Adrift in the South Xiao Hai Review

September 25, 2026 Guest Contributor Adult Fiction 0

Adrift in the South Xiao Hai BookBlast Review

Adrift in the South is a first memoir by Xiao Hai, poet and essayist, and follows his decade working in factories across southern China, culminating in the flourishing arts village Picun. With neat prose and a straight-forward, speedy narrative, the repetitiveness of Xiao’s life never reads as a retread.

A Breakneck Start

The prohibitive cost of school meant Xiao and his younger brother couldn’t both attend, and ‘for most of us youngsters from the countryside, factories were the only places where we could be fed and housed.’ So Xiao dropped out and attended a so-called vocational school which offered sewing training, to then feed teenagers into garment factories. After a month of minimal instruction, his schoolteacher promised the class that, for 1200 yen each, they could find the students jobs in a factory.

We meet Xiao at fifteen-years-old on the day he leaves home to join the workforce.

After nearly getting robbed on an unlicensed bus, Xiao and his classmates arrive at the promised factory. The pay is bad, the boys are crammed into the dorms, and the hours are long and tedious. After a few days, his classmates decamp for a better factory, but Xiao is left behind, as he is only fifteen and a half, and ‘good’ factories do not take underage workers.

‘I even thought of the guy I’d had a big fight with in seventh grade, whose nails had left a scar on my face that is still there today. If I saw him in the factory, I’d drop everything and run over to him; I would shake his hand and tell him that I had forgiven him and that I cared for him.’

Luckily his teacher keeps at least one promise and comes back for him, and Xiao is reunited with his classmates at a new factory. This marks the start of a decade spent drifting between low-paid factory jobs.

Whirling through China’s factories

After the initial novelty of independence fades, the monotony of the assembly line weighs heavily on Xiao. He makes numerous attempts to escape the daily grind, which rarely improves his circumstances, and dreams of a better future often lure him into chancy schemes to make quick money. Xiao develops a brief obsession with lottery tickets. A relative opens a roast duck eatery and is ‘confident it would turn a six-figure profit over the summer’. For one season, Xiao’s parents forgo growing wheat in favour of garlic expecting a lucrative harvest, but everyone gets the same idea. At harvest time, more people are selling garlic than buying it. So Xiao returns to the relentless factory routine.

Despite the many indignities of factory life (the long shifts, drab cafeteria food, cramped housing, mediocre pay, health risks, the monotony), which Xiao describes with absorbing specificity, familial generosity and hope for a better future support what is an extended, and strenuous, coming of age.

Writing and memorising poetry become, in the simplest interpretation, Xiao’s way of passing time amidst hours of predictable tasks, ‘anaesthetised . . . from all emotion’. Even more than comfort, poems invite in tenderness and companionship as ‘we drifted from one city to another like duckweeds, never arriving at a still surface where we could take root’, like wind, ‘without impact’.

The narrative similarly floats us from one factory to the next, Xiao wondering if he is making anything of value or ‘just rubbish’.

Landing in Picun

Then Xiao hears about Picun, an urban artists’ village on the outskirts of Beijing, where migrant workers gather to put on plays, take free writing classes, make art, collaborate. The decision to try his luck there is an easy one, and this time he strikes gold.

Picun is an artist’s haven, and he finds stable work at a second-hand clothing shop. He quickly becomes active in the community and never misses the weekly free writing classes. Soon enough he gets a book of poetry published.

Xiao describes the memoir as a ‘practice in truthful storytelling’ — prose is a ‘long footnote’ to poetry — and each chapter begins with one of Hai’s poems.
If you ever witness a splendid view turn to ash
Please don’t be afraid —
The earth only rotates
If all the machines in the industrial park are running

‘Don’t worry’, you said, ‘Mother Nation’
Even though every alley you’d taken was blind
And all you’d managed was to get lost yet again—
‘That was great’, you said, ‘Mother Nation’

Adrift in the South offers a stark, moving look inside China’s industrial heartland. Xiao Hai transforms what could have been a grim record of factory labour into a testament to the resilience artistic practices foster. Community organizing and creativity aren’t fix-alls for exploitation, but they do help us endure with a bit more pleasure in our days.

Xiao Hai’s memoir started out as an essay in Granta’s ‘China’ issue and grew into this paperback original, out now from Granta Magazine Editions, an imprint ‘closely aligned with the experimental ethos and taste of the magazine.’ Tony Hao translated both the essay and the memoir along with other pieces for the ‘China’ issue. A conversation between the poet and his translator.