A Preface to the Other Half: From Handshake Buildings to High-Rise Dreams (Part 2, Pages 11-16)

The method of this book is therefore at once ethnographic and civic. I did not arrive at a conclusion and then come up with the story. I apprenticed myself to listening.

My first genuine attempt at listening came on a factory floor. In the summer between middle and high school, I worked on a garment plant’s assembly line. Amid the staccato language of machines, I met my first teachers in migrant life. Ten hours a day, we stacked layers of fabric for later fusing, and talked in the thin hours between one seam and the next. Living and eating and standing and resting under the same LED light, what I learned then was not simply that work exhausts the body, but that it disciplines time, memory, and imagination—the lenses through which we see the world, and ourselves embedded inside. Each portrait in this book is embedded in this ubiquitous context of labor, not merely an economic activity, but a way of life that shapes individual arrangements of love, loss, hope, despair, and dignity.

I began the project that became this book in 2023, under the name Migrants of Shenzhen. I worked temporary shifts, I waited at factory gates, I volunteered at Service Centers, I sat on stools outside vendors’ stalls and bought cups of tea for an hour of conversation—to interview migrant workers and share their voices on my storytelling platform. I was rejected more than I was accepted. Both are equally instructive. The time my questions were met with a flat “no” from a gatekeeper, I learned how a stranger calculates risk. The time my greeting was interrupted by a quick “not now” from an electronics worker, I learned how the pace of an overtime shift leaves a worker nothing but exhaustion. Sometimes my inquiries were not altogether pushed away but tentatively accepted with caution. I learned to wear school or factory uniforms to convey curiosity rather than surveillance, immersion instead of intrusion. The interviews that did happen with frankness and openness were often spontaneous products of time and trust’s simple alchemy, not earned or extractive in one moment but built through genuine reciprocity. Reciprocity that results from authentic immersion precipitates genuine connections—in small acts of mutual aid, in helping to sweep the floors for a shopowner, in picking chilly peppers from their stems for a food vendor, in offering a cigarette (though I don’t smoke), a seat on a bench, or my own life story. Talk to a stranger in this way, and you would realize how rich a story they would love to tell.

The best portraits come from casual chats, not structured Q&A. Yet over time, I learned that a cozy structure makes a good chatter. The eleven portraits you are about to read are shaped by firm factual scaffolding that is nonetheless gentle enough to allow porous spaces where memory and feeling flow through. This is not a deliberate choice to curate my accounts, but a natural result of the conversations I had with the eleven individuals. Our chats originate from the verifiable; that is, the weather, the food, the factory, the route, the shift. Facts anchor stories and protect the person speaking because speaking about facts is comfortably easy and risk-free. When trust accrues and the chatters unspool, the conversation is ready to progress to intimate questions that draw out raw feelings, inviting the human subject to delve deep into complexity and interiority. The moral and morality is straightforward: the factual platform buttresses the unfortified emotions, making the latter stronger and safer to disclose. The goal is to refrain from extracting vulnerability while making visible the person behind the labor, which necessarily entails a unique set of individual vulnerabilities.

Since each individual is, indeed, unique, what I present here is not the findings that follow a methodology, but a collection of my diverse listenings. I sat in the evening at a park across a factory gate and waited for the tide of workers to ebb. I worked on the assembly line and dealt with the cadence of the day. I ate at vendors’ stalls and helped to refill chilly sauce bottles to shorten the distance between the interviewer and the interviewee. I stood in front of the window of the security guard’s room to heed his preacher on a philosophy of life echoing between stoic acceptance and fiery critique. I cold emailed urban village CEOs who manage collective property and factory leases to parse their accounts of urban informality and transformation. I spoke with urban planners who drew Shenzhen’s blueprints and designed housing policies to understand their views on informal development and urban renewal. The wide array of vantage points in this book oscillates between the intimate and the architectural, so in seeing migrant workers, you also see the migrant city.