On the evening of April 29th, a row of bungalows in a small farmhouse in Picun was lit with cold white light through the windows and doors. The second house is the largest, and in the middle of the room, is a patchwork desk, and as usual, the Picun Community Union Literature Group begins its weekly program.

One of the topics of the course was a discussion of Fan Yusu's "masterpiece", I am Fan Yusu. A few days ago, the article exploded on the Internet. Fan Yusu, a childcare worker from the village of Dahuo in Xiangyang, Hubei Province, writes in a concise and restrained style about the twisted fate of three generations of women in a family spanning more than half a century.

However, Fan Yusu "disappeared". The staff member in charge of media relations said that Fan Yusu had gone into hiding "in an ancient temple deep in the mountains."

The literature group is affiliated with the Picun "Workers' Home" community union. In September 2014, the group opened for enrollment, and more than a dozen workers from different industries, including Fan Yusu, participated. Zhang Huiyu, a professor at the Central Academy of Arts, is the volunteer teacher.

Zhang Huiyu sat in a circle with a dozen participants; Ma Dayong, a flower worker, spent an hour and a half coming from Tiantan Park after work. Two female domestic workers came to Picun after reading Fan Yusu's article and became new members of the literature group.

The young Hu Xiaohai looked unusually excited, and said in a high-pitched voice that the time to talk to one's soul is the moment to be oneself. "Not only the literature group, but even 9.6 million square kilometers of land and foreign countries, there are workers in every corner, there are such stories."

Finally, he added that the popularity of Fan Da Sister, unexpected but also reasonable, "fire" is uncontrollable.

Chen Fang (a pseudonym), also a childcare worker, said, "I don't see a strong class solidarity, and my employers work hard, too, and they leave their children to earn money. "I hope to write something cozy," she concluded.

Picun is located outside the fifth ring road to the northeast of Beijing and is home to more than 20,000 migrant workers, who are laborers in industries such as construction and services, and are attracted to the area by the low rent and cost of living.

Just as Literature Group participant Leroy said, "What we write is real, it's the norm," she said with a soft-spoken, calm demeanor, "any one of us could have written it."

The members of the Picun Literary Group, represented by Fan Yusu, have different stories, but feel the resonance of "one soul" in My Name is Fan Yusu. These working people continue to record their own experiences and spiritual life, and their works depict a picture of the class mobility between urban and rural areas in China.

The other "Beijing"

(Yuan Wei, 32, is the treasurer of a beauty salon on Jintai Road, living in a 7-square-meter dormitory in Picun. His wife works as a nanny in Beijing's South Third Ring Road, and his children are brought up by their parents in their hometown of Dezhou, Shandong Province. (Sun Junbin photo)

It's about 25 kilometers from Jintai Road to Picun, and it usually takes Yuan Wei two hours to get home on bus No. 306. 32-year-old Yuan Wei, a treasurer at a beauty salon on Jintai Road and one of the members of the Literature Group, lives in a 7-square-meter dormitory in Picun. His wife, a nanny, works in the South Third Ring Road, and his children are brought up by their parents in their hometown in Dezhou, Shandong Province.

Picun is located on the border between Beijing and Yanjiao, Hebei Province. The bus stops at the traffic circle at the entrance of Picun, and to the west of the traffic circle, the straight road leads to the bustling city of Beijing, and to the north of that is Picun, another "Beijing".

Running through the village is a bustling commercial street, with more than 30 noodle shops alone, and crowds of people, often congesting the street for dozens of meters when two cars meet.

At the end of the shopping street is the Tongxin Experimental School, a school for children of migrant workers. Because of school registration problems, the upper grades lose a large number of students back to their home countries every summer.

Airplanes from the capital airport fly over Picun at a rate of two per minute, and the village is so overrun with factories, stores and cheap apartments that it is hard to find a single piece of arable land. There are fewer than 1,500 local villagers, many of whom make their living by renting out their homes. In Picun, these landlords are known as "rent-eaters".

(Workers rest on the side of the road on the streets of Pi Village, while some play flutes and others read books. (Photo by Sun Junbin)

"A bunch of old men and women with a big bunch of keys go around collecting rent." This is how migrant worker Zhang Ziyi sees the locals.

Last year, there were rumors that Pi Village was included in the new subway planning line, and local villagers began to tear down and build. Dust swirled in the air with poplar flakes, and the roar of airplanes, noise from construction sites, car horns and crowds of people made the whole village boil in dust during the day.

On April 14, a 40,000-square-meter plot of land in Louzizhuang Village, Jinzhan Township, next to Picun, was auctioned for 2.92 billion yuan.

The drastic hedge between the immersion of urbanization and the gathering of foreigners makes Picun seem like a stagecoach station for urban-rural and class mobility.

Li Ruo, a native of Xinyang, Henan Province, who lives in Picun, couldn't help but ask, "Is this a city or a village?"

For Yuan Wei, these changes brought him the biggest impact is the rent increase, "last year's rent is only more than 200, this year went up 100 dollars."

Two years ago, he was a carpenter.In 2015, Beijing introduced the "Prohibition and Restriction Catalog of New Industries in Beijing" to close down a large number of general manufacturing and polluting enterprises in urban areas, and the furniture factory where Yuan Wei worked was among them. He finally chose to change his profession, "I still want to stay in Beijing."

In September 2014, Yuan Wei signed up for the literature group set up by the Picun "Workers' Home" community union.

"Founded in 2002, Beijing Workers' Home is a social welfare organization that serves the working community, including the Museum of Working Culture, the New Workers' Theatre, the Mutual Benefit Store and other organizations, and is also the origin of the famous "Spring Festival Gala for Working People". Founder Sun Heng hopes that "Workers' Home" can provide a "mutual support platform" for the working community.

The people who joined the literary group at the same time as Yuan Wei include Guo Fulai, a farmer who just came to Beijing from Hebei, Xu Liangyuan, a bricklayer, Wang Chunyu, a welder, Fan Yusu, a child-care worker, and Zhang Ziyi, a store clerk who suffers from a disability, etc. They come from different places, but they have a similar experience in life - coming from the countryside, moving around from one place to another to work for many years, and being separated from their families. They love literature. In the literature group, they found peers and felt "equal".

Volunteer teacher Zhang Huiyu said that the working class people at the bottom write their stories in a literary way, and their writing allows people to see another side of China and how people living in the city and at the bottom of the society live.

Reunited in a foreign land after 20 years

On the afternoon of April 28th, at the "Fan Yusu Report Media Briefing" held at the "Workers' Home" theater in Picun, several members of the Literature Group were invited to the stage and introduced one by one.

When it was Xu Liangyuan's turn, he slowly stood up, "My name is Xu Liangyuan, I'm from Xiaogan, Hubei, and I'm a bricklayer", he took out a book of poems from the black burlap bag he was carrying, and recited his poem "Runaway Cowherd" on the spot: "Am I a sinner who has left my family and my work behind / I have no choice but to leave my old father behind / my young son behind / the rice that is still drenched in the autumn rain / and run away ". I can only leave my old father/leave my young son/leave the rice that is still drenched in the fall rain/and go away ......."

This is a poem he wrote to his wife, expressing a working man's apology to his family.

(Xu Liangyuan from Xiaogan, Hubei Province, is a member of the literary group whose creations include novels, poems, and screenplays. (Photo by Sun Junbin)

In 1993, when his son was two years old, Xu Liangyuan left his hometown to work in the Northeast with a labor team. A year before that, after Deng Xiaoping's Southern Tour speech, "market economy" was officially written into the Party Constitution, and the reform of the system made class mobility between urban and rural areas possible.

Not long after, Xu Liangyuan moved to Guangzhou to work as a cutter in a Taiwanese-funded garment factory, and in 1998, he went to Dongguan to become a mason.

After having a second child, Xu Liangyuan chose to get himself ligated in order to share his wife's pain. As a result, he didn't get ligated properly and Xu Liangyuan fell sick with back problems and a third child, for which he was fined 800 dollars and the only valuable TV set in the house was taken away.

After the birth of her third child, Xu's wife also came to Dongguan to work as a cutter in a garment factory.

Xu Liangyuan's left leg ankle has a coin-sized pimple, which is injured in Dongguan site left a mark. One day in August of that year, Xu Liangyuan was working on the road construction site, his ankle was cut by a tin. The wound was not healed for a long time, but the contractor let him continue to work until the wound festered and saw bones.

In Dongguan, Xu Liangyuan followed the mobility of the construction site, his wife lives in the factory, sometimes he left work to take a long car ride to see his wife, the two people talk across the iron bars. When her husband stood limping in front of the iron gate, his wife shed tears.

Xu Liangyuan wrote down this experience in a small red leather book that he has treasured for many years: your hands are busy on the assembly line of the factory, my hands are lying on the waist of the city. The "waist" is his reference to the city's modern architecture.

With his wife in a factory and his three children living in a house in his hometown with their uncle, they rely on letters and agreed-upon phone calls. Xu Liangyuan describes this relationship as an "emotional triangle," where "they can't take care of each other, as if they are separated."

In 2003, his wife was sick at home, and Xu Liangyuan came to Beijing alone with a debt of 5,000 or 6,000 dollars.

During the SARS outbreak, the government imposed strict controls on the foreign population. "I went out to do odd jobs during the day, and when the security inspectors came into the hutongs at night, I ran and hid in the cabbage field by the river." Xu Liangyuan recalled.

"After the SARS outbreak, Xu Liangyuan slowly found work on construction sites and gained a firm foothold in Beijing.

The eldest son went to junior high school, learned to smoke, the teacher called to the family to complain, Xu Liangyuan learned that he taught him a lesson, the son said, you grow up not care about me, I love to do what I do, finished slamming the phone away.

Xu Liangyuan felt that his son's smoking was infected by his uncle, and for this reason, he wrote a script called "Passing Smoke from Generation to Generation" about a left-behind child who was influenced by his grandfather to start smoking and deserting his studies.

"So many years, I do not spend much time with children, meet rusty, I speak he does not listen." Xu Liangyuan said that when his son came to Beijing for the first time, he wanted to go to Tiananmen Square to play, but Xu Liangyuan went to another place to work. In the end, the son followed someone else's father.

In 2013, all three of Xu Liangyuan's children came to Beijing, her daughter worked as a font saleswoman, her eldest son was a real estate agent, and her youngest son was selling degaussing machines. The family rented a three-bedroom, one-bathroom house in the Dashanzi neighborhood of the Chaoyang District, with a rent of 2,100 yuan per month.

The reunion took place exactly 20 years after he first went out to work.

At the end of the poem "The Runaway Cowboy," Xu Liangyuan writes.

Earn a little money.

Just one room.

It's okay to have a small house.

Bring your old father from the country.

Bring in the little boy.

Bring the weaver's wife from the other side of the city.

Cowboys and weavers have a family reunion at the head of the city."

Lost Between Town and Country

(Manuscript of Guo Fuli. (Sun Junbinbin photo)

Guo Fulai, 48, joined the literary group from a dictionary.

In the Spring Festival of 2015, a friend introduced Guo Fulai to a job setting up a showroom in Beijing, where he could earn 150 to 160 yuan a day. Guo Fulai left his hometown, where he had lived for more than 40 years, for the first time.

When he came to Picun, he found that the "Workers' Home" had a library, and went to borrow a dictionary, and happened to run into Xiao Fu, the leader of the literary group, and Guo Fulai, who was usually a hobbyist, signed up to join the group right away.

In his hometown of Zhangjiawa Village in Wuqiao County, Guo Fulai farms eight acres of land and his wife runs a kiosk. "The household population of more than 700, less than 300 people at home," Guo Fulai said, kiosk no business at all, farming income also fell sharply. "The year before last, each acre of wheat field only harvested 200 pounds of wheat, each catty purchase price of 1 yuan 1, each acre backward two, three hundred yuan."

Guo Fulai specializes in writing on the theme of homesickness. In Birdsong in the Early Morning, he reminisces about his childhood hometown: there are open plains, endless wheat fields, and the long embankment of the Xuanhui River is bordered by rows of tall poplars and willows, with birds chirping in the trees, and children running along the river.

His manuscript contains a letter to his wife "Xiaoying", which reads: "Blame it on the fact that we were born in the countryside, the poor three acres of saline land, only crazy growth of helpless sighs.

Li Ruo, who was also in the literature group, admired Guo Fulai, "In our group, Brother Guo worked the hardest, and he was very talented."

When My Name is Fan Yusu became popular, Li Ruo had already published more than a dozen stories about her hometown, and her editor, Shen Yanni, called her the "Queen of Traffic".

"I wish more people would face up to rural issues," Leroy said.

After coming to Picun, Li Ruo lived in a 10-square-meter bungalow. There was a bed against the wall, with three beds in the upper, middle and lower bunks.

Li Ruo's hometown is Xinyang, Henan Province, a typical hollow village. In her opinion, except for the elderly and children, "everything in the village seems to have been blown away by the wind" and "it's like the end and corner of the world there."

She writes about the story of Qin, a crazy woman in the village who has no one to depend on, and the story of Grandma Wu, who was abandoned by her children and died silently in a borrowed room.

She also writes about pesticide abuse in the countryside, marriage problems between men and women in the countryside, and, more daringly, about the sexual promiscuity of the men and women left behind in the village.

Li Ruo is her pen name, she explains, "Because what I write are true stories, I'm afraid that people in the village will ignore me if they see them."

At one point, Li Ruo wanted to open a retirement assistance organization in his hometown, which was collectively opposed by his family, "They thought it was too unrealistic and said I was in the city and my brain stayed broken."

Children in the hometown study, Li Ruo want to go back, but suffer in the hometown can not find a job, "here head on the top of the sky, feet on the ground, are not my."

According to the National Bureau of Statistics, in 2015, the total number of rural migrant workers in China was 277.47 million, of which 168.84 million were migrant workers. Sun Heng, the founder of Picun's "Workers' Home", has long researched urban workers, and is not optimistic about the current situation of this large group of people, whom he summarizes by saying that "they can't stay in the city, can't go back to the countryside, and are lost between the city and the countryside".

Two years after coming to Beijing, although it is difficult to find a stable job, Guo Fulai received more and more work, "to be able to find a job can earn money, much better than at home."

The business of the kiosk is still very depressed, his wife wants to come to Beijing to find him, but suffering from the children to go to school can not get out of the house after the withdrawal of schools, she has to ride more than ten miles a day to pick up the children.

"But I never found myself."

Hu Xiaohai, the owner of the Tongxin Mutual Store, is wearing a denim jacket and a backwards duck-tongued cap, sitting in front of the cash register and enthusiastically greeting every customer who enters the door. He is 30 years old and his hometown is Shangqiu, Henan Province.

Sometimes, when "inspiration" strikes, he grabs a piece of paper and writes down the sentence in his mind, which has been his habit for years.

After 15 years of wandering, Hu Xiaohai has found the "freedom" he seeks. Every day, he receives clothes, sells them, counts the accounts, and returns to his dormitory, which is the "best state of life" since he started working, and which he describes as a state of "harmonization of life and spirit".

Hu Xiaohai's original name was Hu Liu Shuai, and he named himself Hu Xiaohai in tribute to his idol, Haizi.

In 2002, after the first semester of his junior year of high school, Hu Xiaohai dropped out of school, wanting to study music.

As a "second-generation worker", Hu Xiaohai's working route is not much different from that of his father's generation, which includes Shenzhen, Dongguan, Ningbo, Suzhou, Zhengzhou, Jiaxing and Beijing Picun.

In the Pearl River Delta, Hu Xiaohai as an assembler, car cutter, 4 years after crawling, he chose to leave; in Jiaxing electronics factory, Hu Xiaohai's job is to play the screws, a packet of 10,000 screws, Hu Xiaohai can not remember how many packets a day he has to play. He often took the paper used for piecework to write down his inner confusion. "I am a screw playing screws, hands on the assembly line without stopping, feel deep despair inside."

Wang Feng's music soothed him, and once walking in the rain from work with Wang Feng's "Youth" in his headphones, Hu Xiaohai cried as he walked. "I like to turn off the lights and listen to 'Beijing, Beijing' in the dark, with a kind of searing loneliness."

Once, in front of a subway station in Suzhou, some sentences came to his mind, and he turned around and borrowed a pen and paper from a sweeper aunt and wrote a song called "Age of Dreaming 2:" "We are always lost in searching, we are always lost in awakening." He mimicked Wang Feng's lyrics.

In 2014, Hu Xiaohai felt that there is no way out, decided to participate in the "Voice of China" talent show, the results did not pass the first round of auditions; the next year in April, he took his original work to the headquarters of the program group in Shanghai, the results are still no end.

(Xiao Fu, leader of the literary group of the Pi Village Community Union, who helped type Fan Yusu's article into an electronic version. (Photo by Sun Junbin)

In October of that year, Xu Lizhi, a working poet, committed suicide by jumping off a building at Foxconn. Hu Xiaohai recited Xu Lizhi's poem to the workers, who said it sounded "very sad".

"Anxious, even angry," he hides Ginsberg's Howl in his pants pocket and pulls it out to read between assembly line breaks.

Unemployment is a common occurrence, "I have definitely changed no less than 50 jobs". Sometimes, after working as a food passer in a Western restaurant at noon in exchange for a meal, I would leave in the afternoon with my bag and go to a Chinese restaurant to wash dishes in exchange for a night of restful sleep with a bed.

In the Spring Festival of 2015, Hu Xiaohai brought home the books that had accompanied him all these years. When his mother saw it, she asked him, "What's the use of reading these books, so many years of nothing, but also write what", guilty Hu Xiaohai went to the backyard and burned his poetry books and manuscripts.

One of his favorite poems to recite about himself is "But I Never Found Myself" "I found the hidden sun / I found the lonely moon / But I never found my true self." The poem was inspired by lyrics from the British band U2.

A lost Hu Xiaohai began frequently sending private messages to his idols on Weibo, resulting in a reply from singer Zhang Chu. "Brother Zhang Chu was very nice, he encouraged me not to give up hope and sent me a set of psychology books."

In July 2016, Hu Xiaohai traveled from Hangzhou to Beijing and made his first stop at Jianguomen Bridge. "That's where Wang Feng wrote Goodnight Beijing."

In October, Hu Xiaohai joined the Picun Literature Group, and more than 40 of his poems were selected for the second series of "Picun Literature" compiled by the group. The instructor, Zhang Huiyu, then edited his 400 poems into a book and printed 50 copies. In his opinion, Hu's poems "express the real feelings of assembly line workers and are very powerful."

Fan Yusu liked Hu Xiaohai's poems, especially "Chinese Workers":

It's full of Chinese workers like the Great Wall.

The hills are full of Chinese workers.

It's full of Chinese workers with bronze in their hands.

Growing up swallowing clouds of Chinese workers ......"

Less than a kilometer east of the Picun traffic circle is a 300-square-meter courtyard, home to the Literature Group, the New Workers' Theater, and the Concentric Mutual Benefit Store, where Hu Xiaohai and his fellow workers also live. The walls of the courtyard are mottled, and a red paper-cut logo of a worker holding a gong stands out, next to a large line that reads, "Without our culture, there is no history; without our history, there is no future!" Although he did not know the source, Hu Xiaohai liked it.