Zheng Xiaoqiong

Abstract

Zheng Xiaoqiong was born in rural Sichuan in 1980. She moved as a migrant worker in 2001 to Dongguan City in southern Guangdong Province and began to write poetry during a six-year stint in a hardware factory. Zheng's poetry burst onto the literary scene from seemingly nowhere to win the Liqun Literature Award from Peoples' Literature in 2007 and quickly became the public face of migrant worker poetry, yet her poetry defies many of the aesthetic expectations this label might imply. While her work clearly foregrounds the painful vulnerability of migrant workers and draws upon the industrial and pastoral language of the factory and the rural landscapes she lives within, her work is stylistically quite complex. Her long poems like “The Complete Darkness” are layered in classical Chinese philosophical and cultural allusions in innovative collage-like assemblages. Unlike the poetry of Tian He and Zeng Dekuang, Zheng's poetry is truly from the migrant working classes, yet the aesthetic complexity of her work complicates the poetics of accessibility often championed by those writing for or about these classes. Therefore, Zheng's poetry offers something of a paradox in the present aesthetic debates. For more about Zheng's work, see Zhang Qinghua's essay “Who Touches the Iron of the Age: On Zheng Xiaoqiong's Poetry” in CLT vol. 1, no. 1 (2010), 31–34. Poems are selected from Minstrels 9 (August 2006).