
The poetry and brief life of a Foxconn worker - isomorph
https://libcom.org/blog/xulizhi-foxconn-suicide-poetry
======
docbrown
Reading through the poems, one in particular stood out to me, ‘A screw Fell to
the Ground.’ While it was done eight months before his suicide, the context
seems to be relatable to how he may have been feeling—mostly the sound of
“someone” plunging and nobody hearing.

—

《一颗螺丝掉在地上》 "A Screw Fell to the Ground"

一颗螺丝掉在地上 A screw fell to the ground

在这个加班的夜晚 In this dark night of overtime

垂直降落，轻轻一响 Plunging vertically, lightly clinking

不会引起任何人的注意 It won’t attract anyone’s attention

就像在此之前 Just like last time

某个相同的夜晚 On a night like this

有个人掉在地上 When someone plunged to the ground

\-- 9 January 2014

~~~
guiltygatorade
I really liked that one as well, but I don't like the fact that the translator
translated "掉在地上" differently between the first and final lines, which are
meant to mirror each other exactly in order to juxtapose the fate of a screw
with the fate of a man. Neither were to receive any embellishments. They both
simply fell or dropped.

Here's my take:

A screw fell to the ground

On a night of overtime

Straight down, a gentle clink

Nobody noticed

Just like last time

On a night not unlike this one

A person fell to the ground

~~~
flippyhead
I like the first one because it's too easy to think someone just fell over
instead of having committed suicide.

Thanks for the insight though, interesting to see.

~~~
guiltygatorade
Yeah I didn't interpret it as having committed suicide. But his other poems
hinted at him falling asleep at the line. So it could be exhaustion. Or, it
could be metaphorical -- that a person's spirit fell to the ground and nobody
cared.

~~~
aerovistae
Oh man, I'd really have to bend my perception pretty far to interpret this as
anything but a reference to suicide, given how many there are among their
workers.

~~~
guiltygatorade
I think you have a point. It certainly can be interpreted that way -- as a
reference to the suicides of his peers. The more I read the his other poems in
the original article the more I'm leaning towards the "suicide" take.

But poetry is always more fun to leave things ambiguous. Original words matter
-- the hardest parts is to translate poems precisely, and try not to let your
interpretation of its meaning overwhelm the original.

------
skizm
According to some initial Googling, it looks like Foxconn had one year where
14 people committed suicide out of nearly one million workers (2010, their
worst year for suicides). The general suicide rate in China is about 22 in
100,000. Seems like the Foxconn suicide rate is significantly lower, right? Or
am I looking at the numbers wrong?

~~~
chocolatebunny
You can't compare a corporation's suicide rate to a nation's because
corporations filter out people through their hiring process.

You have to compare foxconn's suicide rate to other corporations.

~~~
occamrazor
This is a very good point, as unemployment is a possible trigger for
depression and suicide.

However after some googling I could not find comparable statistics (sucide
rates in large Chinese manufacturing companies). Do you know any sources?

------
sleazy_b
These are some remarkable poems. I feel lucky that someone took the time to
translate and share these poems on the internet where they can find a wider
audience.

------
baybal2
What can I tell as an industry insider.

Foxconn was known for giving above market range remuneration, and in addition
was very welcoming to "party crashers." Not only they gave high salaries, but
also liveable dorms, on-site catering, campus hospital and etc. And they were
eager to hire everybody who came to their doorsteps without ever asking for
guy's papers (In China, your resume is an official document.)

Downside: zero progression beyond a team lead after few years, unless the
worker would have be super duper lucky to be selected for training in on-site
college.

Foxconn fortunes turned south few years ago, when it became obvious that
domestic companies surpassed them on salary scale. A salary for a machinist
with 5 years experience begins at net 10000 CNY a month, and 15k is closer to
the median. Foxconn would've never ever gave anybody on the production line
10k a month.

Foxconn is now the "rubber sandals factory" of the electronics world — they
can't move up the value chain because anybody with brains run away from them
the moment they save enough cash to move up.

------
jrowley
I hope this makes people reconsider if they really need a new laptop, iphone,
etc. I think a lot of people would pay twice as much for their devices if they
could guarantee the workers weren't being exploited.

~~~
stupidbird
I think you're overly optimistic about how little people care about price.

I'd argue that if you could halve the price by literally using slaves to
manufacturer them, most people wouldn't care as long as those slaves were on
the other side of the planet.

~~~
adamc
That is a depressing way to view the world.

~~~
asdff
In a song with 49 million plays on Spotify alone, Kanye West said "Nike, Nike
treat employees just like slaves Gave LeBron a billi' not to run away," right
around the time when Nike was getting serious heat from its labor conditions
overseas

The share price did not move.

~~~
abraae
A world where Kanye could move the stock price of a large corporate would be a
confused one.

------
abvdasker
These poems are heartbreaking to read. It seems to expose something
fundamental about the working conditions for so many Chinese laborers. The
science-fiction reader in me can't help but feel like these poems represent a
certain kind of dystopia realized.

------
paganel
In a similar vein there’s also this book called “An Anthology of Chartist
Poetry: Poetry of the British Working Class, 1830s-1850s” whose title says it
all. It can be read online through Google Books at this link:
[https://books.google.ro/books/about/An_Anthology_of_Chartist...](https://books.google.ro/books/about/An_Anthology_of_Chartist_Poetry.html?id=hl_Ta-
bYMOkC&redir_esc=y)

~~~
claudiawerner
And in a similar vein there's also Robert Tressell's "The Ragged Trousered
Philanthropists" which is an amazing story even for the modern labour
movement.

------
MichaelMoser123
But other companies can build their phones without such appalling working
conditions? Don't they?

[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/18/foxconn-l...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/18/foxconn-
life-death-forbidden-city-longhua-suicide-apple-iphone-brian-merchant-one-
device-extract)

~~~
azernik
They accept much lower margins than Apple, in part because Apple is notorious
for pushing its suppliers for lower prices to boost its margins.

~~~
browsercoin
damn that just makes me not buy Apple even more.

I buy Samsung phones because I know they treat their workers very well for the
most part both in Korea and abroad. In Vietnam, they built daycare, hospitals,
school, park, housing for the entire workforce. In Korea, they give out huge
bonuses to workers and will promote talented people.

I also buy Samsung for the same reason I buy Hyundai, it's not that I can't
afford the more expensive brands, I do it out of patriotism for the motherland
and scream "TRAITOR!" with the windows up when I drive by a Korean person in a
Subaru.

~~~
azernik
I'm an Israeli and have similar mixed motives for liking Mobileye more than
Tesla Autopilot.

~~~
browsercoin
shalom...i was joking but yeah i do feel proud of what my people have achieved
and you should be too. i love watching historical documentaries on israel,
especially i feel a certain kinship towards both korea and israel because as
underdogs surrounded by not so friendly countries historically have made it
and fiercely protected by the people.

------
typon
This has depressed me...not just because of this guy's brilliant poems and the
potential within, but because there doesn't seem to be an end in sight for any
of this suffering.

Even if you don't personally buy laptops or phones, companies like
Google/Amazon etc. are buying them on your behalf to put in the "cloud".
There's really not much average people can do to stop this.

~~~
TangoTrotFox
China at one time tried to move towards a social economic system. It was
optimistically labeled their 'Great Leap Forward.' We can debate whether it
was socialism or communism, but it's irrelevant. And indeed during this time
there was little to nothing in the way of lingering and emotional poetry being
widely shared bemoaning the conditions of work and the lesser relevance of the
individual. And that's because people had more pressing matters. Some
30,000,000 - 50,000,000 Chinese starved, to death, in a period of about 4
years. That is upwards of 5% of the country. To put a face to those numbers,
imagine every individual you've ever seen or known. And now imagine 1 out of
every 20 of them starving to death in the next 4 years.

The current huge progress in China has been because they've become a
capitalist nation in every way except name. Capitalism does not create
utopias. It results in massive inequality, and there will always be a demand
for the worldwide lowest common denominator of labor costs. But at the same
time it creates a system where individuals can achieve immense success through
their own merit and one where you don't have people dying of starvation.

The point of this is that you can't compare what we have to utopia. It's
almost certainly literally impossible to achieve utopia with our current
resources and technology. Instead you need to compare what we have to what
else we could realistically have. And the current system is pretty bad. It
just happens to be better, by a pretty wide margin, than every other system
we've been able to consider and trial.

------
adamnemecek
China is definitely extreme but you don't have to go too far to see overworked
people, it's much more common in the US than people realize. Everyone is
overworked. I think that Starbucks got popular partially due to this.

~~~
ryanmercer
> it's much more common in the US than people realize. Everyone is overworked.

Indeed, Alexis Ohanian has been speaking out about this very recently too.

~~~
adamnemecek
Link? Is this it?

[https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-
tech/ne...](https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-
tech/news/reddit-hustle-porn-alexis-ohanian-tech-silicon-valley-web-
summit-a8621696.html)

~~~
ryanmercer
Check his twitter and LinkedIn as I've seen him touch on it on both recently,
but yeah that's one of the articles I've seen.

I think this is the first one I saw [https://qz.com/work/1458073/reddit-co-
founder-alexis-ohanian...](https://qz.com/work/1458073/reddit-co-founder-
alexis-ohanian-is-taking-a-stand-against-hustle-porn/)

------
tianmingwu
I think one lesson that be learnt from this sad story is that when you feel
you are trapped in a depressing job or place, think of change, take the
courage to pack up and leave for a new job or place. Don't be passive and
endure the same depression over and over.

~~~
bruceb
He did pack up and tried other things. They didnt work out so he had to come
back to Foxconn.

------
alexS
A competing factory is using really hardcore AI to coerce people to do this
kind of thing. Some people can see through worlds. I spotted this as soon as
this made the front-page.

~~~
Paperweight
Can you give more info?

------
z2
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8561326](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8561326)

Similar discussion from about 2 years earlier. I think that we react and
reflect similarly is a good thing, though I've no clue how conditions changed
overall in this time.

------
golergka
Foxconn employs almost a million people. When you compare the rate of suicides
among it's employees to rate of suicide in China as a whole, there's no
significant difference:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn_suicides#Analysis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn_suicides#Analysis)

May be this statistic is forged somehow, of course - but all the media pieces
I read about Foxconn suicides don't even try to gather up meaningful analysis,
blaming all suicides on the company instead.

------
ryanmercer
This adequately describes my life and job, except I stare at invoices all day
entering similar information day in, day out, submittimg electronic data to a
handful of government agencies for twelve and a half years now. I'm basically
a piece of OCR software that's told to sit there, be quiet, be perfect, if you
call in sick we're holding it against you, no you can't take time off that
month is blacked out, no you don't need a cost of living raise, produce
produce produce! I'll regularly just zone out for who knows how long, usually
snapping back to the world when my head starts to dip or my eyes go unfocused
enough to start to cause discomfort. Realizing, this is my 'life' and likely
will be until I die.

\--

《我就那样站着入睡》 "I Fall Asleep, Just Standing Like That"

and

"My Life’s Journey is Still Far from Complete"

hit way too close to home. You'd think my life would be drastically different
in midwest America. I'm not standing at an assembly line, I didn't have to
leave my home town to go far away to a factory, but I really am expected to be
more machine than man. I'm expected to sit at a desk, not talk, limit my trips
to the bathroom, limit getting up with the exception of the 2 daily parades of
2 laps around the office that are done as a group, if you're sick you're
expected to be at work unless dying although every cold and flu season
corporate stressed "if you're sick stay home" ha! Everything is about
efficiency and production, merit-based increases rarely cover cost of living
increases, I get 5 weeks of vacation a year but blocks of time get blacked out
and we work any holiday that's on a weekday while local management (and most
definitely corporate) is at home with their families.

I saw Office Space in theaters when I was 14. I thought it was satire. Oh how
wrong I was. It is life. Actually, it's better than life.

While I enjoy the luxuries of sitting and, sometimes working HVAC (it was in
the 80's in my office most of the summer), I do highly repetitive work that is
effectively data entry that in 5, 10, 15 years OCR software will do the bulk
of. Want to advance? Well, you better have a 4-6 year degree and be willing to
move to other states multiple times to earn an extra 10-20%. Want to get sick?
Do it on your own time. Want to take a vacation with your family? Ehhhh we'll
see but don't count on it. Want to enjoy a holiday away from work? Hahahaha
better be one of the few people that get drawn to have it off. Want a raise?
Ok you can have a merit based increase once a year, if you were sick you get
less, if you made a few errors each month while trying to make unrealistic
production standards you get less, weren't cheerful enough based on your
manager's arbitrary determination you get a little less...

I come on sites like HN, Reddit, even Facebook. I hear people talk about their
jobs. I hear people bitch that the company retreat wasn't at some place cool
this year, I hear people complain they only get 2 months of
maternity/paternity leave, I hear them whine how oh boo hoo they have to work
4 more years at their job to be able to be FIRE (ha, I will have to work until
the day I die, cry me a river), I hear that tens of thousands had the luxury
of walking out of work to protest sexual harassment policy when I can't call
in without a doctor's note or it counts against me and even with a doctor's
note I know it's going to shave several tenths of a percent off of my MAYBE
2.6% merit-based increase on my annual review.

Damn Foxconn employees, I feel you. Oh how I feel you.

~~~
overthemoon
Folks, ryanmercer shared a story about demoralizing work conditions, in a
thread about terrible work conditions, and your first response is to question
how much he's done to ameliorate it?

~~~
claudiawerner
This was my thought too. Frequently, with liberal subjectivist-indvidualist
ideology, we are guided into individualising problems to the highest degree,
to the point where qualitatively existing and horrible structures of violence
are not questioned at all. The onus is on the sufferer to stop suffering,
rather than to change the system such that others don't have to suffer in
their place. Mark Fisher wrote about this kind of issue especially in regards
to mental health and depression, too.

~~~
icebraining
When you see someone drowning from a capsized boat, is your first reaction to
rush to a table to design a new boat that doesn't capsize that easily? Or is
it to help that individual?

ryanmercer is talking individually; it's normal to respond that way as well.
It doesn't mean it's their fault or responsibility to improve their situation,
much like it's not the drowning person's.

------
factsaresacred
I have like 30 tabs open from things I promised I'd return and read (until an
accidental closing of the browser saves me from these obligations). But as I
began to read through this, I could not stop.

Xu's poems are remarkable. A creative soul trapped inside, and eventually
swallowed by, the meaningless pit of capitalism.

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

While being a peasant is in no way desirable, at least you don't have to sell
your soul pretending that a life spent serving a gigantic corporation in
return for scraps is desirable.

Most work is simply absurd - a place of drudgery and despair. We can say that
while still accepting that it beats poverty.

------
hi41
The poetry is so beautiful. One day I was in a park and stopped at a spot that
had so many trees and the sunlight was streaking through the leaves and the
tree branches. It was extremely beautiful. I felt a strong urge to hug the
tree and weep. I left all this for a life in a gray cubicle and the human ant
hill.

------
0x262d
this sort of suffering is unfortunately necessary and endemic to capitalism,
conscientious consumerism or not.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism)

------
peterburkimsher
I "worked" at the Xingda Hongye PCB factory in Zhongshan for a month. They let
me stay in the factory dormitory and eat in the cafeteria for free, but didn't
pay me.

It was good! Afterwards I got a job in Shenzhen that paid, so I moved. But the
Xingda workers were from all over China, each with fascinating stories, and
very happy to meet a foreigner.

I wish I could go back there now. I just finished 4 years working at a microSD
card company in Taiwan. I've been trying to find a job since March; unemployed
since August. I've given up on my dreams, and I'll take anything. I don't even
know how to apply for jobs now. The only two interviews I had were from people
who already worked in the company telling their HR to talk to me. Recruiters
are ignoring me. Prayer hasn't worked. Sharing side projects on HN hasn't
worked. Please tell me the email address of someone who can give me food and
shelter.

~~~
aerovistae
I don't understand how an experienced technical contributor who can speak five
languages ends up sleeping on a factory floor unpaid in China. I don't mean to
demean your story, I only mean very literally that I don't understand it. How
did you end up in such a situation? You were in California, Switzerland,
Vancouver....how did it get to this point?

~~~
bmn__
> I don't understand it. How did you end up in such a situation?

mental illness

~~~
hitekker
I would have disagreed with you, if I hadn't read the top-level comment
author's posting history.

Yikes.

~~~
peterburkimsher
Perhaps there's some emotional issues I have right now. But please don't
mistake cause and effect.

I didn't lose my job due to mental illness. I feel very discouraged because
I've failed to find a job, and now I'm physically separated from my girlfriend
and other friend groups. I'm trying to make new friends, but my parents keep
moving me around (Geneva, now UK, next Germany). Instead of teaching me how to
get a job, people just tell me my résumé is awful, as if that would help.

~~~
aerovistae
I think if you are clever enough to figure out how to create all the many
things you have created, you are clever enough to look at a range of
successful resumes and emulate them. This is a much less involved task than
any of the projects listed on your website.

------
asianthrowaway
> We hope that in the future, workers in Foxconn and elsewhere manage to find
> ways around such companies' military-style discipline and surveillance, come
> together, and forge collective paths out of this capitalist world of death,
> into a world worth living in.

Are they aware that China is a communist country?

~~~
beaconstudios
technically it's a socialist economy with mostly state capitalism. The party
is communist but the idea in theory is they're in charge of transitioning
towards communism as a vanguard party, just like the soviets.

nonetheless, military-style discipline and surveillance have been very
prominent in communist-led countries to date so I'm not sure why the author
thinks that would change. Maoism and Stalinism aren't known for being cuddly
and humanistic.

~~~
eeZah7Ux
It's state capitalism without the socialism: very little worker protection or
freedom, no social safety nets, powerful large corporations and banks,
military-style discipline and surveillance.

~~~
beaconstudios
Sounds like socialism to me.

------
almostdeadguy
Shocked, but pleasantly so to see this on HN.

~~~
isomorph
Thanks. I try to post things that are the intersection of tech and ethics. I
now see that it had been posted before.

------
matreyes
Dear Apple or like,

Please commemorate the life and death of this workers on your products,
advertising and software. This could, maybe, change our reasoning about the
supply chain.

