铁钉 / An Iron Nail

In the furnace, she has been cast into an iron nail

Placed on the wall, her second half of life is somewhat

Lonely and cold; her master hangs on her body

Plastic bags that hold vegetables, onions, eggs and

Fatty pieces of meat; she approaches life in silence

Time is rusting on her body, her lustrous youth

Turning withered yellow, dark red; she does not speak, even though

Memories constantly bring her back into her once fiery past

She could have become a machine in operation, but being inattentive

She's turned into a small iron nail, like an invisible person

Standing on the wall, witnessing mediocre, trivial lives, yet

Her inner life being truly banal, her outlook on life is not

Completely hopeless. On the contrary, she loves the ordinariness

Of everyday living, the endless quarrels and conversations of

Her master; she's resigned to the daily tranquility, half of her body

Sunk in the wall, time is accumulating gradually as

Rust is swallowing her little by little; every day, she endures

Taunting from shiny iron tools, the great God has molded her

Into an iron nail; her life is already a failure

Now fixed on the wall, she is doubly unfortunate

But she never complains or resents, she has forgivingly accepted

Her fate; for she knows being alive is more courageous and peaceful than dead.

(《散落在机台上的诗》/Poems Scattered on the Machine 15–16)

 

她 / She

 

Time opens its gigantic mouth, the moon is rusting

 On the machine, haggard, dim, turbid, with ominous danger in her heart

Flowing, gurgling; the cliffs of her body are collapsing; dirt and gravels

Tattered pieces of time, fill up the ferocious river in the female body

Confused tides no longer fluctuate according to seasons. She sits in a deck seat

As moving products interweave with time, devouring; so fast is she

Aging, ten years flew by like water … immense fatigue

Appearing in her mind … for so many years, she's been keeping company

These screws, one, two, turn, left, right

She is fixing her dreams and youth on a product, watching

Those pale youthful days, running all the way from an inland village

To a coastal factory, all the way to a store shelf in the U.S.A.

Fatigue and industrial diseases are accumulating in the lungs

Those hints: menstruation no longer comes on time;

Violent coughing; she sees far away from the factory in the development zone

Green lychee trees are being hacked down, the machines by her side

Are trembling … she rubs her red swollen eyes, placing herself

Between the moving products on the assembly line.

(《散落在机台上的诗》/Poems Scattered on the Machine 25)

 

 

荔枝林/  Lychee Grove

 Amid delicate, subtle fragrance and curves, the setting sun has climbed up

 The dim, bright lychee grove on the paulownia hill, on its wide empty body

 Twilight is shimmering, the cold stream is singing a thousands-year-old

 Village tune, ah, it can't adapt to the industrial age, whose

 Bustle and prosperity it is not concerned with; it still keeps

 The slowness and sadness of an old era; like a sick person

 It's greasy, swarthy, stagnate with the stench of industrial wastes

 No one is listening to its soft sobbing. Up on the hill

 Excavators are digging up lychee trees, the felled trees

 Lie on naked yellow dirt, their tiny flowers

 Scattered on the ground, their faint fragrance fading, ah, in the setting sun

 I see on the Phoenix Boulevard, so many like me

 Arriving from afar to share this flourishing prosperity of the industrial age

 Witnessing where the lychee trees are cut down factories and machines rise,

 Chinese-style bluish-green tile-roofed houses are replaced by Western scenes

  In this village, no one is like me who

 Listens for what's behind booming economy—the sobbing cold stream and the

Sorrow of the felled lychee grove, the conservative village shrine amidst forests

 of high rises.

(《散落在机台上的诗》/Poems Scattered on the Machine 35)

 

 

工业时代 / Age of Industry

 

 Japanese machines in American invested factories are carrying iron

 Produced in Brazilian mines; lathe tools from Germany are reshaping the coastal

  lines

 Of France; store shelves in South Korea are full of standard items from Italy

 Belgium is waiting in the corner to be sold; Spain and Singapore

Are being inspected; Russia has been put into the warehouse by transporters; Africa is standing in the open-air square as natural resources; orders from Chile are narrow & long like its territory; my Sichuan dialect is somewhat old fashioned, Xiangxi dialect is harder to understand; Minnan dialect of Fujian is conversing with Taiwanese

 Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong is only a half-way station; if I'm willing  

 I could arrange India, Afghanistan, Pakistan in the vicinity

 Of Australia, put Iraq and USA side by side

 Move Israel to the middle of the Caribbean nations

 Make England and Argentina shake hands, Japan and Mexico…

 In this industrial age, I am keeping busy every day

 For the sake of peacefully arranging the world in a factory.

(《散落在机台上的诗》/Poems Scattered on the Machine 57–58)

 

拆 / Disassemble

 

 I disassemble my bones, soul, blood, flesh, and heartbeat

 Into screws, film, plastic parts, splinters, and hooks

 Which are assembled, recombined, assigned standard labels, so that my childhood

 Dissolves into apparitions of memories, times past, and emotions. I disassemble

 Love into blueprints, products, wages, overtime, I-owe-you pays, and insomnia

 So, too, is the vertical society disassembled into horizontal disasters, villages,

  and homesickness

 If the flames in the furnace cannot ignite a piece of rusted iron … yet I

 Am still searching for meanings of life in a life filled with rust; those

 Ideals and passions of the past are dismantled by the crushing power of the

  hardware factory that  

 Dissects a person into parts, screwed in a corner of society

 How have certain diseases of industry penetrated our bodies

 This misfortune belongs to our era, or the masses

 But I still love deeply this age of industry, the industrial hardware factory

 Love its wheels, wings, the bearings of motor vehicles

 The clarity of pains it brings me, happiness and misfortune

 In this era I will disassemble myself into springs

 Switch valves, wires, steel needles, and a street lamp

 I'll once more return to the furnace, to forge myself

 Into shape, to hack myself into one sharp nail

 To be nailed on the wall of our era.

(《散落在机台上的诗》/Poems Scattered on the Machine 59)

厌  倦 / Weariness

 

She is weary of untimely youth, this familiar scene

Calm moonlight, fish-scale like clouds, shadows of trees; she is weary of

the Silver Lake Park  

  Lucid singing of birds that are dispersing in disorder, moving around, taking off

  From the hardware factory, landing on top of the garment factory building; she's

wear of the

  Light yellow light shining through the window, its quavering slow and

  Serene; she is weary of dialects and machines, the light-blue

  Glass reflecting the landscape of eastern Sichuan, her forgotten childhood

  Tottering through the lychee grove, a group of frolicking kids

  Lying exhausted; she is weary of time-cards and machines

Ah, what time is it? She is still standing by the window, in the scorching blue sky

Are floating clouds, mirages of her future, love in a picture, and childhood

Buried in distant memories; still, she'll write down life in a strange town

On the back of her time cards, recollect her family far away

Beyond overtime, meager pay, vocational diseases

She‘s aging by the side of machines, in deck seats, on construction sites

Behind her, cities of high rises one after another

Have again deserted them.  

(《郑小琼诗选》/ Selected Poems by Zheng Xiaoqiong 49)

 

 

钉/ Nails

How much love, how much pain, how many iron nails

 Have fixed me on the machine board, blueprints, order forms，

 Morning dew, midday blood   

 

One iron nail is needed to hold together overtime, vocational diseases

 And unnamable grief, pegging migrant workers' lives

 On complex buildings, spreading out the fortunes and misfortunes of an era

 

 How many fatigued shadows in the dim light

 How many numb smiles of fragile, thin, and small migrant-worker sisters

 Their love and memories are like the moss under green shades, quiet and brittle

 

How many silent nails pass over their placid flesh and bones 

 Their youth imbued with kindness and innocence, next to profits, I-owe-you wages

 Labor law, nostalgia, and an incomprehensible love

 

 On the pale blue assembly line, deck seats dangle

One after another, piercing nails pause a moment

Outside the window, autumn strolls past; someone relies on nails to survive.

  (《郑小琼诗选》/ Selected Poems by Zheng Xiaoqiong 51)   

 

 

肺 / Lungs

 

His slow, labored, heavy breathing, clogged lungs

Moving in his body are welding dust, lead dust, cement dust … firmly and

tenaciously clutching

On the soft, frail leaves of lungs for life, like an iron nail inserted into an

impoverished and humble corporeal body

His diseased lungs are wheezing violently in this industrial era. Painful, agitated

Sounds of coughing rise up from vulnerable bodies, shredding hope slim

as the flicker on a cigarette butt

 

Theirs are lungs from the countryside, lungs from fields of poor crops, or one or two

pairs of

Fateful lungs, diseased lungs, rotting lungs

Vocational diseases weigh down the countryside's low chimneys

Migrant workers' children are school dropouts; they standstill lost in the smoke of

small fires

The wet wood she stuck into the stove resembles their father's stuffed lungs

Coughing convulsively   

 

. . .

 

I watch the dust-clogged lungs in life:  one family fading in twilight

Their nearly dried-up life rises with the sound of coughing heavy as lead

Blotchy as the mountain slopes after tree-felling and mining

Agony and ugliness exposed.

(《人行天桥 》/ Pedestrian Bridge 38)

 

 

陈   芳 / Chen Fang

Hidden behind her youthful face

Is a seasoned heart  

Lethargic at the worn-out machine

Young yet aging like her gentle sighs

Quiet voice    bending head    slow

Foot steps fatigued and empty    she is from Hubei

Mother of two children    twenty-six-year

Old     her husband is a transporter at a molding factory

In another city    he left to work there a year ago

Eight years before that     she and he crammed into a van

Arrived here from a village in Hubei    four years ago

They returned home to be married    a fifteen-day holiday

Pregnant then giving birth   she returned home for a year

Pregnant again then giving birth she returned home for another year

She remembers how desolate life was when she first arrived here

Taking a walk along the cold stream with her love

She was robbed of her ear rings by a robber hidden in the grass

Leaving her with torn ear lopes the vegetable fields on both sides

Are bulldozed flat lychee trees felled the green land

Is left bald with yellow sores  on both sides of the stream stand

Development perimeter markers factories rise up like forests along the stream

——nine years    she is used to

15-day shifts, installing 20,000 slingshots a day

Those tiny slingshots have materialized a house in the countryside of Hubei

Tens of thousands of savings in the bank  she is used to the admiration of people

In her hometown used to machines and their rumbling

Used to fatigue and drowsiness used to the breeze from the sea

Used to going without breakfast this girl Chen Fang

Arriving here in 1998     in 2007 she still remains

On the assembly line    she feels a faint pain

In the stomach    like the pain the felled trees feel

Pressing a hand on her ulcerous stomach she went home

Saying she'd return when she got well

She talked about the changes around here    describing

The cold river turning smelly    remembering

The sound its running water used to make     the aching stomach

Makes her somewhat apprehensive and a little sad.

(《女工记》/ Female Migrant Workers 185–86)

 

 

 

 

凉山童工 / A Child Migrant Worker from Cold Mountain

 

Life is but baffling  our epoch is becoming

Blind     a fourteen-year-old girl has to lead with us

On the assembly line the fatigue brought about by our era 

Sometimes  she wishes she had gone back to the countryside in Sichuan to

Cut firewood     cut grass gather wild berries and flowers

Thin and small, her gaze reveals desolation I don't know

What sentences to use to express  except

The child worker's   sighs like thin paper

Her gaze can always crush a soft heart

Why is the only little compassion also shattered by machines

Her legging behind at half a beat often invites

The group leader's curses  her tears do not fall

They circle in her eyes “I am a grown-up

I won't cry”   she solemnly says

How baffling   her childhood has become

Remembrance  she talks about the mountains such as their slopes

Blue like the sea  such as snakes  oxen

Perhaps life is finding a path out of bafflement

Back to life itself sometimes her dark face

Shows contempt for a fellow  worker

She points at another girl thinner and more delicate than she saying

“She is younger than I am  but she has to sleep with men at night.”

(《女工记》/ Female Migrant Workers 51–52)

 

 

    跪 着 讨 薪 者 / “Those Who Kneel to Demand Their Wages”

 

They flash by like ghosts     at train stations

At machines    in industrial zones    in dirty rentals

Their thin figures    like blades    like white paper

Like hair  like air  they have cut with their fingers

Iron     films    plastic …  they are tired and numb

Looking like ghosts    they are put into machines

Overalls    assembly lines    they are bright-eyed

Youthful  they flash into the flood made up by themselves

The dark waves  I can no longer tell them apart

Just as I'm indistinguishable standing among them    only skin

Limbs     movements    blured features    one after another  

Those innocent faces    are ceaselessly grouped     lined up

Forming ant colonies    bee hives of toy factories    they are

Smiling    standing    running    bending    curling up then each

Reduced to a pair of hands    thighs

Becoming tightly tightened screws    cut into pieces of iron

Pressed into plastic    twisted into aluminum threads    tailored to cloth

Their disappointed complacent fatigued  happy

Scatter-minded helpless  lonely … expressions

They are from villages   hamlets    clusters    they are smart

Clumsy    they are timid    weak…

Now    they're kneeling on the ground    facing huge bright glass doors and windows

Black-uniformed security guards    shiny cars    New Year's greeneries

The golden factory signboard glitters in the sunlight

They kneel at the factory gate    holding a piece of cardboard

With clumsy handwritten words “Give Me My Blood & Sweat Wages”

They four are fearless kneeling at the factory gate

They are surrounded by onlookers  a few days ago    they were all fellow

 countrywomen

Fellow workers    friends    or    colleagues sitting next to each other in their work

 stations

They look expressionless at the four kneeling female workers

They witness four fellow workers dragged away by security     they witness

One female worker's shoe fall off    they witness another female worker's

Pants torn  as she struggled    they watch in silence

The four knelling female workers are dragged far away  their gazes show

No sorrow     or joy … they walk into to the workshops without expressions

Their profound misfortune makes me  sad or frustrated.        

(《女工记》/ Female Migrant Workers 107–108)

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