Adrift in the South
Regular price
€18.50
A01=Xiao Hai
Author_Xiao Hai
barbara demick
Category=DNBL1
Category=DNC
Category=NHF
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
forthcoming
i deliver parcels in beijing
julia lovell
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shuang xuetao
workplace memoir
Product details
- ISBN 9781738536269
- Dimensions: 129 x 198mm
- Publication Date: 07 May 2026
- Publisher: Granta Publications Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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When Xiao Hai turned fifteen, his family paid a vocational-school teacher 1,200 yuan to find him a factory job in Shenzhen. So began fifteen years spent moving between the garment mills and electronics factories of China's fast-growing southern cities.
Adrift in the South is a memoir of life as a migrant labourer in the twenty-first century, making iPhones and baby clothes, hand-stitching football shirts and cutting plastic into radios. Here, Xiao Hai reveals the alienation and tedium of factory life, the small indignities and indifference of the larger system. And he tells the story of how poetry led him somewhere unexpected: to join a small community of artists living, working, and studying together on the outskirts of Beijing.
This memoir is a landmark text from China's migrant worker literature movement, a grassroots group of writers providing an unvarnished account of what life is like for the 300 million migrant workers powering the world's second-biggest economy.
Xiao Hai was born in Shangqiu City in Henan Province in China. At fifteen he moved to Shenzhen to join the workforce. He spent the next decade moving between cities, working factory jobs and writing poetry. He is the author of the poetry collection Sisyphus on the Wenyu River, and translations of his poetry have appeared in World Literature Today and Chinese Literature Today.
Tony Hao is a Connecticut-based Chinese-to-English literary translator and writer. Authors he has translated include Taiwanese novelist Tong Wei-Ger and Chinese short story writer Ban Yu.
