The Body and Soul at Social Bottom

龙源期刊网 https://www.360docs.net/doc/52301174.html,

作者：Zhang Qin

来源：《China Book International》2013年第02期

As French thinker Simone Weil said, you can not know the sense of humiliation and can not understand freedom thus can not really understand the suffering of labors if you do not live with labors and work with them. The book Workwomen Record with back profile of blue dress workwomen as cover narrates the life of peasant workers at bottom based on the personal experience of author.

The Workwomen Record is a narrative poetry anthology concerning women peasant workers as a special group in China’s social transition period. It records the living conditions of workwomen on various flow lines in Dongguan, Guangdong province in detail.

It records 100 workwomen in the book, most of them left hometown for work when they just graduated from junior high school. They come to cities and then enter into the flow lines of factories for a new life due to poor rural life. However, the life of flow line is far from the city life in their dream. Some workwomen have to change jobs because of their fingers are cut by machines , or being dismissed due to occupational diseases, or unemployed due to bankruptcy of factory or old age. They live in dirty, noisy, and disorder cheap rental houses in urban villages and set drift.

It took author more than 6 years to collect these materials recording the life of workwomen. For the purpose of collecting such materials, she meets other workwomen through her partners and visits the poor villages in Hunan and Sichuan province, She even lived in the room next to sex worker and fled rapidly. In her writing, she said, she has ever planned to give up these records due to her timidity, fear and sense of humiliation. However, under the spur of morality consciousness, she spent 6 years on completing this book, which describes small potatoes and makes you think and move deeply. Thus, these wordless workwomen draw people’s attention with their sad and pitiful stories.

“ I have flied across the sky where there was no trace of my twig,” the words in book is the life portrait of thousands of workwomen. After devoting their short-time youth to cities, they are forced to leave the cities where they once worked due to low wages, high housing price and household register. “They are forgotten and ignored by times completely.” But the author loves these workwomen at bottom society deeply. She wishes them to be remembered by people instead of only as being a job number. Thus she writes their life profile with their names as title of poems. Under the records of author, these workwomen with stories and names enjoy their dignity.

With honesty and sympathy, the author paid great attention to hard life of workwomen from point of woman’s opinio n and with careful observation. They live in dark, dirty, noisy, and disorder rental houses in urban villages, spending 11 hours on flow lines every day, with tears, calling up their children in hometown far away from them. They had to suffer from induced abortion, failure of love and cheat, robbery, etc. They had to kneel at the gate of factory asking for their salaries. However, the sadness and misery arising from substance and soul has gradually become blood and violence. “At