Event FinderEASC Colloquium: Adrift in the South - Xiao Hai, Tony Hao
- Starts
- Ends
- Format
- In person
- Location
- GLOBAL & INTERNATIONAL STUDIES BUILDING, 355 North Eagleson Avenue, Bloomington, IN 47405
About This Event
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 memoiris 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.About the author: Xiao Hai was born in Shangqiu City in Henan Province in China. At fifteen he moved to Shenzhen to join the workforce, moving between cities and factory jobs while writing poetry in his spare time. He is the author of the poetry collection Sisyphus on the Wenyu River, and translations of his poetry have appeared in World Literature Today and Chinese Literature Today.About the translator: Tony Hao is a New Haven, Connecticut-based Chinese-to-English literary translator and writer. Authors he has translated include Taiwanese novelist Tong Wei-Ger 童偉格, Chinese worker-poet Xiao Hai 小海, Taiwanese transgender writer Liu Chen-Chun 劉宸君, and Chinese short story writer Ban Yu 班宇. His debut book-length translation, Adrift in the South, a memoir by Xiao Hai, was published by Granta Magazine Editions in May, 2026. His short-form translations have appeared in Granta, The Wall Street Journal, The Georgia Review, The Offing, Books from Taiwan, Florescence (The Taipei Chinese PEN), MAYDAY Magazine, and elsewhere. His work has been recognized by the PEN Translates Grant, the Granum Foundation Translation Prize, Art Omi Writers: Translation Lab, the Vermont Studio Center, BCLT's Advanced Translation Workshop, the Bread Loaf Translators' Conference, and elsewhere.