Survey Of Drifters' Life

The 1980s witnessed the upsurge of literature about migrant workers in the Pearl River Delta, the frontier of China's economic reform and opening-up. In order to express their survival situations and give vent to their emotions, migrant workers at the bottom created a lot of literary works. Some worker writers such as Wang Shiyue, An Zi, Zhang Weiming, etc. made use of their personal experience to demonstrate the voice of the working group. Meanwhile, the migrant working upsurge drew attention of some writers with insight, and they started to shift their themes in the direction of the emerging worker groups. Some writers, like Sun Huifen, Liu Qingbang, Chi Zijian, etc. wrote about migrant workers and their literary creations showed the humanistic concerns of intellectuals over the people at the bottom.The literary creation about migrant workers has some limitations, which is shown either in writers'works at the bottom or and professional writers'humanistic care. Migrant worker writers from migrant workers have rather poor cultural and intellectual structures. Besides, due to their experience at the bottom, their works are filled with descriptions of their own life experience, emotional narrations and complaints about society, and certain kind of rationality is missing. Professional writers'works show sympathy with migrant workers, which succeed in overcoming the shortcomings of migrant worker writers and treating the group rationally with appropriate amount of criticism, but these writers lack life experience at the bottom, which result in some distance from reality in their works.Among the writers who write about migrant workers, Jing Yongming is a special one. He is a professional writer, but he is also equipped with special experience owing to the fact that he is an outsider. Running the restaurant in Beijing made him experience the difficulties of the drifter away from his hometown. As an outsider, Jing Yongming writes about outsiders with a special angle to describe migrant workers working in Beijing. He breaks the boundary between migrant worker writers and professional writers. Compared with other migrant worker writers, he, with two identities, has written novels with higher professional standards. He can treat the group in an objective manner, while he has more humanistic care of intellectuals over the people at the bottom and he has more cultural contemplations over society and institutions. Compared with other professional writers who write about rural migrant workers, he unfolds to his readers true survival situations of rural migrant workers in cities and their spiritual world in more impartial and more detailed descriptions.At the beginning of the migrant working upsurge, migrant workers'life was ignored in cities. While working hard, they were often driven away by urban management staff. In his works, Jing Yongming narrates cities'open deportation of rural migrant workers. Gradually, cities have recognized migrant workers, and they have even become dependent on them. However, this is only acceptance as a form, and essentially, cities still reject migrant workers. Jing Yongming started to write about a series of"Outsiders". His initial works are about the survival plight of migrant workers at bottom in Beijing, about their hardships, their agonies from being discriminated against, and their sexual depressions. Nevertheless, Jing Yongming found that these migrant workers become satisfied easily. Hardships in life do not necessarily mean misery in surface, but their emotional life is very colorful. So Jing Yongming started to care about drifting migrant workers'colorful emotional life.From Jing Yongming's works, we can see another kind of unimaginable survival situation of urban dwellers. With traditional cultures from rural areas, migrant workers come to modern cities. Hardships in life and cultural conflicts do not frustrate them. In order to survive, migrant workers from the countryside struggle in cities in their positive and optimistic attitudes. They are bold enough to jump out of their original track of life and discard their original way of living for a new life. They brave the "unfriendly"cities and never give up in spite of difficulties. The predominant features of Jing Yongming's novels lie in the expressions of the drifting outsiders'spirit of resilience. Unlike some literary works that depict morbid states of migrant workers due to depression in life, Jing Yongming's novels depict positive figures. In his novel"Sick", Liu Bao, despite the fact that he has all the necessary documents and ID card, is so frightened by the police that he hides in the closet. When caught, he urinates into his pants. However, he never gives up hope to change his destiny and tries to survive in the city. The novel does not bother to describe migrant workers'survival state, and, instead, it narrates their daily life in cities and expresses their striving spirit in adverse living conditions in some details. So, Lin Yu, a literary critic, comments that his works write about"standing people".Jing Yongming's works also pay attention to the cultural shocks on outsiders in cities. Most of the migrant workers come to cities from the countryside. They grew up in rural areas with traditional characters of kind and pure humanity. After entering cities, the modern urban culture, accelerating economic development and heated competition give them marginal urban and rural dualistic personality. They are not welcome in cities. Urban dwellers claim that they disrupt their original life order and throng the cities, coupled with occasional crimes. Rejected by the cities, they cannot go back to their villages, because they have already accepted modern urban cultures."Out of the village but kept away from the city"is the shared psychological state of all the migrant workers. The cultural contrast makes it impossible for the migrant workers who struggle in cities to fine a real home.Over the some 30 years since the reform and opening-up, with constant progress of society, the rural traditionalism and the urban modernity have kept conflicting. The youth of the first generation of rural migrant workers are consumed by the cities. Now parents of most of the families with a single child place great hopes in their children's future. Most of their sons and daughters have entered universities. That is the reason to explain the undersupply of people working at lower posts and the oversupply of people working at upper posts. Urbanization is an indicator of social advance, and it is a historical inevitability. However, large numbers of rural migrant workers rush to cities, only to drain workforce from the rural areas, which is adverse to rural development. Gaps between the countryside and the city bring a lot of problems to rural migrant workers in cities.Literary creation about migrant workers offers readers a new literary model. It shows migrant workers'aspiration to integrate into cities but in vain. It has aroused widespread interest since its debut. Jing Yongming's serial novels about"Outsiders"have aroused attention from readers and critics because of their special creative angle and unique writing characteristics. This paper focuses on Jing Yongming's novels and analyzes his works'creative results and contributions to literature about migrant workers, so as to have basic understanding and mastery of his literary creation.