{"id":6542,"date":"2015-06-06T10:28:28","date_gmt":"2015-06-06T17:28:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=6542"},"modified":"2015-06-16T10:33:07","modified_gmt":"2015-06-16T17:33:07","slug":"the-poet-who-died-for-your-phone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2015\/06\/06\/the-poet-who-died-for-your-phone\/","title":{"rendered":"The Poet Who Died For Your Phone"},"content":{"rendered":"

from TIME<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Poet Who Died For Your Phone<\/h1>\n

By Emily Rauhala \/ Shenzhen and Jieyang<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Hundreds of thousands of people travel from China\u2019s countryside to its cities to work in factories, building devices for international consumers and trying to assemble better lives for themselves. Xu Lizhi left behind a haunting record of that life.<\/em><\/p>\n

He dreamed about it, wrote about it. He rolled it around in the palm of his hand. Working through the \u201cdark night of overtime\u201d in January 2014, the 23-year-old Xu Lizhi imagined himself like a misplaced screw, \u201cplunging vertically, lightly clinking,\u201d lost to the factory floor. \u201cIt won\u2019t attract anyone\u2019s attention,\u201d he wrote. \u201cJust like the last time\/ On a night like this\/ When someone plunged to the ground.\u201d<\/p>\n

A village boy with clothes-hanger shoulders and a high school education, Xu moved to the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen in 2011. He was looking for a way out of rural life; he hoped to find a way to use his mind. Like hundreds of thousands before him, he settled, to start, for a spot on the assembly line at Foxconn Technology Group, the Taiwan manufacturing giant linked to just about every other name in electronics, from Apple to Acer and Microsoft. To make sense of what he saw there, he started to write, his evocative work earning him a modest following in the city\u2019s small community of dagong shiren<\/i>, or migrant poets.<\/p>\n

In his 3\u00bd years in Shenzhen, Xu captured <\/b>life there in brutal, beautiful detail. In the city, the country kid found a voice that roared, publishing poems in company newspaper Foxconn People<\/em> and sharing his work online. Factory workers are often treated as interchangeable, anonymous. To readers, his words were a reminder that every laborer has a mind and heart; for him, writing was a way out. \u201cWriting poems gives me another way of life,\u201d he told a Chinese journalist in an unpublished interview that TIME has seen. \u201cWhen you\u2019re writing poems, you\u2019re not confined to the real world.\u201d For the first time, Xu\u2019s brother and close friends shared his story with the foreign press.<\/p>\n

[ click to continue reading at TIME<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from TIME The Poet Who Died For Your Phone By Emily Rauhala \/ Shenzhen and Jieyang Hundreds of thousands of people travel from China\u2019s countryside to its cities to work in factories, building devices for international consumers and trying to assemble better lives for themselves. Xu Lizhi left behind a haunting record of that life. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6542","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6542","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6542"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6542\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6542"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6542"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6542"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}