❀ Main Page
❀ Three Generations
❀ Fan Yusu Decided to Live Off a Rich Man
❀ Chinese Migrant Workers: Staging 1965’s Shanghai in 2017’s Picun
❀ Chinese Queer Feminist Poetic Intimacies: A Translation Play
❀ Daybreak
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This role-play game script is a creative response to the special collaboration between editors of Feminisms with Chinese Characteristics, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, and Chinese Literature and Thought Today. It is also inspired by the workshop “Reacting to the Past: Transforming the Conditions of Teaching and Learning Through Play” at the 2023 MLA annual conference in held in San Francisco. In particular, this script is a response to two essays, Ping Zhu’s “Wang Anyi’s New Shanghai: Gender and Labor in Fu Ping” (Chapter 9) and Hui Faye Xiao’s “‘I Am Fan Yusu’: Baomu Writing and Grassroots Feminism Against the Postsocialist Patriarchy” (Chapter 10), in Feminisms with Chinese Characteristics, edited by Ping Zhu and Hui Faye Xiao.
In this game, I have created three characters based on Hui Faye Xiao’s discussion of the Picun Literature Group—a literary group formed for migrant workers in an urban village outside of Beijing. The time is set roughly in April 2017 before the publication of Fan Yusu’s autobiography and the following explosive media attention. I inserted Wang Anyi’s novel Fu Ping as an embedded text for the Picun characters to engage with, which is the text under discussion in Ping Zhu’s chapter. The focus in this game is Chapter 16 in Wang’s novel, where the grandson from the countryside comes to Shanghai to visit his foster grandmother. The grandmother is a housekeeper for a couple who are socialist cadres in China in 1965. The tension is Fu Ping’s reluctance to fulfil her promise to marry into the grandson’s family, as her distaste for the traditional female role as an unwaged domestic worker grows stronger and stronger. Despite regional differences (Picun is in Beijing while Wang’s novel is set in Shanghai), both settings address migrant workers in metropolitan cities. Following Hui Faye Xiao’s view of political sisterhood and Ping Zhu’s discussion of labour aesthetics, I hope to explore changing ethics (such as labour ethics and kinship ethics) for Chinese migrant workers since the mid-twentieth century by juxtaposing two generations of migrant workers through embedded narratives.
The format of this script follows a particular kind of game—“Reacting to the Past” (RTTP) [1], which is an award-winning pedagogy for engaged learning based on immersive role-playing games. I chose role-playing game as my creative format because, compared to general discussions in literary and cultural classrooms, this game demands more creative and personal engagements with literary texts and historical contexts from participants. By performing and producing personal diaries from certain characters, students physically embody such perspectives that go beyond general cognitive identification. This in turn leads to a new aesthetic distance between the student and the literary texts, as well as a new affective distance across cultures and genders. The length of this game is designed for four class sessions, though instructors can adapt it as they see fit. Compared to most RTTP games, my script is a lot shorter. Every game requires three participants, and they can draw cards to assign their character roles. Player’s genders do not need to correspond with those of the characters. There can be multiple game groups within the same class. For example, if the class has 15 students, they will form 5 game groups. During the game, the instructor serves both as a game master to assign relevant handouts and as a cultural consultant to help students explore modern and contemporary Chinese social and cultural contexts. The game ends with all game groups staging their respective sketches, and the whole class can vote for their favourite team.
Download the role-play game script HERE.
[1] For more information on role-play games as pedagogical tools, see the Reacting Consortium website https://reactingconsortium.org/.
How to cite: Wang, Yihan Lulu. “Chinese Migrant Workers: Staging 1965’s Shanghai in 2017’s Picun.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 18 Jul. 2023, chajournal.blog/2023/07/18/yihang-lulu-wang.
Yihan Lulu Wang 王奕涵 grew up in Jinan, China. She is a PhD candidate of the joint program of Chinese and Comparative Literature in East Asian Languages and Cultures at Washington University in St. Louis. Her dissertation studies care work and visions of social reproduction in China’s post-socialist science fiction. It looks at how technological advancement is envisioned in the context of people’s daily lives to create new kinds of lifestyles and communities. Her research interest covers post-socialist Chinese literary and cultural production, Marxist feminism, Affect studies, narrative theory, and STS studies. She obtained her MA in Comparative Literature from University College of London, and her BA in English from Nankai University, with a year at La Universidad de Los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia). Yihan enjoys dancing, creative writing, and scripted role-play games.
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