Bodies on the Line

Iron, though a naturally occurring element, carries with it distinctly manmade connotations in its capacity for destruction. Developments in the production of iron, along with its smelting and the subsequent increase in its economies of scale, led directly to the industrial revolution in the West from the 18th century to the early 20th, and the phrase “blood and iron,” popularized in 1862 by the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck, would come to characterize the vicious politics of that era. When processed, iron becomes steel; steel is turned into appliances, machinery, and skyscrapers. When we speak of progress, of modernity, what we are really talking about is iron and all that it has wrought.

Iron appears frequently in the work of the Chinese poet Zheng Xiaoqiong. Born in 1980 in Nonchong, in rural Sichuan, Zheng’s life coincides with another, more recent industrial revolution: that in contemporary China. Both her biography and her body of work reflect this tremendous change. Starting in 2001, Zheng worked on the assembly lines of various factories in the southern Guangdong Province; soon after, she began writing poetry about the unsatisfying conditions and brutal day-to-day experiences that China’s migrant workers face. In 2006, her first collection, Huangmaling, was published, with nearly a dozen more appearing since. And now, the translator Eleanor Goodman has compiled In the Roar of the Machine (NYRB, 2025), an English-language selection from Zheng’s first four books, spanning 2006 to 2016. The collection brings to a new audience Zheng’s carefully observed portraits of the backbreaking physical work that fuels a society in flux.

In these poems, iron contains a malicious power that conjures great wealth for the lucky few who control its production even as it corrodes the basic dignity of the human laborers at the bottom. Iron, Zheng writes, “speaks in sign language,” in “this sharp-edged, oiled-language / of cast iron—the language of silent workers.” Iron takes on a life of its own, and tries “establishing a political party.” It delivers “a speech on the machines,” it takes over all daily existence; the life of a factory worker is a “life of iron.” A woman standing over a machine eventually understands that she’s “just a piece of extruded iron.” Again and again, across multiple poems, iron warps the lives of those who interact with it and depend on it, as they find their hours consumed by the machines they manipulate, the “hungry machine, every day eating iron.” Iron is everywhere, it surrounds them. It is inside of them. Iron threatens to turn them, too, into machines.

The relationship between the human and the nonhuman, the human and the machine, is particularly important in Zheng’s work. Her poems give voice to a class of people who have otherwise been forgotten or ignored in contemporary China and the rest of the world, but whose labor proves indispensable in the global upswell in the manufacture and purchase of consumer products. The factory workers—often women, but occasionally men—who populate Zheng’s poems are at the heart of a new Industrial Age, and they know it. Their youth, they find, has been “stopped by a timesheet.” Their words, their bodies, and their time have been transformed by the machines they operate, as though they, too, were plastic or metal or cloth, ready to be cut and molded and fit into the shape of a garment or a phone. “Under the cutting machine,” Zheng writes in “A Needle Hole through the Constellations,” a poem from 2009, “existence / cracks, fades, refuses to compromise.” They speak a fundamentally different language than those who buy the goods they’ve made, as Zheng observes in “Language,” also from 2009: “Rusty language,” she writes,

like a young woman worker’s helpless eyes or an injured 
      male worker by the factory doors 
their hurting language language of shivering bodies 
language of denied compensation for injured fingers

A machine turns raw materials into goods. And what the factory machines have done to the workers in Zheng’s poems is turn the raw experience of their lives into something similar to the commodities they produce, blurring the boundary between human and object. “Our fates they laugh at us like defective goods,” Zheng writes in “Ding Min.”

Her poems are observational, often portraits of particular women, such as those from her collection Women Worker (2012), which are named after individual factory laborers. In “Zhou Hong,” the title character turns to sex work and tells the poem’s speaker of her “illusory and unstable life”; “these days,” the narrator notes, “in China’s remote villages so many girls / share your fate.” The relationship between men and women, and the ways in which the women of these poems find themselves connected to or dependent on the men in their lives is illustrated in poems such as “Shu Miao,” which ends with the observation that “all your hope rests on finding a good man / since after all it matters for the rest of a woman’s life.” In a particularly devastating line toward the end of “Hu Zhimin,” a woman’s sacrifices for her family—she turns to prostitution—become a source of shame for her brothers, who rely on her money and yet, after her death, refuse to bury her in the family plot: “she’d ruin the fengshui of the family home.”

“Overwhelmed by what she encountered in the hardware factory where she first found employment,” Goodman explains in her translator’s note, “Zheng turned to writing as a release from emotional and psychological pressure, but also as a form of protest and witness.” In her early poems, especially, we sense this desolation and shock: “the green dreams of pregnancy she once had are gone amid spiraling grey bits of iron,” reads a line in “Iron Tools.” Private life is not possible in the factory world, with its dormitories and long hours. “Life,” the first poem in Roar, opens: “What you don’t know is that my name has been hidden by an employee ID / my hands become part of the assembly line, my body signed over / to a contract.”

Time evaporates quickly for the poem’s subjects, their days allotted strictly by the factory’s schedule. There is little free time allowed during their 12-hour workdays, and few breaks; there are, instead “the permission slips for five minutes in the bathroom / two minutes at the water dispenser.” In the standout early poem “Witnessed,” time becomes an enemy, as an overworked woman’s 4 a.m. drowsiness turns against her, and she loses a finger to the machine. There are curious moments, too, in which certain phrases bring to mind lines from poems by Western writers grappling with the aftereffects of an earlier century’s industrialization. In “The Mutating Villages,” the lines “all the faces become one face / each individual face becomes the face of the crowd” brings to mind the “faces in the crowd” from Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” while a page later, in “Lychee Grove,” the speaker observes that “an ancient slowness and sorrow, it lies like a sick patient,” as though echoing T.S. Eliot’s “a patient etherized upon a table.” Is this just coincidence? The work of the translator? A reference found in Zheng’s original? Or am I inventing a cadence where none exists?

***

Iron is not the only raw material that factories transform. Today, tantalum, tungsten, tin, and gold fuel the machines we carry with us every day—the phones and computers and other products now deemed necessary to modern life. It makes sense, then, that Zheng is not the only migrant worker poet who has been published in China. Goodman, this volume’s translator, has been instrumental in bringing the work of multiple Chinese migrant worker poets to an English-speaking audience in collections such as Iron Moon: An Anthology of Chinese Migrant Worker Poetry (2015), originally compiled and edited by the writer and filmmaker Qin Xiayu. “The concept of the migrant worker first appeared in China in 1984,” Qin Xiayu explains in the book’s foreword, “when the researcher Zhang Yulin began surveying the development of towns and cities, which, along with the rise of industry, brought large numbers of rural residents from the countryside into the cities for the first time. This group of people became known as migrant workers, pointing to their status as outsiders in their own country.” The title Iron Moon comes from a poem by the Foxconn worker Xu Luzhi, who died by suicide in 2014 at age 24. “I swallowed an iron moon / they called it a screw,” goes the first stanza; it ends with the lines, “I spread across my country / a poem of shame,” a cri de couer that ricochets across the page with the force of gears turning.

The poets collected in Iron Moon represent a wide swath of writers. Some have worked in clothing factories, toy factories, and electronics factories, while others have worked in explosives mines, construction, or in the dry-cleaning industry. Some have since been able to leave these lines of work and are now full-time editors and writers, while others remain in factories. Their birth years range from 1965 to 1990, and many are haunted by their youth, lost to the dangerous monotony of the assembly line. The first stanza of “Orders of the Front Lines,” by Xie Xiangnan, illustrates the mood of many poems in the collection:

My finest five years went into the input feeder of a machine 
I watched those five youthful years come out of the machine’s 
asshole—each formed into an elliptical plastic toy, 
slippery, sometimes orange, 
sometimes bright red and green eggshells. 
(I’ve heard they’re shipped to America, shipped 
to Western Europe as Christmas toys, sold one after another 
to blue-eyed children . . .)

To read these poems as a Westerner is to be implicated in an uncomfortable dialogue between two worlds, that of the purchaser and the labor purchased. For all the talk of “low waste” and “minimalism” that pervades certain circles in the United States today, there is still a general ignorance among many Americans concerning who, in fact, constructed these goods in the first place. “Sundress,” by Wu Xia, probes this one-sided relationship in the context of fast fashion:

Soon when I get off work 
I’ll wash my sweaty uniform 
and the sundress will be packed and shipped 
to a fashionable store 
it will wait for you 
unknown girl 
I love you 
 

But does the unknown girl think of the laborer on the other side of this equation? Among even the loudest anti-fast fashion influencers, acknowledging this inequality seems rare.

At a moment in which the output of Chinese migrant workers in the abstract has become a fixation and an anxiety among strands of the American right, the poetry in Iron Moon and In the Roar of the Machine offers a concrete portrayal of what manufacturing in Chinese factories is really like. The violence found within their walls—the severed fingers, the bent backs—is in stark contrast to the romanticized fantasies that appear with increasing frequency on American social media channels, in which factory jobs—at least those in the United States—are imagined to embody a particular vision of dignified, powerful masculinity that the contemporary global economy has somehow robbed from American men. In April, the conservative influencer Milo Yiannoupolis tweeted, “Men are depressed and addicted and broken because they have nothing to do. They get no stimulation or satisfaction from BS email jobs. I’m telling you, white Americans will love working in factories again.” (The tweet was liked more than 7,000 times.) In these conservative visions, there are no women on the factory lines either, which represent an escape from a “feminized” economy and culture.

In Zheng’s poems, little respect exists for the health, safety, and interiority of those factory workers who operate machines. There is no glory and little community. In “Workshop,” the tedious repetition of the piecemeal work—“sawing, cutting / polishing, drilling / milling, lathing / weighing, rolling” goes on for seven lines, creating an experience of endless action, with little time for pause. Child labor is rampant: “her small weak gaze reveals desolation,” Zheng writes of a 14-year-old girl in “Child Laborers on Mt. Liang,” later noting that “what little sympathy exists / always gets crushed by the assembly line machines.” Rather than offer a sense of purpose to workers, these machines instead reduce all human experience to their level. “The future is exchanged for credit,” goes a line in “Zhang Ai,” from Woman Worker, and “love is reduced to economic exchange.” Machines, in this portrayal, do not offer their workers a sense of freedom or self-actualization.

Reading Zheng’s work, and the work of other Chinese migrant worker poets like her, offers us a chance to bypass the clatter of these machines. What is left is the purity of the human point of view that machines threaten to obscure. A glimpse of hope, of connection: not even iron can take on the sound of the human voice.