China’s poet of precarity

Scribbled on stray scraps of paper during the work day, Wang Jibing’s poems carry the relentless soundtrack of the gig economy — of labyrinthine lanes, noisy traffic junctions, irate phone calls, but also the constant hum of chronic uncertainty. That the collection, Low Flight, has won the 56-year-old Chinese food delivery agent the Lu Xun Literary Prize, China’s premier literary award, is a heartening affirmation of both his resilience and literature’s capacity to celebrate imaginative expansiveness, no matter where it emerges from. Wang is part of a growing tribe of blue-collar workers in China who have turned to writing to make sense of their hardscrabble lives. Literature is replete with such examples. Maxim Gorky wandered through poverty and odd jobs before becoming Russia’s chronicler of the dispossessed; Maya Angelou was San Francisco’s first female Black streetcar conductor before she found writing; Raymond Carver a janitor and mill hand before his stories reshaped American fiction. In India, Daya Pawar, Bama, Omprakash Valmiki and countless others wrote from the margins, forcing literature to bear witness. What does a low flight reveal? Not a bird’s eye view of the world, but a sharper picture of what it is to live close to the ground, without a scaffolding of certainties, learning to make the odds work in your favour, somehow. Wang, who had to drop out of school because of poverty and spent decades working in construction sites, street stalls and other precarious work, has refused to give up his job even after the award. It is a moving validation of the courage of the ordinary, in not ceding ground, in holding on to all that gives life, labour and dreams meaning.