heavy too — I remember in those years my brother needed money to get married, and then more money to build a house.

Factory owners in Puning generally provided food and housing. One typical setup put the workshop and the dormitory in one space, divided by wooden boards or plywood. Those rooms were usually narrow — bunk beds plus a small aisle. Another option was an empty room in the boss's house, usually unfinished, bare concrete. A third was sharing a place with workers from other factories.

I changed jobs five or six times in Puning, and my housing changed with each one — I lived in all three kinds, the shortest stretch a few months, the longest two years. There was no privacy or freedom to speak of, and the boss could call you up to work at any hour; if a load of cotton yarn arrived at midnight he'd haul you straight out of bed.

Conditions at the first factory were especially bad. The beds weren't far from the machines; the workshop was about 100 square meters, and the part people lived in took up only 10 of that, with the toilet and the kitchen side by side next to it.

The one who cooked was the boss's father, and the old man was very stingy. Those of us on nights needed a late meal, and usually he'd leave a little leftover rice and vegetables from dinner for us to fry ourselves — but the uncooked vegetables, the meat and the oil he'd hide away. We always knew, but couldn't be bothered to dig it out. One time he hid some oil in the rubbish heap, and the next day it was crawling with ants. He didn't throw it out. He melted the oil down, strained the ants out through gauze, and cooked our food with it. A worker from Jiangxi got angry and said, "I'm not eating this, I'm pouring it out." I was hungry, and figured I hadn't actually seen it happen, so I ate it anyway.

Between 1999 and 2000 I was badly on edge. After more than a year at that factory I couldn't take it, and I felt this society was a dark place. Workers were in a bad way, and public order in the city was bad too — fights, even gunfights, happened often. Once, not far from our factory, the city government sent out several hundred police to catch drug dealers, and in the end they caught nobody. Some police station chiefs, I heard, had bought their posts.

At night we hardly dared go out. We were afraid of the crime, and also afraid of being checked for temporary residence permits.

I got caught twice. One day I was on nights, got up around noon, ate lunch, and wanted to walk it off, so I shuffled down the road in my slippers. Suddenly a truck cut across in front of me, stopped, and the cab door flew open. I couldn't work out why this truck wanted to block me, so I walked around it and kept going. Someone dropped down from the truck and grabbed my shoulder. I wrenched it off hard and asked him, "What are you doing?" "Checking temporary residence permits!" I went limp on the spot.

Back then police stations used box vans fitted out as what everyone called "pig trucks" — the cargo box in back had a small window cut in for air. When they opened the rear door there were already ten or twenty people inside, and in the end about twenty of us were packed in, all standing. Some of them had permits, but the permits had been torn up when they were caught. Two others were visiting friends from elsewhere in Guangdong. They were asked, "How long have you been here?" "Three days." "Three days, and no permit? Get in!"

The station's holding cell had a concrete sleeping platform with a toilet pit at the far end, and twenty or thirty of us waited in that twenty-odd square meters for someone to come and buy us out. I sat there from two or three in the afternoon until 10 at night. Around five or six the guard came banging on an iron bucket — "Dinner, dinner" — rice porridge, 30 yuan a meal. "Eat or don't eat, you're paying either way," he said, setting a stack of yellow enamel bowls down at the door. Nobody, it seemed, wanted any.

One man grabbed the stainless-steel door and shouted, "Let me out!" He was hauled off, and when he came back over an hour later he'd gone quiet. There was a purple ring around each wrist — he said they'd cuffed him and strung him up for more than an hour. At 10 that night my boss came and bought me out for about 150 yuan; he said it was half price because he was a local.

I was very naive then, and fairly pure too, I suppose — I felt my spirit was still clean, and I didn't want to spend the rest of my life in a society this dark and filthy, so I thought about ending it, about killing myself. A workmate from Sichuan had told me the snow mountains of Tibet were holy, and I wanted to die somewhere pure like that. I told nobody at the time — I felt nobody would understand — I only told my cousin at the same factory that if people back home asked, he should say I'd gone to Guangzhou.

Around October I went from Guangzhou to Kunming, then on to Lhasa. Travel was awkward back then and the trip took a month. After Kunming I could only take buses, one stretch at a time. By that point I wasn't afraid of dying, so I got a bit self-punishing about it. I slept two nights out in the wild hills, thinking I might as well freeze to death. One night I found a patch of scrub, put on every piece of clothing I had, and still shivered. By two in the morning I still hadn't died — I felt my clothes and they'd frozen stiff; my face was only a little damp. I figured I might as well get up and walk.

At first I could still feel out the road, but there was a road crew's shed along the way and the dogs inside were barking hard. What if they were Tibetan mastiffs, I thought — being bitten half to death would be a miserable end — so I cut across the open hills instead. Around six or seven I felt my way into a town, rode a stretch on a tractor, then walked again. I spent another night out in the hills, with a river rushing nearby, and it brought to mind the ghost stories I'd read, and water burials; something was rustling in the scrub too, I don't know what, and I barely slept.

I finally flagged down a taxi. The driver asked what I was doing, and I said I was going to Qamdo to find my brother, who worked construction there. I kept my wits about me: I still had a few hundred yuan, but told the driver I had 50. In the end he took 30 and drove me more than 100 kilometers. From Qamdo I took a minibus on to Lhasa, seven or eight days, with something interesting happening every day. At night, for instance, everyone had to sleep sitting in the bus, clutching their luggage, worried about highway robbers — which made me think of Maupassant's Boule de Suif.

Three or four days into Lhasa I hesitated again. End it here? And if I did, would anything out there in society change? Was my view simply too narrow, my knowledge too thin, to answer my own questions? If I really wanted to die, any patch of earth can bury a man — why go all the way to a snow mountain for it? I stopped wanting to die, and took a train to Xining.

"All Crows Are Black"

I stayed in Xining more than a month. I worked as a domestic cleaner, an odd-job hand at a handicraft factory, and a middleman. I went with some village lads from around Xining to look for work at a domestic services company; the manager was from Hubei, and in the end he kept me on — maybe he thought I'd be easier to manage than the locals — and put me on windows. A dozen or so days later the company folded.

They didn't feed you there, and for housing I squeezed in with other window washers in a rented house, on a bed set up under the stairs. It was more than ten degrees below zero and all I had was one wool blanket. Once, after going a long time without washing my hair — hot water cost money — I washed it in cold water. A few steps later I touched my head and it had frozen solid. Maybe it was being young: I had a cold for a few days and got over it without medicine.

Afterward I thought it over and decided the work in Xining was worse than Puning — Puning was familiar, relatively steady, and the pay was better. But by then I was broke. For one stretch I lived on 10 yuan over three days, and that was borrowed. Before going to Tibet I'd sent 1,000 yuan home, and to get from Xining back to Puning I had to ask my family for 700 of it back. Thinking about it now, I feel guilty — in more than 20 years away I've barely sent money home, and the one time I sent 1,000 yuan I asked for most of it back.

After Puning I kept wondering whether somewhere else might have better pay, better conditions, a bit more dignity for workers. I never found it. I went to Shenzhen, Zhongshan, Yangjiang, Huizhou — every new place left me hurt again, even though what I wanted was to settle down. My second older brother told me off for it: all crows are black, he said, and I wouldn't quit until I'd hit a dead end.

After several years in Guangdong I came to feel that no matter how many years you work in a place, it will never belong to you — you're always just an outsider passing through.

Around 2004, my second brother, a cousin and I talked about going home to farm and raise livestock, and we leased a fish pond for ducks and fish. The few of us worked ourselves hard, but as it went on I felt lost again. My thinking had drifted from my family's, and the questions I'd once been ready to die over were still unanswered — why is our life like this? What is the difference between the migrant worker's situation and the old society? I stuck it out three or four months, then one day I picked up a plastic bag, packed a few clothes and a few hundred yuan, and left again. It felt final, and grimly heroic.

This time I went straight to Xiamen — Xiamen was a special economic zone too, I figured, so maybe things would be a bit better. I stayed a month or two and worked several jobs. The one that stayed with me was a furniture factory near the airport. There were one or two hundred people there and I was an odd-job hand. The work was hard and the machines were dangerous. The factory had a lot of cutting machines — you fed the raw material straight into the saw, with no guards at all. Many of the workers were owed more than two years of wages and were stuck there. If they sued, the boss might simply disappear, and auctioning off the machines wouldn't raise much.

I felt there was nothing ahead for me there, and the work was terrible for your body. After sweeping, dust filled the air — the first ten times I spat, it came out black. I worked a week and left without asking for my pay; complaining to the labor bureau might lead nowhere, and it wasn't worth it for that little. But I was seething. I stood in the dorm staring at the window for a long time, then punched it and cracked the glass. My hand was cut open, but it let something out.

In between, I was tricked into pyramid schemes twice. The first time was near Yangjiang — they said the working environment was good and the pay all right, and once I got there I found it was a pyramid scheme. I stuck it out a week, then escaped. The second time was in 2005: a junior-high classmate in Boluo County, Huizhou, said a factory there was hiring, and when I arrived it was another pyramid scheme. I stayed a day or two, wanting to pull my classmate out with me, but he'd been completely brainwashed and insisted this wasn't a pyramid scheme, it was "new-style marketing." We had a huge row, and they locked me in a room and had "lecturers" take turns "teaching" me, from nine or ten in the morning until three or four in the afternoon. Once they saw they couldn't talk me round — and since we were in a busy part of town, where they didn't dare do much — they let me go.

Those five or six years felt like going round and round a circle I couldn't get out of.

I worked in Puning a while longer, then in the second half of 2005 went back to Guilin and studied computers for six months. Everything I'd seen so far was small family workshops and small businesses; I'd had little contact with the big companies and factories in Shenzhen and Dongguan. What was the worker's condition like under large-scale industrial production? In April 2006 I decided to go and find out for myself in Dongguan and Shenzhen.

First I worked at a stationery factory in Dongguan with several thousand employees, making 600 or 700 yuan a month, chrome-plating the metal fittings on file folders. The chemicals there included hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, nitric acid and potassium cyanide, and a lot of workers came down with skin diseases. My job was "running the tanks" — taking the finished pieces and rinsing them one by one through six tanks of clean water. The most extreme thing about that factory was its round-the-clock two-shift system: six hours on, six hours off, over and over. It was brutal. You could never get enough sleep.

Then I went to Shenzhen and spent half a year at a toy factory as a spray painter. Pay was 800 or 900 yuan a month, and I had to pull the spray-gun trigger two or three thousand times a day; in the morning my hand wouldn't open. Later I did pad printing, supposedly the best job in the factory — really it meant sitting there stamping things. There was a young guy whose quota was five or six thousand pieces a day; he'd finish in eight hours and rest, so the supervisor raised it to seven thousand; he still finished in eight hours, so the supervisor raised it again. The whole point was to force you into overtime.

In Shenzhen I also delivered milk and delivered parcels. The milk round stayed with me most. You rode a bicycle, and the tires went flat every few days; once a tire was flat it took twice the effort to move. At five or six in the morning no repair stalls were open, so you just gritted your teeth and pedaled.

"What Way Out Is There for Migrant Workers?"

In 2007 I joined a company in Shenzhen that made mobile-phone keypads — the best job I ever had. It was a factory of five or six hundred people. I started as a quality inspector, then became an assistant engineer and lab supervisor, middle management, more or less. Ordinary workers then made around 1,000 yuan; on top of food and housing I was making close to 2,000 a month, eight hours a day, five days a week — fairly easy. There was also a girl at the factory I rather liked.

Around then, someone from an NGO told me about an internship program: an 800-yuan monthly stipend, a chance to learn at various labor organizations, and probably a return to factory work afterward. I wavered for days, but in the end I wanted to give myself one more chance to see what way out there might be for migrant workers, so I spent half a year interning at labor organizations around the country.

That period was full of confusion too. I'd often think: there are close to 300 million migrant workers in this country, and one organization can serve only one small patch — how much can this kind of help mean for a group that size?

In 2008 I heard the factories in Suzhou paid well, so I came to Suzhou to work and take a look. At first I was at a spray-painting plant, painting TV casings, again on 12-hour shifts. I worked there a few months; the labor was heavy. Pay was 800 or 900 yuan a month.

Companies in Suzhou rarely provided housing, so you had to find your own. While at the spray-painting plant I lived in a dormitory block for a month or two. The place was called the New Residents Service Center, and when I first saw the name I was intrigued: "There's somewhere this good? 'New residents' and a 'service center'?"

Once I moved in I found it was much like the worker dorms in Dongguan and Shenzhen. I remember five floors, and full up it could hold nearly 7,000 people. The dormitory-block model is much the same everywhere — the smallest rooms held four people, with four bunk-bed frames; the largest held 10 or 11. I later saw the construction standard was 32 square meters a room, with a small balcony and a bathroom, and some may have had a separate shower stall. Each bed cost 100 yuan a month.

I saw a media report saying this "raised the dignity of migrant workers' housing," and I couldn't make sense of it. How did it raise anything? It was an ordinary worker dorm.

The dorm block had one bad feature. The room I was in had eight beds, seven of them taken, and all seven of us worked at different companies — one man managed an internet cafe, another worked at Asus. Everyone's shifts were different, and someone always seemed to be coming or going — someone washing, someone sleeping, someone leaving for work.

One man slept across from me. He'd come back at midnight and be up at six for work, while I worked eight to eight, so we rarely saw each other or spoke. The internet cafe manager worked noon to midnight; the Asus man worked seven to seven, but his workplace was far away, so he was up at five and back at nine at night. I've never slept deeply, and I always felt I was being woken.

Later I moved to a small electronics factory and to Wanfeng Jiayuan, a resettlement-housing estate of three-bedroom flats. It was a bit cleaner than an ordinary rented house, though not up to a normal commercial estate. About 300 yuan a month, though I didn't stay long.

At the end of 2008, wanting to put my interest in literature to some use for fellow workers, I decided to open a reading room, and found a place in Shenxiang Village — a second-floor space facing the street, just over 10,000 yuan a year. On Lunar New Year's Eve I was there happily running the wiring myself, putting up bookshelves and so on, and that night I slept in the reading room on a mat on the floor. It opened from 12:30 in the afternoon to 9:30 at night. As more and more people came, I finally rented a place to live nearby.

I've lived all over Shenxiang Village — east, west, south, north — partly because I wanted to know what the local rented rooms were like. The best one, and the one I kept longest at three years, was on the third floor of a back courtyard on the west side, six rooms to the floor. My room was about 10 square meters, 320 yuan a month, with a window and decent light: a beat-up bed, a beat-up table and a beat-up cupboard.

The whole building had two toilets, both in the front courtyard — you went down from the back courtyard first, then across to the balcony at the front. There was a shower stall on that balcony, and the landlord liked to boast that "in all of Shenxiang, only two or three places have a shower stall." Those two toilets left a deep impression on me: whichever one you used, you came back stinking, and the smell took half an hour to lift.

By then I had recently met my wife — my girlfriend at the time — at the reading room. She was a volunteer, from Changzhou. We went to Beijing together for work, and she told me her father had also been an ordinary migrant worker; from then on we slowly grew closer. When she stayed over here, she really hated using the toilet.

I also lived once in a room with no window on any side, on the second floor, four or five square meters, with no space left once the bed was in — 260 yuan a month. In the daytime, with the light off, you couldn't see your own hand, and the partition walls carried every sound; you heard everything the others did. In winter, heating meant warming the bedding with your own body; the little electric heater didn't help much, dried out the air and ate electricity. In summer the air conditioner ate electricity too, so mostly you just endured. The sleeping mat would go hot and you'd wipe it down several times a night, but the water dried off fast. There was a joke that the only way to cool down was to set a basin of water at each corner of the bed and dip your arms and legs in.

Later I found a ground-floor room by the mouth of the lane, with a small patch of open ground behind it. It looked pleasant enough. Only after moving in did I learn how damp it was. I lived there from April or May through August or September, and a book left unopened for ten days would go moldy. In the afternoon I'd put the bedding out in the sun, and in the evening I'd come back hoping to smell sunshine on it, but it always felt damp to the touch. Clothes that weren't hung outside grew mold.

I stayed until the end of 2016, and only left the rented room in Shenxiang Village when my wife was close to giving birth. Prices in Wujiang District hadn't been bid up yet a few years back; we bought our flat in 2014 at nearly 7,000 yuan a square meter, about 80 square meters of usable space, a down payment of 200,000-odd yuan, and a monthly mortgage payment of more than 3,800 yuan. On my income the mortgage alone would be hard to manage — it's my wife who has been paying it.

Starlight Home, These Past Few Years

At the end of 2012, something involving a fellow worker convinced us we had to set up an activity room for migrant children.

That winter I was still in the third-floor rented room. One day I got home, washed up, and it was nearly 10:30 when a woman called me. Her first words were, "Can you save my child?" She was from Anhui, her husband from Henan; the child had grown up in Suzhou. Because the parents were migrant workers, the child kept changing schools and homes, and the husband was inclined to beat the child. The couple's relationship had broken down to the point of divorce. The child got little affection at home, had no steady friends, and had turned withdrawn.

This is common among the children of migrant workers. Every parting hurts a child, so some of them simply stop making friends.

The child was about 15 then, and had fallen in with some small-time troublemakers in the neighborhood, running with them, stealing and robbing, picked up by the police every few days. The police kept calling the Anhui woman in for talks. She'd gone to the neighborhood committee, to the women's federation, to the trade union, but government work can't cover every angle, and besides, she wasn't a local — under the household registration system, if you're not a local resident, your problem may simply be nobody's business. So, out of desperation, she came to me.

We hadn't started doing any work with children then, and only agreed to try. In the end she never brought the child in, but that case made us feel we absolutely had to open a children's activity room in 2013.

After the New Year that year I went around Shenxiang Village looking for a space, and eventually found what is now the Loving Heart Room. Our foundations were thin — I came from a worker background myself, and money was tight — and I felt willing but unable. So I went to the internet for help, tagging people all over Weibo. I didn't even have WeChat Moments then; I only got WeChat in July 2013. Eventually I reached a reporter at Suzhou TV who happened to be covering migrant children at the time, and they came and did a story on us, and connected us to some resources.

We found some money for the transfer fee and the rent, but staff salaries were still unsolved, so later we approached the Shanghai United Foundation as well. Suzhou TV gave us a lot of coverage, and we opened a second Loving Heart Room 10 or 15 kilometers from here, in a space the village committee provided free. It's still running.

The Loving Heart Room in Shenxiang Village has just moved next to the reading room, because the rent went up at the old place and the space was small, 45 square meters. The transfer fee at the start was about 22,000 yuan, and the rent was only 14,000 yuan a year, rising to 18,000 last year.

I want to finish a novel next year. I started it 10 years ago and have been starting and stopping ever since — I'm at 100,000 characters now… it's about my time at the factory in Shenzhen, which I think is fairly representative… I keep putting it off, but I want to finish it next year. What we hope to do here in the community is use literature or art to record honestly how our fellow workers live, get people thinking about where this group stands and where it is going, and speak to society through the work.

Graphics: Lin Yuyao

Cover image from Quartz and on-site photography; other images provided by the interviewee.