Ed: Last month, we published a review of Chinese nonfiction writer Yuan Ling’s latest book,“My Brothers and Sisters in Picun,”(我的皮村兄妹, CITIC Press, 2024), which is as yet untranslated into English. Now, we’re presenting a translated excerpt adapted from one chapter of the book, in partnership with China Digital Times, which has published the original Chinese version here. In this chapter, Yuan Ling tells the story of one member of the Picun Literary Group, a migrant worker called Han Xue.

After my first class with the Picun Literary Group, Han Xue was one of the two people with whom I exchanged WeChat contacts. Her soft-spoken manner revealed a quiet intelligence and thoughtfulness.

This first impression later proved true. She didn’t attend the writing group often, but when she did she listened attentively and, during discussions, always asked questions about how to write — as if she truly cherished the rare opportunity. Her accent was a unique blend that made it hard to guess where she was from. She said she had been working as a live-in nanny for many years, without regular days off, which was why she couldn’t attend every session. One time, after class ended, she and I took the same bus, the No. 306, to the subway on our separate ways home. On the bus, we got to talking about her husband. He was a demobilized army officer who’d been transferred to a state-run danwei position. That set her apart from most other domestic workers. On the subway, Hanxue shared that she loved writing. In the past, she’d mainly posted short poems on her blog but after joining the literary group and receiving encouragement, she had written a longer personal essay and wanted to send it to me for feedback.

I was surprised that she wrote poetry. Later, she sent me the piece on her phone. It was titled “Under the High-Rises” and described her first time taking her employer’s pet dog to a grooming salon, as well as her own visit to a spa for a hot sand treatment for her rheumatism. She marvelled at the absurdity of people calling their pets “babies,” the fact that dog food was more expensive than human food, and the astonishing price of 200 yuan for a pet dental cleaning. She was also amazed by how fashionable women would spend thousands on body-shaping beauty treatments. Her writing had a natural flair, though some parts felt too conversational and lacked a distinct style. I shared those thoughts with her, and she accepted them happily.

Through the piece, I also learned that she worked for a family living in the Pearl River Royal View, an old-school high-end residential complex near Beijing’s Third Ring Road. The apartments were all expensive, decorated in the style of imperial palaces, and the residents were all wealthy. Han Xue’s employer, “Boss Lin,” was a business owner whose company was on the verge of an IPO. Han Xue had been working for his family for over a decade, which was rare among nannies.

I told her I wanted to visit her at the Pearl River Royal View, which she consented to. We planned for an afternoon while the child she cared for, Lin Bao, was at school, when she had a little free time. The property management was strict, so she came out to meet me. We walked through a grand entrance with Baroque-style archways and statues of fully armored warriors. Inside, the complex was beautifully lush, with fountains and large, neatly trimmed lawns. We sat on a bench by the grass and talked. I finally learned where her mixed accent came from; she was from Xinyang, Henan, but had lived in the Northeast for many years. She had gotten married there and, later, bought a house in Tianjin with her employer’s help, securing a Tianjin residency permit. Her husband and child lived there, and she visited them every two weeks.

I thought she had a good employer. She agreed, saying Boss Lin was generous and easy to get along with. His wife had a temper but was straightforward, so conflicts passed quickly. The grandmother, however, was difficult. When Lin Bao was just months old, the grandmother insisted on not using diapers. The child pissed and shit wherever she pleased, leading several nannies to quit over the first five months. Han Xue was able to hold on by the skin of her teeth, and things eventually improved. It helped that the grandparents spent half the year in Hainan, only returning when Beijing began to warm. Lin and his wife were often away too, so taking care of Lin Bao was easy. The child, like many from affluent families, spent hours under the covers playing on her phone. Recently she’d entered a bit of a rebellious phase and sometimes said hurtful things. At one point, Han Xue considered quitting but ultimately stayed because she needed another seven years’ worth of wages to pay off the Tianjin house.

As we talked, a nanny pushing a newborn in a stroller walked by and greeted Han Xue. She explained that when Lin Bao was younger, she took her for walks in a stroller too. All the nannies knew each other well, and shared in the complex’s secrets. Despite the neighborhood’s luxurious appearance, many units were quite small and so many wealthy men’s mistresses lived there. When those women had kids, their children were raised mostly by grandparents and nannies, with the fathers only visiting occasionally. She told me that the newborn who’d just passed by was the child of a pretty university student. Since the birth, the father — a short, thin, swarthy man — had only visited twice. He looked more like the student’s dad than her lover. But the girl’s parents didn’t care about all that. When their “son-in-law” came to visit, they treated him with exaggerated deference, their eyes fixed on his pockets.

The smart mistresses get their lovers to buy them property, securing assets even if the relationship ends. The rest live in rented apartments. If the baby fails to lock down their lover’s heart, they lose both the man and the money overnight in a breakup. They often don’t have the cash-in-hand to live on. Han Xue knows of one girl from the Northeast like that. She had twin girls with a man in the U.S. steel business. He said he wanted to enroll the children in a kindergarten in the States but then promptly cut all contact with her. He didn’t send money, not even a letter. She was left destitute. Eventually, she had no choice but to return with the children to her home in the Northeast. The twins are now enrolled in a rural kindergarten, a far cry from what she was promised. Everybody can’t help but sigh for her and the children. 

As we talked about her house in Tianjin, Han Xue asked whether I’d bought a house in Beijing. I told her I hadn’t, either in Beijing or my hometown. I also told her I don’t have a Beijing residency. Han Xue was visibly surprised. I must have been quite the departure from the image of a literature teacher at Picun she had in her mind. The atmosphere between us became subtly different. Around 3 p.m., she had to leave because the grandmother was waking from her nap.

Some time later, a journalist came to my rented room in Yanchengyuan [in the rural Changping district of Beijing] for an interview. The topic of housing and residency permits came up, and I mentioned my conversation with Han Xue by the lawn in the Pearl River Royal View. The article was published without my review, and it stated: “The nanny opposite, upon learning that Yuan Ling had no house in Beijing, couldn’t help but puff out her chest a bit.”

Han Xue somehow came across the article. She first asked if she was the only nanny interviewed. Then she sent me that passage and asked if it was about her. She sounded a little upset: “How could someone as insignificant as me look down on you?” I struggled to explain that it wasn’t my intention. Feeling awkward, I dodged the conversation. For a long time after that, we didn’t talk.

More than a year later, we met again at a Picun literature class. The session ended late, and by the time we reached the west entrance of Picun, we had missed the last 306 bus. Han Xue, who had walked there with me, was unsure of what to do. I hailed a ride and took her with me to the Caofang subway station. We rode the subway together until she got off at her stop. On the train, we started talking again. She told me she had written another essay and wanted to send it to me for feedback. She did, and I offered some suggestions.

Later, she sent me a message: “You’re the teacher who takes my writing the most seriously.” Gradually, we resumed our occasional conversations, and the interview incident faded into the past.

Compared to other domestic workers like Fan Yusu, I always felt that Han Xue was luckier. She had a long-term, kind employer, a house in Tianjin, and a daughter who excelled academically. Her husband even had a stable government job. But one night, standing on a double-decker bus from Picun West to Caofang, she received a call from her husband. They argued over money, some small sum. After the call, Han Xue stared out the window, looking despondent.

“I am a practical woman,” she said softly.

“Why do you say that?”

“I don’t dare to get a divorce.” 

That answer shocked me.

She explained that she fell for her husband because he was a soldier. When in full military dress, she admired him to the brink of worship. Now, theirs was a marriage in name only. Though they still shared a bed, each slept alone, completely divorced from the other. Her husband, she explained, is stingy, like a character from Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet.

Outside the window, shadows of trees flickered past. Light and darkness alternated across her face, like a slideshow of her winding life.

She didn’t attend the writing group often, but when she did she listened attentively and, during discussions, always asked questions about how to write — as if she truly cherished the rare opportunity.

Han Xue’s given name is Wang Chengxiu. Her nickname [Han Xue means “Cold Snow”] has been with her from childhood and has never changed.

Han Xue was born into a large blended family in 1970. She had an older brother and sister, and her father also had four other daughters from a previous marriage, all significantly older than her. The family was extremely poor. Their work points [a Maoist-era measurement of production and consumption] were always advanced from one year to the next, until even the production team stopped offering them loans altogether. Their food rations were never enough, and her mother had to gather weeds from the fields, the kind usually used for compost or pig feed, to mix into porridge so the family could eat. Han Xue, the youngest daughter, didn’t enjoy special treatment — rather, she bore the brunt of the family’s poverty. She wore her sister’s old clothes, regardless of season, and if she could have a meal of plain rice during the New Year, that was considered lucky. Most painful of all, when Han Xue was born, her father commanded her mother to drown her in the chamber pot. Her mother didn’t comply and her father left, only to return home three days later. 

In Han Xue’s telling, her mother also preferred sons, a favoritism that revealed itself in education. Her parents focused all their resources on Han Xue’s brother, supporting him through high school and university entrance exams. He was, to be fair, a strong student, once winning first place in a Xinyang citywide math competition.

With all the attention on her brother, there was nothing left for the two youngest sisters. Han Xue’s family was always behind on her school fees, for which her teachers would punish her by holding her for detention or making her stand in the corner. In the beginning, she’d be joined by a few classmates, but the other students eventually paid up and were released. Only Han Xue would remain, marking her as the poorest in class. This was terribly humiliating to her. 

Stubborn by nature, Han Xue wouldn’t allow anyone to pity her. She even convinced herself that there was nothing to pity. 

One New Year, a neighbor’s kid was spanked for playing in some bushes while wearing his new festival clothes. Han Xue thought to herself: “I don’t have new clothes but at least my dad doesn’t beat me. I’m still lucky.” Her father was more than ten years older than her mother. He was violently persecuted for trying to raise chicks for sale during the Cultural Revolution, leaving him with a chronic bloody cough. He died of a brain hemorrhage before Han Xue even learned to walk. That was a big part of why the family was so poor.

In the 1980s, the village got its first black-and-white TV. Han Xue saw a documentary about a mother in Yunnan who drowned while washing clothes in a river, leaving her two kids to live under a plastic sheet. Han Xue thought, “At least I have a home and a mom I can rely on. I’m one of the lucky ones.” In truth, Han Xue’s house was only partially roofed. In the winter, due to thin tile coverage and years of neglect due to a lack of money, snowflakes drifted through cracks in the roof, coming to rest directly on the bed. 

By fifth grade, Han Xue dropped out of school because she couldn’t bear to be pitied. The spark was a fight with a classmate who’d claimed that Han Xue’s mother had begged for food in a nearby village. The classmate claimed that her father, that village’s team leader, lent two sacks of rice to Hanxue’s mother. “That hurt me so terribly, like I’d been branded.” More than 30 years later, Han Xue still chokes up recalling it. Afterward, a teacher scolded Han Xue for fighting. “I couldn’t take it anymore, so I dropped out.” 

A month later, a classmate she’d been close with came to see Han Xue, which made her regret leaving. She missed school. That friend later wrote Han Xue a letter, describing how Han Xue had “braved the cold to sell sunflower seeds.” Her classmates had spotted Han Xue selling roasted sunflower seeds she’d purchased from the local brick factory at an outdoor movie screening in the village center. 

Selling seeds was light work. Working the fields was harder. From the age of 13, after dropping out, until she left home as a migrant laborer at 19, Han Xue worked alongside her sister in the fields. Her sister plowed with oxen while Han Xue cut and carried rice, and hauled manure. She wasn’t strong, and the strain caused a lump the size of a quail egg to form on the back of her neck. To this day, she still massages it on the doorframe, which has helped shrink it but hasn’t made it go away.

Her brother once tried to persuade her to return to school, but, at that point, she had been out of class for a year and so refused. At 19, her brother enrolled in a military academy in Beijing. He brought Han Xue and her sister with him, and the family leased their land to a half-brother. Looking back, Han Xue somewhat regrets not going south to Guangzhou. Rumors said southern factories only hired unmarried girls aged 19 to 24. At the time, that “sounded sketchy” to her. But it was the cusp of the 1990s and that first wave of her neighbors who went to Shenzhen ended up setting down roots and, eventually, making decent lives for themselves.

At the time, there were no housekeeping agencies in Beijing. Han Xue and her sister would wait among the job-seekers outside Chongwenmen, hoping to be picked for a gig. Her sister worked as a nanny for a few months, but then quit and went back home looking to get married. Han Xue was hired as a nanny herself, by a different family. At first it was tough. The child was spoiled and a fussy eater, and family tensions were complex. After fights between an aunt and a daughter-in-law, the family matriarch would take out her frustrations on Han Xue. After working there for a year, she left to work as a waitress in a small restaurant, only to find it even less stable. Customers were unpredictable, and would sometimes get drunk and say or do indecent things. Han Xue couldn’t stand it and so went to work for a family she’d met at the restaurant. She was hired to take care of their grandmother but even that family was complicated. The woman’s daughter, who lived in Peru, constantly undermined her mom. She pressured Han Xue to move to Peru and care for her child instead. Han Xue declined because she feared living abroad was dangerous. 

When she began nannying, she felt waiting on others degrading. But those two experiences taught her that even the most glamorous households had their own messes, and it helped her reconcile herself to the work. 

After more than a year, her mother called from Liaoning province. Her brother had graduated and was stationed in Fuxin, where he had married and started a family. Their mother had moved there to help with childcare and she missed Han Xue. So Han Xue moved to the Northeast. She hadn’t been there long before her mom returned to Henan, but Han Xue remained, taking a job at a capacitor factory run by a retired soldier. Her job was to roll paper tubes, soak them in various electric junk, and then hammer electrodes out of the tubes. It paid nearly 200 yuan a month, double what she earned as a nanny, but at the cost of air pollution. The factory air was full of acrid smells that were bad for her health. Two years later, [by now the early 1990s,] Han Xue met her future husband and got married, quitting factory work for good.

When Han Xue was born, her father commanded her mother to drown her in the chamber pot. Her mother didn’t comply and her father left, only to return home three days later. 

The relationship between Han Xue and her husband had grown increasingly distant. Signs of trouble appeared before their marriage. While Han Xue was working in Beijing, she knitted a sweater for her husband, mindful of the cold weather in the northeast. But he dismissed it, saying it wasn’t as good as the ones his sister made. Since getting married, the two had spent more time apart than together — in total, they had only truly lived together for less than two years. Their emotional connection had become ever more estranged. One snowy day in the year Han Xue turned 41, a serious clash with Boss Lin’s mother made her feel she couldn’t stay in their household any longer. She set off for the Northeast. Her train arrived in Fuxin near midnight. Her husband didn’t meet her at the station. When she got home, he was snoring away. After waking up, he questioned why she had returned. The next evening, upon his return from work, he complained that while she was in Beijing, he was left to take care of their child alone. While home, Han Xue had no money of her own and no one with whom to share her growing frustrations. So she made an about face and decided to return to Beijing. Trudging through heavy snow, she felt her lot miserable; her heart pure as fresh snow, her fate as cold. Like snow falling into a hole made in frozen ice, nothing remains. Suddenly, a few lines of poetry popped into Han Xue’s head:

A harsh winter leaves bare branches
Snowflakes fall through holes in ice
Everywhere is bleak and desolate
A red heart awaits the dawn of cold light

For Han Xue, the experience was entirely new; she suddenly felt able to write poetry. 

She adopted her pen name, began to read for pleasure, and, with her limited funds, bought discounted pirated books from a street vendor at the entrance of her residential complex. On the night of March 23, 2013, while her employer and their child were fast asleep, Han Xue stood alone at the window. Seeing the moonlit sky in stark contrast with the dark ground, she thought the gap between her and her employer were similar. Feeling keenly that some inequalities cannot be remedied, she wrote a poem titled “Dialogue Between Heaven and Earth.” This became the first poem Han Xue felt truly satisfied with.

After we got to know each other, Han Xue sent me the poem. I didn’t know the story behind it and felt the title was too grand and a bit abstract. Later, she continued to write more poems. Two of them were eventually selected by the poet An Qi for the anthology Poems of the Beijing Drifters. Both poems, compared to her earlier work, were more closely based on her lived experience as a domestic worker in Beijing. One of the poems stemmed from a moment when she wouldn’t let Lin Bao play on her phone after which Lin Bao protested, “You’re not even my family.” That comment broke Han Xue’s heart. It reminded her of her own home far away, accumulating dust — and the child she had left behind:

The child I raised
Said I am not her family.
Time, I did not betray you.
My child, become a stranger. 

Once, when her husband visited Tianjin, a heating pipe burst in the middle of the night while their daughter was home alone in Liaoning. Han Xue’s octogenarian mother-in-law was overwhelmed, and the house flooded. Their daughter was left crying on the front steps. Though Han Xue rushed back from Beijing to deal with the flooding, neighbors and relatives criticized her, saying she was a “ruthless” mother for staying in Beijing so long. Han Xue took that word, “ruthless,” and used it as the title of another poem that recalled the first time her own mother fell seriously ill. Han Xue went home but stayed only eight days before going back to Beijing before her mother fully recovered. Her mother, who loved Han Xue most, said through tears: “My youngest daughter is the most ruthless.” The poem ends with these lines:

I have to pay for my child’s schooling.
I need to buy a home.
So I carry the word “ruthless”
On my back across Beijing. 

Han Xue later began writing essays on family life on a note-taking app on her phone, but it got infected with a virus that started draining dozens of yuan from her accounts per day. She had to get the phone wiped, and everything she had written was lost. “It felt like losing a child,” she said. Her employer, Boss Lin, gave Han Xue an iPhone, and she continued writing. She published a few pieces on a website called Jiangshan Literature Net. Someone later invited her to join a migrant worker poets’ group on QQ. Through that, she learned about the Picun Literary Group. She was intrigued and reached out to Xiao Fu on March 8, 2017, International Women’s Day. Soon after, Fan Yusu’s viral essay brought huge attention to Picun, deepening Han Xue’s sense that literature could actually change the life of a female domestic worker like herself. 

Trudging through heavy snow, Han Xue felt her lot miserable; her heart pure as fresh snow, her fate as cold.

On May Day, when her employer’s family went on vacation and gave her time off, Han Xue seized the chance to visit Picun. She got off near the Caofang subway station, but roadwork prevented her from finding the No. 306 bus stop. That didn’t deter her. She walked three or four stops along the highway, drenched in sweat, before finally catching a bus. Though she didn’t meet Fan Yusu that day, she felt she had “found her people” in the run-down-looking Workers’ Home meeting room and, for the first time, believed that if she kept coming, she could keep writing. That night, after class, it was too late for Han Xue to go home, so she stayed at a 50-yuan-per-night inn in Picun. The room was pitch black and windowless. She lay awake all night, disturbed by her thoughts. She found the condition of the room trying, but then thought to herself: “I’ve just been living in my employer’s home for too long, where things are nice. Isn’t this exactly what it was like back in the countryside?”

Later, Xiao Fu helped her get a bed at the Workers’ Home. Once, when fellow worker-artist Wan Huashan wasn’t around, he even let her stay at his rented place. In August 2022, Lin’s family moved to Tianjin for Lin Bao’s middle school. That winter, Han Xue would take the high-speed train from Baodi to Beijing South Station, then transfer to a subway and then a bus to reach Picun. After class, she’d stay the night in the village, where her lodging had no heating, and curl up under a stiff, dirty blanket through the night. Then she’d rush back to Tianjin first thing the next morning. Most of the time, while working at her employer’s house, she wore headphones and listened to online literary livestreams. She rarely joined the discussions, but she absorbed every word intently.

After a few visits to Picun, she finally met the legendary Fan Yusu in person. They talked often. Fan even visited Han Xue at the Pearl River Royal View apartment. During their conversations, Fan always encouraged her to write more. That changed Han Xue’s thinking. Before, she thought she’d have to wait until after sixty, when she retired and had time, to really read and write.

After her first essay “Under the High-Rises” was published in New Workers’ Literature, [a literary journal published by the Picun writers group] Han Xue developed a plan to write a series. In later parts, she told the stories of women she met at housekeeping companies, the ups and downs of her in-home work, and employers generous and stingy, as well as all we had discussed together while chatting on the lawn that day: the twisting fates of those kept college girls and their children. She even took an anecdote from the original story — about seeing the shapely buttocks of a white-collar worker for the first time while undergoing hot sand treatment at a spa — and built it out into a standalone segment. These stories retained her signature eye for detail and reflected her thoughts on class, wealth and fate under the skyscrapers. She once showed them to me, but never submitted them again.

Han Xue didn’t have the same confidence in her writing as Fan Yusu. Publishing in New Workers’ Literature came with no payment, only two complimentary books. Editor Zhang Huiyu sent her seven instead. Han Xue messaged to ask why, and Huiyu replied, “Read more.” Among the seven were Live with Meaningfulness by Yan Zhen, as well as classics like Three Days to See and The Thorn Birds. She also listened to audiobooks online. She listened to Dream of the Red Chamber twice, but her favorite was Tales of Hulan River by Xiao Hong, a female author from northeast China, and thus somehow familiar. Yet reading masterpieces sometimes made her feel disheartened. “It made me feel like my own writing is meaningless, too poor in quality.” The poet Shi Libin had read some of her poems and invited her to submit a series but Han Xue said, “I just couldn’t get myself to write it.”

By the spring of 2022, when we again met under the grand arches of Pearl River Royal View, Han Xue had begun a novel titled A Practical Woman. It was autobiographical. She chose the title because she felt she was just that: a woman bound by worldly concerns. Even though she hadn’t spoken much with her husband for over a year and didn’t rely on his money anymore — each handling their own finances, sharing a bed but sleeping back-to-back — she wouldn’t divorce. “I just can’t break away or rise above,” she said. At heart, she still believed divorce wasn’t right. She needed to fulfill the outward duties of a woman, to have a child and a household, “so it looks like I have a family.” The novel tells the story of a woman whose husband chases her for two miles with a shovel, trying to bash her face in. Even after that, that woman won’t leave either, as she’s “afraid of losing face.” Though, by the end, her man forces a divorce anyway. 

The novel stalled after 40,000 characters. In the last two years, Han Xue hasn’t picked up the pen much: “My health’s not great. I haven’t written. I don’t have much confidence.” In 2022, she felt chest discomfort and was diagnosed in Tianjin with coronary heart disease. The doctors told her she had “50% blockage in a coronary branch.” It sounded scary, but a follow-up at Anzhen Hospital in Beijing revealed it was actually long-term overwork causing spinal disc compression that was pressing on blood vessels. It wasn’t serious. Still, she’s been on medication ever since.

Han Xue remains hopeful about the future. The protagonist of her novel is named Wanxia, “Evening Glow,” as if Han Xue is finally shedding the frozen memories of those snowy nights. In a few years, when her daughter finishes graduate school, when her employer’s child finishes high school and gets into college, Han Xue plans to retire from domestic work, relying on the flexible employment social security she’s been paying into in Fuxin. She’ll spend her days reading and writing. “After 60, that’ll be our springtime.” Her voice resounds with joy when talking about that future. 

Even though she plans to settle in Tianjin, she still intends to attend literary classes. “I’ll have time by then.” She envisions herself riding the high-speed train from Baodi to Beijing South, transferring to the subway and bus to reach Picun, attending the class, and then taking the night bus home, or staying in a small inn if necessary. What matters most is gathering with her peers in the Tongxin Library beneath that warm, shared light. ∎

Adapted from “My Brothers and Sisters in Picun,” Yuan Ling (我的皮村兄妹, CITIC Press 中信集团, 2024). Translation by Alexander Boyd and machine. Read the original Chinese version of this story at China Digital Space.

Header: Chinese women training to be qualified nannies, eating lunch next to plastic training babies at the Ayi University (阿姨大学) in Beijing, 2016. (Kevin Frayer/Getty)

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