I first heard the story of Yongfen Zhang from the cleaning lady at the community library, Yongfen’s roommate. She told me that Yongfen lost her father when she was a baby, that her mother remarried, that she never attended a day of school. To support her children, Yongfen left her hometown for Shanghai. Unable to read a single character, she could only clean streets. She was confined to her room and the streets she cleaned.
Although I never met Yongfen I feel a kinship with her: we speak the same dialect and come from the same region in central China, with its overpopulation, agricultural tradition, history of famines, conservative thinking, lack of trade and emerging industries. Our region has become the primary source of migrant workers for Shanghai. I meet them in libraries, in barber shops, on streets, and I recognize them immediately once I hear how they speak Mandarin.
—Yiran Li
Yongfen Zhang, Female, Central Plains
Yongfen Zhang, 1982, Xihua, Central Plains,
street cleaner, Central Plains Road, Shanghai.
Illiterate and tracing the graffiti
of her name from ID to labour contract
Not even in dreams: no mountain, no sea.
Central Plains to Central Plains Road,
map of half her life.
Reading is the refuge of the people
and she reads too, warnings from heaven,
from the landfill take the third right
and read your way back home,
reading her husband’s face (a good man
schooled three years, pinching her tits
so much more gently than her stepfather).
After meals she sits in the dirt
and reads the moving legs.
Legs are easy to read. There’s only two:
those that have laboured, those that haven’t.
Just as she sat, ten years old, on the ground,
concrete-mixer, digging wild vegetables,
hop-skipping to the field with brother
strapped to her back, arms muscled as hammers.
Never thought she’d grow into a sin called
ignorance.