Place: Laos

A Long and Winding Way to Go: Luka Lei Zhang on Working-Class Writings from Asia

January 2, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

I want to use the framework of ‘working-class literature’ to explore the transformations and tensions in literary texts.

Through the lens of comparative literature, the ancestry of working-class writings and the literature of labour trails from Russian novelist Maxim Gorky’s Maть (Mother, 1906) to South Africa’s Black migrant theatre, from the oeuvre of Argentine poet Elías Castelnuovo to the biographies of working-class Irish writers, and includes the many proletarian writers collectives springing up in response to the social moment: France’s Socialisme ou Barbarie, Japan’s Puroretaria bunka undō and Nihon Puroretaria Sakka Dōmei, Sri Lanka’s Dabindu, and United Kingdom’s ‘The Fed’ or the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers.

As Macau-based Chinese scholar-translator Dr. Luka Lei Zhang writes in The Routledge Companion to Working-Class Literature (2024), the literary production of contemporary Asian workers ‘are often subjected to intricate social forces and power dynamics’, and it ‘would be a mistake to reduce these contradictions to simple good/bad, political/apolitical, and individual/collective oppositions’. It is this simplistic dichotomy that is contested by Asian Workers Stories, an anthology of fiction and nonfiction prose produced outside the fortresses of the canon, the middle-class literati, and the academe. Dr. Zhang, the anthology’s editor, brings her expertise as a scholar (and at-times translator) of working-class writers Chong Han, Tan Kok Seng, and Md Sharif Uddin of Singapore, as well as Mengyu, Wan Huashan, and Shengzi of China. In a 2023 interview, she confessed: ‘Personally and politically, working-class literature holds a special place in my heart’, going on to name Gorky, Annie Ernaux, Xu Lizhi, Takiji Kobayashi, and Filipino migrant worker-poet Rolinda Onates Española as her favourites.

In this interview, I spoke with Dr. Zhang on migrant workers writing from East Asia, Southeast and South Asia, and the Middle East, as well as the expansion of working-class writings within the larger body of the Asian literary canon.  

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Cheers to the anthology Asian Workers Stories! Apart from wanting to contribute a new dimension to Asian working-class literature (considering most existing books are either scholarly or poetry collections originally written in English), what are other motivations that impelled the creation of this anthology? 

Luka Lei Zhang (LLZ): I’ve worked on workers’ writings for several years and have encountered many great storytellers. Although several anthologies of workers’ poetry exist, short stories are translated and collected on a lesser basis. My main goal was to organise the writers in this region and, in this way, show that their work is valued and that they do not write alone. I am fortunate to know many Asian worker writers personally, which had allowed me to approach them and discuss the project, and their interest and encouragement motivated me to pursue the work further. I met Hard Ball Press’s publisher, Tim Sheard, at the Working-Class Studies Conference in 2019. He invited me to publish working-class writings with him—and that’s how it happened. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

February 16, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Andriana Hamas, and Thuy Dinh

Dispatches from the Philippines, Bulgaria, and the Vietnamese Diaspora!

This week, our editors report on (attempts) at elucidation in the humanities and the cruelties of historic expatriation; the instating of Living National Treasures in the form of indigenous practitioners and their singular crafts; and a word that is meant to sum up a year. 

Thuy Dinh, Editor-at-Large, reporting on the Vietnamese Diaspora

The National Museum of Immigration History in Paris, France is currently offering a sobering exhibition on the history of Indochinese workers-soldiers, called les lính thợ or les công binh. As colonized subjects, twenty thousand men from Indochina—i.e., Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia—were brought to France at the onset of World War II to help with the war effort. Aside from a small percentage of educated volunteers who wished to escape the colony’s lack of social advancement, the majority, ranging from ages 18 to 30, was forcibly recruited from the poor peasantry to work in France’s defense industry.

Besides the exhibit, recollections by surviving workers have been compiled in recent years by various sources, such as the photographic essay “The Forced Oblivion” by Alejandra Arévalo, the graphic memoir “Les Lính Thợ: Immigrés de force, les travailleurs indochinois en France 1939-1952” (2017) by Pierre Daum and Clément Baloup, the film Công Binh, la longue nuit indochinoise (2013) by Lê Lâm, and the Vietnamese-French monograph, Những người lính thợ – Les travailleurs indochinois requis by Liêm Khê Luguern (2010).

When Germany invaded France in June 1940, the Indochinese workers were evacuated to the free zone in Southern France, where they worked in forestry and pioneered the rice-growing industry in the Camargue region. Both state-run and private companies employed these workers, but salaries were either paid to the French government, or distributed to the workers at rates significantly below those paid to locals. When Germany invaded the free zone in 1942, the workers were conscripted by German occupation troops to work in weapon factories. Besides harrowing working conditions, the men suffered physical and mental trauma due to prolonged exile and mistreatment by their superiors. READ MORE…