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The poetry and brief life of a Foxconn worker: Xu Lizhi (1990-2014)

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Re: The poetry and brief life of a Foxconn worker: Xu Lizhi (1990-2014)

#71

Post by ctchocula »

xarien wrote: post #65

The second poem actually gives quite a bit of insight regarding his situation. Translation from Chinese to English is hard and much is lost in translation. I'll translate the following to prose as to minimize what's lost in the translation: 《冲突》 "Conflict" 他们都说 They all say 我是个话很少的孩子 I'm a child of few words 对此我并不否认 This I don't deny 实际上 But actually 我说与不说 Whether I speak or not 都会跟这个社会 With this society I'll still 发…

As a native Chinese speaker, I would contend "conflict" is a more suitable word choice.

In Chinese, he doesn't qualify the final three sentences as his own feeling. The phrase "I feel" in English is usually used to indicate uncertainty/lack of objectivity. Instead, he uses "都会", whose strength, certainty and sense of inevitability are better represented by "I will" or "I'll" in English. In Chinese, the final line is a verb. By using the verb form of "conflict" as the last word in English as is done in the Chinese, the correct emphasis is placed on "conflict" as it is done on "冲突".

Re: The poetry and brief life of a Foxconn worker: Xu Lizhi (1990-2014)

#73

Post by nyolfen »

api wrote: post #34

Capitalism indeed seems to consign the masses to work that is drudgery and is intellectually beneath them, but so does socialism. Every socialist experiment I'm familiar with has almost instantly devolved into a form of a capitalism based on social pull with the bureaucracy rather than financial leverage. The final endpoint of this trajectory seems to be the mafia state -- pure social pull capitalism within criminal-…

i'm not posting this as an advocation of hoxhaism but the case of albania is an interesting one that most english speaking people don't seem to be familiar with

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Socialist_Republic_...

Re: The poetry and brief life of a Foxconn worker: Xu Lizhi (1990-2014)

#74

Post by wyager »

zhengyi13 wrote: post #64
wyager wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Foxconn employees feel so trapped by their conditions they are deprived of even the ability to take their own life Wait, so now the issue isn't "Foxconn employees kill themselves too much", it's "Foxconn employees don't kill themselves enough"?

I'm not sure this is what GP was addressing, but there is a very real phenomenon of getting so depressed that you can't even manage to kill yourself. You actually see increased risk of suicide at the beginning of therapy for some patients, where they come up enough to get just enough mental energy to successfully kill themselves.

But we have no evidence that this is the case. At first people kept saying "Foxconn employees kill themselves a lot, so they're depressed", and now they're saying "Foxconn employees don't kill themselves as much as we do, so they're depressed". It seems to me that people here are simply predisposed to believe that Foxconn employees are depressed, and are willing to take pretty much anything as evidence for that belief.

Re: The poetry and brief life of a Foxconn worker: Xu Lizhi (1990-2014)

#76

Post by noname123 »

xarien wrote: post #65

The second poem actually gives quite a bit of insight regarding his situation. Translation from Chinese to English is hard and much is lost in translation. I'll translate the following to prose as to minimize what's lost in the translation: 《冲突》 "Conflict" 他们都说 They all say 我是个话很少的孩子 I'm a child of few words 对此我并不否认 This I don't deny 实际上 But actually 我说与不说 Whether I speak or not 都会跟这个社会 With this society I'll still 发…

My translation, trying to preserve the imagery expressed in some of the characters and also the rhythm of poetry in Mandarin,

《冲突》 "Collision, Rushing to a"

他们都说 The people are always talking, speculating

我是个话很少的孩子 That I'm a man-child, a little bit morose, have little to show for in the discipline of twisting tongue

对此我并不否认 To their accusation I won't deny nor recant,

实际上 But I'll instead declare that in reality, (not on their verbal plane),

我说与不说 I choose to speak to not speak - might as well cut my tongue,

都会跟这个社会 I have computed all possible scenario's of their word games and foresaw,

发生冲突 All interactions rushing on the freeway, en-route to their collisions.

Re: The poetry and brief life of a Foxconn worker: Xu Lizhi (1990-2014)

#77

Post by lotsofmangos »

CognitiveLens wrote: post #14

Suicide is a tragedy and people should always do what they can to prevent it. However, it is also something that will always occur in some portion of the population, typically as the result of depression. We should not ignore the fact that the suicide rate in, for example, the United States is an order of magnitude higher than it is at Foxconn. Foxconn employs over 1.2 million people, so the number of suicides will a…

We should not ignore the fact that the suicide rate in, for example, the United States is an order of magnitude higher than it is at Foxconn.

I looked at the figures for this. They are all talking about suicides by employees while on Foxconn property, not total suicide rate of current and recent employees.

Re: The poetry and brief life of a Foxconn worker: Xu Lizhi (1990-2014)

#78

Post by wdewind »

zhengyi13 wrote: post #64
wyager wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Foxconn employees feel so trapped by their conditions they are deprived of even the ability to take their own life Wait, so now the issue isn't "Foxconn employees kill themselves too much", it's "Foxconn employees don't kill themselves enough"?

I'm not sure this is what GP was addressing, but there is a very real phenomenon of getting so depressed that you can't even manage to kill yourself. You actually see increased risk of suicide at the beginning of therapy for some patients, where they come up enough to get just enough mental energy to successfully kill themselves.

> You actually see increased risk of suicide at the beginning of therapy for some patients, where they come up enough to get just enough mental energy to successfully kill themselves.

This is something that happens (mostly with bipolar people who go into manic states, it actually doesn't typically happen with severe depression cases), but in terms of risk, no you are wrong, statistically you see decreased risk immediately after starting any kind of depression treatment:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17606654

Re: The poetry and brief life of a Foxconn worker: Xu Lizhi (1990-2014)

#79

Post by wdewind »

brd wrote: post #57
svachalek wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if we didn't buy electronics, or what if we insisted on treating these workers so well it made more sense to leave the factories in the US? Then our money stays here and young men and women like Xu are back in their villages trying to scrape out a living on a few square meters of soil. Workers take these jobs because it's an opportunity to improve their life and the lives of their families. It may still be miser…

This argument always comes up and its an argument I hate. If for no other reason, I dislike it because from what I've seen rates of depression are dramatically higher when you introduce these sorts of jobs vs. letting people scrape by working land in a 3rd world setting. What you're arguing is (excuse the hyperbolic nature of the example) that slavery is better than leaving indigenous people in their natural setting.…

> rates of depression are dramatically higher when you introduce these sorts of jobs vs. letting people scrape by working land in a 3rd world setting

First of all, I don't think there's anyway you can assert that. We have no real data about what depression rates were like when these jobs were introduced.

Second of all, the notion that all of these people could be simple, back to the earth farmers is the alternative is all kinds of incorrect.

Third, the notion that even if they were back to the earth farmers they would be happier than factory workers is also one that, from what I've seen, is based entirely on sentiment and not on evidence.

Re: The poetry and brief life of a Foxconn worker: Xu Lizhi (1990-2014)

#80

Post by drderidder »

Wow, beautiful poetry. The article, and recently a documentary on the garment trade in Bangledesh [1] had me thinking about ethical consumption. Ever since watching "The Story of Stuff" [2] I've wanted a way to easily understand the ethical implications of purchases. I'd like to scan a bar code and get a 1-to-5 rating of how ethical and fair the product life cycle is - something like that. I'd be willing to pay more, and do with less, if it meant knowing that my purchases contributed to a healthy work-life balance, living wage, and... well, hope, basically, for the various people involved in the production chain. The Fair Trade label on my coffee doesn't go very far to quell the inner conviction that stories like this increasingly raise. I don't really care for a gold iGadget, or whatever, but I'd love one that's built with empathy. I don't buy the argument that fair-trade is a luxury for the upper middle class. I think it would benefit everyone and contribute to a more participatory economy. [3]

[1] http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/episodes/2013-2014/made-in-banglades...

[2] http://storyofstuff.org/

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8548035

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