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Adrift in the South

by Xiao Hai

  

€ 16.25 

ISBN: 9781738536269

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.

320 pages.

Temporarily out of stock.

Currently not in stock but due shortly. Usually despatched in 3 to 10 working days.
If you order this along with other items, your entire order will be held and despatched when complete.

Date of Publication: 07/05/2026

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