Two poems about life at Foxconn, written by a worker who killed himself there

Xu Lizhi was a 24-year-old factory worker at Foxconn, the Taiwanese-owned Chinese manufacturer responsible for making a lot of our fancy electronic gadgets, including most of Apple’s products. Since the scandal over Foxconn’s worker suicides several years ago, employee suicides have often made the news, but Xu’s death following his leap from a dorm on the Foxconn campus is different. Xu was a poet, and a lot of his work has been published posthumously, both in newspapers and online.

Of particular interest are a couple of poems that he wrote in 2011, which are quite obviously about his experiences at Foxconn.

(The translations below are my own, but they do borrow a bit to Nao’s excellent translations at Libcom, which I read before beginning mine.)

I fell asleep standing like that

The paper in front of my eyes slowly yellows,
As I carve varying shades of black into it with a fountain pen,
It’s full of the jargon of labor,
Warehouse, assembly line, machine, time card, overtime, salary…
These words have suppressed me into submission,
I can’t cry out, can’t resist,
Can’t accuse, can’t complain,
I can only silently bear my exhaustion.
When I first came here,
All I hoped for was a gray pay stub on the tenth of each month,
To give me some belated comfort,
[But] for it I had to sand down my edges, grind away my words,
Never skip work, never take a sick day, never take a personal day,
Never arrive late, never leave early,
Beside the assembly line I stand like a statue, hands flying,
How many days and nights,
Have I fallen asleep standing like that?

The Last Graveyard

The machines are humming drowsily,
Diseased metals stored in sealed warehouses,
Salaries hidden behind window curtains,
Like the love young laborers bury deep in their hearts,
With no time to speak, passions fade into dust,
They have stomachs as strong as iron,
Full of thick sulfuric and nitric acids,
Work catches their tears before they can be shed,
Time goes by, their minds completely empty,
[Production] output suppresses their youth, pain works overtime day and night,
Not yet old, but the dizziness covers their life,
Skin peeled back by the jig,
And coated with a layer of aluminum alloy,
Some people persist, some take sick and leave,
I nap between them, watching over,
The last graveyard of our youth.

Although these poems are quite evocative, I caution readers not to assume too much about the causes of Xu’s ultimate suicide, or to ascribe blame to Foxconn for his death. Although the picture he paints is certainly not a pleasant one, keep in mind that these poems were written years before his death, and that as works of art they may represent Xu’s feelings better than they represent the actual on-the-ground conditions at Foxconn factories.

Still, Xu’s work is definitely thought-provoking, isn’t it?