Remembering Xu Lizhi, the factory worker poet.

我想再看一眼大海，目睹我半生的泪水有多汪洋

I want to take another look at the ocean, behold the vastness of tears from half a lifetime

我想再爬一爬高高的山头，试着把丢失的灵魂喊回来

I want to climb another mountain, try to call back the soul that I’ve lost...

I found out about Xu Lizhi's suicide when I had just graduated high school. I was seventeen back then and he was twenty-four, and I used to try and look into older people's lives to see what mine had in store. It has now been ten years and eight days, and I come to think of him now, a skeleton quietly set inside a box in the ground. Now dead, the memory of his life may perhaps serve to inspire others to fight for the ones that continue alive, exploited, unpaid.

Schopenhauer wrote once in his essay On Human Nature: "To demand of a man, who does not care to live any longer for himself, that he should live on as a mere machine for the advantage of others is an extravagant pretension." Machine is a word that Xu Lizhi often used, and thought about, and touched, and lived:

《我就那样站着入睡》

"I Fall Asleep, Just Standing Like That"

眼前的纸张微微发黄

The paper before my eyes fades yellow

我用钢笔在上面凿下深浅不一的黑

With a steel pen I chisel on it uneven black

里面盛满打工的词汇

Full of working words

车间，流水线，机台，上岗证，加班，薪水……

Workshop, assembly line, machine, work card, overtime, wages...

我被它们治得服服贴贴

They've trained me to become docile

我不会呐喊，不会反抗

Don't know how to shout or rebel

不会控诉，不会埋怨

How to complain or denounce

只默默地承受着疲惫

Only how to silently suffer exhaustion

驻足时光之初

When I first set foot in this place

我只盼望每月十号那张灰色的薪资单

I hoped only for that grey pay slip on the tenth of each month

赐我以迟到的安慰

To grant me some belated solace

为此我必须磨去棱角，磨去语言

For this I had to grind away my corners, grind away my words

拒绝旷工，拒绝病假，拒绝事假

Refuse to skip work, refuse sick leave, refuse leave for private reasons

拒绝迟到，拒绝早退

Refuse to be late, refuse to leave early

流水线旁我站立如铁，双手如飞

By the assembly line I stood straight like iron, hands like flight,

多少白天，多少黑夜

How many days, how many nights

我就那样，站着入睡 

Did I —just like that— standing fall asleep?

One may think that these are the words of a person who hadn't in him to survive. Unkinder temperaments, always eager to blame victims for their own misfortunes to feel satisfied in the belief that justice has been served, would call him a weakling. Yet right before he died, the day before, he wrote the two lines at the beginning of this text. His hope was unyielding, even to the end, and it never ceased. It changed, morphed into the hope that death would be more bearable than life: this is a hope we all share, only with the exception that life for most never becomes so unbearable as to try and confirm it.

And what if he had been a wimp? Is injustice more tolerable because it is done to the weak?

Schopenhauer, the free-spoken old coot, was very plain in asserting that suicide was the opposite from a denial of the will to live; it is the affirmation that life would undoubtedly be worthy of being lived, if only the circumstances were other. It is a denial of life's pains at all costs, and in this way it can be a vindication of joy and the value of life, too high to betray by living in shame. Xu Lizhi's suicide is a remembrance to all that life is to be defended against the machine, behind which is the bogeyman, a sack of insects. It was and remains a protest against the systems we find ourselves trapped in, which are upheld and managed by bogeymen (the guards at Foxconn's corporate city, the middle managers, the faceless CEOs), and enabled by bigger systems. Steve Jobs commented back then that Foxconn was actually "pretty nice" and "not a sweatshop". By that point twenty-two other people had killed themselves in the industrial park, all under thirty years old.

But what protest, sincerely, remains to us who wish to affirm life by living it; who have been lucky enough to live lives preferable to death? Not much but this very act, continuing to live so that we might put our grain of sand into the gears of the machine. Organizing, quietly resisting, bidding our time, calling back every night the soul we have lost during the day.