Zheng Xiaoqiong

Zheng Xiaoqiong , Chinese 郑小琼 (* 1980 in Nanchong , Sichuan ) is a Chinese writer. She is particularly known for her documentary poems, essays, and interviews with Chinese migrant workers . Together with the authors Han Han , Xing Rongqin, Chun Shu and others, she was voted one of the “Most Important Chinese Writers after 1980” and has received numerous prizes.

life and work

Experience as a migrant worker

Zheng Xiaoqiong grew up in Nanchong , an agricultural and relative poor part of southwest China's Sichuan Province . After graduating from middle school and training as a nurse, she worked for a few months in a village hospital before going to the southern Chinese industrial city of Dongguan as a migrant worker in March 2001 . There she first worked in a furniture factory, where she received a monthly wage of just ¥ 284, then in various other factories in the cities of Zhongshan and Shenzhen , and finally again in a metal factory in Dongguan, where she stayed for the next six years.

Also in 2001, Zheng first came into contact with contemporary poetry. She began to regularly read poems in literary magazines and to write her own texts in which she critically documented the living and working conditions of migrant workers.

Like other victims of the enormous labor migration to the southern Chinese industrial cities, Zheng lived and worked in Dongguan under degrading and in some cases disenfranchised conditions: her residence permit was repeatedly declared invalid and fined, often her wages were not paid or only partially paid to her worked 12-hour shifts with permanent overtime and shared a dorm room with seven other workers.

Liqun Prize and media attention

From 2005 onwards, Zheng published individual poems in various literary journals and magazines. She became known to a wider public in 2007 when, unexpectedly, she received the People's Literature magazine 's Liqun Prize . The award of a hitherto largely unknown author who earned her living as a factory worker with a low formal educational qualification and who had come to grips with such an elitist connotation as poetry without any academic background was celebrated as a sensation.

Following the award of the Liqun Prize, there was further national media turmoil over Zheng because she turned down an offer to join the Chinese Writers' Association and said she wanted to continue earning a living as a migrant worker instead. Members of the Writers' Association receive a state salary for their artistic work, but in return undertake not to write on politically sensitive topics or to criticize the Chinese government.

Topics, style and reception

In the years that followed, Zheng published several volumes of poems and essays that build on her own experiences, but also on several hundred interviews that she conducted researching with migrant workers in southern China. The poems in their first volume 女工 记 (German: The Workers' Book), published in 2012, process the material from these interviews and are each titled with the name of the respective interviewee. In her subsequent volumes of poetry, Zheng contextualizes her research with theories of social inequality by Pierre Bourdieu , among others , which she makes productive in her poetic writing. She also deals with topics such as the acute environmental destruction caused by rapid industrialization (not only in China), which she maps in her texts, and attempts to create a local, dense historiography for the villages and small towns of the Chinese hinterland. Regardless of the subject, Zheng uses the technique of enjambment in many of her poems to create ambivalences and multiple meanings.

Zheng has been received in various ways by literary scholars and literary critics: as a representative of a wave of documentary poetry, as part of a new movement of ecopoetry from the global south , as a protagonist of a poetic deep mapping approach or as a pioneer of a new “lyric of the world of work”, their Forerunners can be seen in the 1970s (in Germany e.g. with Group 61 or the Bitterfelder Weg ).

The reception of Zheng's poems is also influenced by the fact that they arise at a time when there is a general hype about migrant worker poetry in China, which is also perceived internationally. Among other things, the migrant worker lyric anthology 我 的 诗篇 (English: Iron Moon ) and the documentary of the same name were translated into English, and the Süddeutsche Zeitung took the suicide of the migrant worker and poet Xu Lizhi as an opportunity to publish a detailed report on the phenomenon of Publish migrant workers' poetry.

However, Zheng has publicly opposed the simplistic label of “migrant worker lyric” several times and called for a serious examination of the complexity and diversity of her poems. Literary publications on her poems also refer to the multitude of her subjects and the complexity of her language, which simplistic classifications cannot do justice to.

Zheng's poems have been translated into German, English, French, Japanese, Korean, Spanish and Turkish, among others. Since it was discovered in 2007, she has performed at numerous international literary festivals, including Poetry International Rotterdam and the Berlin Poetry Festival . She lives and works as a freelance writer and co-editor of a literary and cultural magazine in Shenzhen.

Works

Volumes of poetry

• 女工 记 (The Book of Women Workers) ISBN 978-7-5360-6673-1 .
• 郑小琼 诗选 (Zheng Xiaoqiong. Selected Poems) ISBN 978-7-5360-5296-3 .
• 纯种 植物 (Breeding plants) ISBN 978-7-5360-6248-1 .
• 人 行 天桥 (pedestrian bridge)
• 散落 在 机 台上 的 诗 (Poems That Fall From Machines) ISBN 978-7-5087-2792-9 .
• 玫瑰 庄园 (Rose Garden) ISBN 978-7-5360-8185-7 .

Translations into German

• Zheng Xiaoqiong, In: Lea Schneider (Ed.): CHINABOX. New poetry from the People's Republic. Verlagshaus Berlin, 2016, ISBN 978-3-945832-20-2 .

Awards

• 利群 * 人民 文学 奖 (People's Literature Liqun Prize for Literature)
• 庄重 文 文学 奖 (Zhuangzhongwen Literature Prize)

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1. ↑ Zheng Xiaoqiong - Beijing Review. Retrieved September 29, 2018 . 
2. ↑ ^{a b c} Zheng Xiaoqiong (poet) - China - Poetry International. Retrieved September 29, 2018 . 
3. ↑ ^{a b c} Lea Schneider: Zheng Xiaoqiong . In: Lea Schneider (Ed.): CHINABOX. New poetry from the People's Republic . Verlagshaus Berlin, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-945832-20-2 , p. 92-93 .
4. ↑ 郑小琼: 女工 记 . 花城 出版社, 2012, ISBN 978-7-5360-6673-1 .
5. ↑ ^{a b c} 郑小琼: 玫瑰 庄园 . 花城 出版社, 2016, ISBN 978-7-5360-8185-7 .
6. ↑ ^{a b} A MUSICAL NOTE OF OUR ERA: ZHENG XIAOQIONG'S POETRY (article) - China - Poetry International. Retrieved September 29, 2018 . 
7. ↑ Iron Moon: An Anthology of Chinese Migrant Worker Poetry and Iron Moon (the film) . In: MCLC Resource Center . February 21, 2017 ( osu.edu [accessed September 29, 2018]).
8. ↑ Kai Strittmatter: The jump . In: sueddeutsche.de . June 21, 2015, ISSN  0174-4917 ( sueddeutsche.de [accessed September 29, 2018]).
9. ↑ ^{a b} Walk on the Wild Side: Snapshots of the Chinese Poetry Scene . In: MCLC Resource Center . December 12, 2017 ( osu.edu [accessed September 29, 2018]).
10. ^ Poetry International Rotterdam