Portrayals of Sex Work Without Moralizing

This week on Sinica, in a special episode recorded as a live joint webcast with NYRB/Poets and Equator Magazine, I sit down with Eleanor Goodman — poet, scholar, research associate at Harvard's Fairbank Center, and one of the most accomplished translators working between Chinese and English — to talk about the extraordinary Sichuan-born poet Zheng Xiaoqiong (郑小琼).

Born in 1980 in a mountain village, trained as a nurse, Zheng joined the great tide of internal migration in her early 20s, ending up on the assembly line of a hardware factory in Dongguan in the Pearl River Delta. She picked up a pen after a workplace injury — part of her finger taken off by a lathe — and what came out across poems, essays, and reportage has made her one of the most singular voices in contemporary Chinese literature. Her trajectory from the assembly line to the editorial desk of an official literary magazine is, as far as I know, essentially without parallel.

Eleanor has been translating Zheng since around 2013, and the partnership they've built has given Anglophone readers access to a body of work that defies easy categorization — at once intimate and historical, ethnographic and lyric, tender and unsparing. We talk about how they met, about Zheng's resistance to the "migrant worker poet" label, about the bodily feminism that runs through her verse, about her unmoralizing portraits of sex workers, about lost youth and the way the body keeps the ledger of factory time. Eleanor reads Zheng's poem "Woman Worker: Youth Pinned to a Workstation" (女工: 被固定在卡桌上的青春) in both Chinese and her English translation — and it is, every time, devastating.

Huge thanks to Abigail Dunn at NYRB Poets and Ratik Asokan at Equator for organizing this conversation and for inviting me to host it, to Eleanor for her generosity and her brilliance, and most of all to Zheng Xiaoqiong, whose voice — even when she cannot be with us in person — comes through with absolute clarity.

Eleanor's translation of Zheng Xiaoqiong's In the Roar of the Machine is available from NYRB Poets. The Equator selections, drawn from Zheng's long-form prose, are available at Equator Magazine.

• 05:07 — How Eleanor and Zheng met in 2013, and why a book had to happen
• 08:14 — Navigating the awkward proposition of China for the Western left
• 10:50 — Zheng's trajectory: from a Sichuan village to the assembly line to the editor's desk
• 16:29 — Resisting the "migrant worker poet" (打工诗人) label
• 20:47 — Conventions of the genre: exhaustion, iron, lost identity, the screw in the machine
• 24:58 — Who gets translated into English, and why
• 28:34 — The translator's ethics: how do you render a factory poem honestly?
• 32:42 — Eleanor reads "Woman Worker, Youth Pinned to a Workstation" (女工被固定在卡桌上的青春) in Chinese and English
• 37:14 — Zheng's bodily feminism: irregular periods, a different way of caring
• 40:37 — Lost youth and the passage of time
• 44:36 — Sex work and women's labor: portraits without moralizing
• 49:59 — Whose work actually counts in Chinese urban discourse?
• 52:45 — Why Zheng Xiaoqiong wasn't able to join us, and how censorship really works
• 54:44 — Rose Courtyard and what's next: classical allusions, ancestral homes, embroidering grandmothers
• 57:39 — Audience Q&A: American worker poets, the WeChat communities of migrant writers, and Zheng's standing in Chinese letters

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