Reincarnations of Labor Reportage: Nonfiction by Chinese Migrant Worker Authors

Literary reportage and workers’ literature have historically been imbricated in a productive relationship. In this chapter, I approach nonfiction (feixugou 非 虛構) as a contemporary genre (that roughly came about in the 2000s), high- lighting its thematic and stylistic connections to industrial-themed reportage literature and especially its function as an instrument for workers to construct self-narratives, thus participating in reportage art’s active (and often critical) intervention in the social space where it is produced (see Chen’s, Mirra’s, and Moran’s chapters in this volume). As case studies, I present nonfiction accounts written by two workers, Meng Yu 夢雨 and Yuan Wei 苑偉. Both are members of the Picun Literature Group (Picun wenxue xiaozu 皮村文學小 組), a collective devoted to literary training and creative writing for rural-to- urban migrant laborers.