Debts: Coming to Terms with Migrant Worker Poetry

Abstract

This essay offers some impressions of a grassroots literature group and the multifaceted nongovernmental organization of which it is a part: the Migrant Workers Home based in Picun, in the suburbs of Beijing. In migrant worker literature the subaltern definitely speaks—and this is also true for the museum of migrant worker culture that is part of the Migrant Workers Home. After comparing this museum with government-run migrant worker museums in Shenzhen and Guangzhou, the essay returns to the Picun literature group and highlights the question of translatability in foreign scholarship’s engagement with China’s migrant worker poetry.