Last summer, a pair of green pants caught my eye on a sidewalk sale rack. Semi-transparent organza, elastic waistband, seven dollars final sale — a boon for the humid months to come! It wasn’t until I got home and put them on that I noticed a crooked seam, sewn lopsided at one side of the waist. The mistake ruptured the usual invisibility of machinic production, bringing into focus the human hand that must have made this error. Perhaps this was the mark of a sneeze or the moment of a laugh escaping from a body. A head turning when your name is called.
The label read, “Made in China,” where my family fled as exiles to Taiwan during the Chinese Civil War in the 1940s. My thoughts briefly flitted to my mother, who — instead of going to college as her siblings did—worked in factories as a young woman.
Wang Bing’s newest film, Youth (Spring) is a 2023 documentary filmed in the small textile factories of Zhili, a manufacturing town in Huzhou located about 90 miles west of Shanghai. The three-and-a-half-hour film follows mostly 19- to 21-one-year-old rural migrant workers from the province of Anhui who sew children’s pants, jackets, and dresses while Mando pop blasts on speakers above the din of sewing machines. (It can be streamed on Amazon or Apple TV.) The youngest worker the film identifies is 16 and the oldest is 34. Anyone familiar with Wang, internationally revered as an auteur of slow documentary cinema, will know that this is familiar territory: labor in postindustrial China, following the lives of rural populations who are either left behind or who leave in search of work that will earn them enough to send money to their families and feasibly save for the eventual return home.
“Life beyond the factory is a void”
The factory workers in Youth may belong to a different kind of contemporary migrant labor class, whose splintered trajectories from the countryside to city centers are often undertaken in search of something altogether different from previous generations: adventure, upward mobility, an education outside of academia, and, if fortune favors, love. China’s booming economy in the last decades has transformed the plight of the rural migrant worker. Once seen as inferior and discriminated against by the government and urbanites as a subordinate caste, the nearly 300 million migrant workers now comprise more than one-third of the Chinese labor force, the largest migration in history. These workers, considered the “rural elite” due to the higher wages and education they receive, might never return to their villages, preferring to stay in cities, marry, start families, and join the ranks of the middle class. Certainly, slave wages and vile working conditions (a timeworn narrative trope that produces a frisson of schadenfreude for the West — Oh those poor things! We really should practice conscious consumerism more) are also a reality for some factory workers, but it’s not the only one that exists.
The country’s rural surplus labor had once been confined to their birthplaces by the restrictions of its household registration system, the hukou — a long-term governmental policy controlling internal migration by giving urban residents access to social programs that assign benefits like retirement pensions, education, and health care while denying these rights to rural citizens. Rural migrants are not entitled to urban resident wages. The hukou, by design, was meant to prevent internal migration in order to maintain rural populations as such. Citizens are confined to live and die where they are born. Similar to a passport, the hukou system allows a resident to travel domestically, but living outside of one’s birthplace, where you are not registered, is technically not allowed. Migrants, therefore, have statuses akin to an undocumented immigrant. They have no rights, no access to benefits or education, and can be forcibly removed.
Yet as the world’s largest manufacturing economy and leading exporter of goods, China is dependent on its rural workforce like never before. The attitudes toward the migrants powering its economic boom are still inherently segregationist, but their long-term futures are no longer foreclosed to the possibilities of life beyond the village. In recent decades, the government has relaxed its prohibition on illegal migration, though the restrictions placed on those who choose to relocate elsewhere for work remain the same. The tension between the insatiable need for production and restrictions on migration is a systemic failure that replicates itself wherever capital insists on apartheid-like systems of labor.
Wang’s film rarely leaves the factory, a liminal space where these youths work, live, flirt, date, dream, eat, fight, and form unified collectives to negotiate for better wages. Much of the film’s runtime witnesses the workers engaged in youthful horseplay: teenage girls chasing boys and playfully twisting their ears, young men throwing scissors and cell phones at each other, a boy smearing cake all over a girl’s face, two nuzzling lovers hiding behind a wall of fabric rolls. These scenes could be taking place anywhere in the world, the tension of budding sexuality, competition, and longing often enacted through a violence that unites their bodies in touch.
No narrative arc, no completion, only the repetition of hands pushing colorful fabric through sewing machines
For 20-year-old Shengnan, the quotidian routines of work and play are transcended by more serious matters: She’s pregnant by 19-year-old Huguo, a coworker. Her parents, together with the boss, discuss a plan for her to get an abortion. He demands that she finish her quota first before getting the procedure, threatening to withhold her wages. “Cheer up!” her boss tells Shengnan. “An abortion is like getting bitten by a dog and biting back. Look at it that way. It’s not the end of the world.” Behind a drying comforter hanging on a balcony, Huguo invokes his family’s wishes to keep the baby while Shengnan chides him for not being able to think for himself. Whether the abortion occurs or not, however, does not concern Wang. The conflict falls away as the scene cuts to another factory in Zhili City. New youths, same horseplay.
The film never returns to Shengnan and Huguo. This denial of resolution is a recurrent approach in Wang’s films. Here, there is no narrative arc, no completion, only the repetition of hands pushing colorful fabric through sewing machines, mounds of sleeves and furry hoods piling up, the glow of smartphones illuminating workers’ faces as they scroll and text, more and more factories filled with young workers. We never find out what becomes of these youths. For viewers, especially those not yet acquainted with Wang’s social realist oeuvre, the experience of sitting through his durational films might feel like labor in and of itself. With runtimes stretching to fourteen hours, a viewer could potentially sit from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. watching a single film. Without the traditional narrative structures of plot and denouement, or even a stable cast of characters, viewers trudge between stations, alternatively bored, angry, irritated, impatient, spaced out, and then suddenly become interested in labor negotiations or a tussle between workers before the deafening roar of the machines take over again.
If the film requires of its viewers a certain endurance of labor, then it is equally invested in revealing the labor of making the film. Wang shot the film in digital video over a period of five years with three cameramen. Walking shots are shaky, bouncing up and down with the cameraman’s footsteps as he follows the film’s subjects up the factory stairs to their dorms or down the street at night to buy a bowl of steaming noodles from a street vendor. The long shots are physically laborious to maintain. The camera trembles and stumbles, mirroring the worker-subjects themselves, or maybe it is the worker holding the camera who falters throughout his workday. The belabored style of the film belabors that its labor is style in and of itself.
The camera remains dedicated to the faces of the teenage boys in Wang’s film as their limbs are draped all over each other on their dorm-room beds singing along to love songs (“Is that the soft rain falling? Or your secret tears, tell me?”). Dreamers grinning in hidden thought as they casually feed layers of fabric into a machine’s hungry maw and a young woman rebuffing her pursuer telling him that her life is a mess, his riposte arriving midair to meet her rejection: “I don’t want to be your past. I want to be your future.” The work itself is interstitial, background to the feelings of these young adults and teenagers. Even as the camera facilitates a certain closeness, Wang keeps the viewer at bay from larger questions of desire where histories and futures are omitted from the narrative. The workers’ familial and economic circumstances are never revealed; neither are their plans and hopes for the future. Life beyond the factory is a void left to the viewer to imagine, or not.
Sometimes, labor functions as material for the workers, who — in addition to negotiating romances and abortions — spend a lot of the film bargaining with their factory bosses for better wages. Newcomers will learn what a fair wage is only by way of experience or perhaps through contact with the networks of other migrant workers whose lives intersect on Happiness Road, a locus of the children’s clothing manufacturing industry in the province. The factory is a waystation of experience for these rural elites, who work in teams to produce batches of garment orders for distributors. The teams agree on prices paid per finished item of clothing as well as allotments for travel expenditures to return home for the new year. The more the workers make, the less the boss earns. The tensions mount as these youths elect representatives, determine as a collective how much they should ask for, and trundle down to the boss’s office to get their bargaining on. But our desire — and their desire — for resolution is thwarted. Again, Wang doesn’t include the results of these negotiations in the film. There is only a repetition of varying bosses using the same rhetorical claims that there isn’t enough capital to go around when “business is bad” Business, apparently, is always bad.
The West’s allegiance to narrative structures that, typically, often fail to deviate from linear time and the one-and-done strictures of the male orgasm —“Something that swells and tautens until climax, then collapses,” author Jane Alison writes about the rather pathetic convention of Aristotelian dramatic arcs in her book Meander, Spiral, Explode — do not account for experiences beyond itself, including the lives of marginalized people, radically embodied subjectivity, and polychronic cultures determined by fluidity, simultaneity, and circularity. This structural approach shares an allegiance with feminist and experimental films that are rooted in queerness and coded through race and gender. The film’s strategy of continually returning to nearly identical factory floors, different scenes of young men with similar razor-cut hairstyles smoking while their legs dangle off the upper deck of a bunk bed, wage negotiation after wage negotiation with insulting bosses leaping across the screen in succession like a rock skipping on a lake, creates its own logic of time, at once perennial and in unremitting static movement.
Desire, then, is localized. The film is not a critique of global systems of late-stage capitalism or even China’s politics at large. A girl working the overnight shift at an internet café falls asleep at the front desk. Her boyfriend warns her that staying up all night will mess up her internal balance: a body in thrall to the moon. Scenes of mouths eating, feet soaking in plastic tubs, bodies working and sleeping and reproducing — these are labors of the body that our lives are in service to; reprieve is without end. Young people use their bodies to make clothes for children’s bodies while their bodies are rendered illegal as they cross invisible borders. The world makes sense in constellations of abstraction that occasionally come into focus as patterns and shapes. But most of the time, there is no resolution, no dramatic arc that denies or completes our desirous intentions. There is only repetition and meaning as we can make of it in fragmented clips of life as the accumulation of time.
Slow cinema resists the reckless pace of production and consumption in late capitalism, a way of providing the viewer a time and space to “be in” rather than “escape from.” Watching Wang’s films is, for me, like reading theory. Yet, unlike theory, Youth requires of its viewers not only labor of the intellect but also of the body, a rare locale to be situated within. I am compelled by this material perhaps not only through the vectors of its many ideas but something deeper, embodied, which can only be articulated through metaphor — the feeling of torquing a part of myself, a part which contains the denseness of what troubles me, until the tightness hurts and I am able to place my finger on its node.
The factory is where my mother began her life as a young adult earning wages and forming social bonds with her fellow factory workers. My mother met my father on the factory floor when they were young. He would go around pretending to wield the power of clairvoyance in order to touch women workers’ hands and predict the futures written on their palms. The factory is the origin of my mother and father’s story as two people whose lives intersected so that they would be forever changed. It is where my mother, who hadn’t yet experienced all that life would thrust upon her, had once spent her days working with her hands to make things that would go out into a world that she did not yet know.
Sarah Wang has written for the New Yorker, The Nation, and the London Review of Books. She teaches creative writing at Barnard College.
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