Abstract
In contemporary China, rural-urban migrants constitute a new urban subject with entirely new identity-related issues. This study aims at demonstrating how literature can be a valid field in investigating such evolving subjectivities, through an analysis of Xu Zechen’s early novellas depicting migrants’ vicissitudes in Beijing. Combining a close reading of the texts and a review of the main social problems characterising rural-urban migration in China, this paper focuses on the representation of the identity crisis within the migrant self in Xu’s stories, taking into account the network of meanings employed by the writer to signify the objective and subjective tension between the city and the countryside.
Highlights
Picerni A Journey into the CityUrbanisation and labour migration are two central, distinctive and mutually influencing features of contemporary China
Migrant workers account for 70% of the population increase in urban population (Zhang, Song 2003), they are usually forced to live in the outskirts, under a sort of “residential segregation” (Wang 2013), and at the margins of urban society (Wang, Ning 2016)
Xu Zechen’s own creative touch in writing the relationship between the urban space and its non-urban subjects offers valuable inspiration to reflect on the influence of globalisation on contemporary Chinese lives, rural-urban migration in China, and the urban marginalized
Summary
Urbanisation and labour migration are two central, distinctive and mutually influencing features of contemporary China. Against the aforementioned background, the scope of artistic creation in China has included the subjectivities and social life of the nongmingong: human and social issues vis-à-vis migrants’ impact with the hukou system feature prominently in ‘subaltern’ (底 层 dǐcéng) fiction (Li Yunlei 2014; Rampolla 2017), and an extremely fecund literature has been produced by migrants themselves, mostly in the form of poetry, uniquely exceptional in its representation of its authors’ existences, problems, anxieties and dreams (see Liu 2012 for one of the most comprehensive studies on the topic). It would be wrong and far too reductive to consider writers who deal with social life as if they were mere reflections of such reality, as if each concrete social problem automatically had its literary rendition The strength of this ‘intersection’ between literature and society, which is what interests me, lies precisely in its creating a new and original interpretation, stemming from the fecund encounter between social life and the author’s subjective sensibility. Literature can be investigated from multiple perspectives, and my analysis of Xu’s fiction concentrates mainly on its interaction with the social reality of its migrant and urban characters, on how it influences their own growth in the stories, and on how it appears to be perceived and read by them
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