C ULTURE
whether for being a single mother or low class, she found an invis-
ible web had trapped her life. She admitted that living in this society,
women “have to face more pressures.”
Picun is an urban village where hundreds of thousands of migrant
workers live alongside an “ant tribe” – young university graduates
who live in converted basements and illegally partitioned rooms in
the outskirts, hardworking and intelligent, yet anonymous and un-
derpaid.
After moving there, Fan worked first as a nursery teacher at a school
for children of migrant workers. When her younger daughter could
go to school on her own, Fan quit the nursery job and became a
nanny.
Working for various kinds of families made her aware of the huge
discrepancies in the different social classes. If the rich and poor have
something in common, she observes, it is that they all live in anxiety
to some degree.
One of her rich employers is concerned about whether or not to
emigrate due to the air pollution problem; an employer who owns
a dozen properties is anxious about devaluation or missing the best
times to make a deal; a millionaire’s mistress who feels she has to put
on exquisite makeup every day, waiting for her lover to come. People
in Picun have different worries, complaining about wage arrears, chil-
dren’s education or the difficulty of finding a wife.
Fan told ChinaReport that some of her employers would hire
university students from prestigious universities as tutors for their
children.“These students come from the best universities in China,
but they have to work as private tutors to make a living. These stu-
dents, who will join the ant tribes in future, also look down on the
nannies,” Fan told our reporter.
When her elder daughter could read novels, Fan went to flea mar-
kets and waste collection stations to buy secondhand books by the
pound. She hoped that through self-education her daughters could
avoid the fate of “being a screw in the world’s factory or puppet-like
Terracotta warriors on an assembly line.”
Her elder daughter started working as a labourer at the age of 14,
and learnt many crafts while working hard. Now 20, the elder daugh-
ter has become a white-collar worker with a good annual salary of
90,000 yuan (US$13,000).
In Picun, an organisation called Worker’s Home serves as a cultural
centre for migrant workers there, providing them with facilities such
as a theatre, cinema, library and a museum.
In her spare time, Fan would visit the library of the Worker’s Home
to borrow books or head to the National Library and Capital Library
to read local records archives and chronicles. As her reading records at
the Worker’s Home library show, Fan reads widely. Besides books on
nursery teaching and child psychology, it is fiction such as works by
George Orwell that Fan reads the most.
“Although novels like 1984 and Animal Farm are fictional and al-
legorical on the surface, they nonetheless reflect the truth of a long
period of human society,” Fan told ChinaReport.
In late 2014, the Worker’s Home set up a literature group. Zhang
Huiyu, a literary scholar of the Chinese National Academy of Arts,
volunteered to teach literature and writing courses to workers in Pi-
cun. Zhang encouraged his students to write about their lives and
later compiled their works into a volume called Picun Literature.
Fan Yusu attended the course for a year, during which she wrote her
first essay “One Day of My Life,” a diary-like record of working as aWorkers’ Home holds the First Migrant Worker Arts Festival in Picun Village
in 2009, in which migrant workers perform original plays in the newly-
constructed New Workers TheatrePhoto by cfp