A Playlist Companion to Xiao Hai’s Adrift in the South

Shenzhen City Scene, Photo by Weichao Deng on Unsplash

Poet Xiao Hai’s (小海) memoir has recently been translated and released in English in May 2026 as Adrift in the South. It captures the decades that he spent on factory floors from the early 2000s until he made his way to Beijing and became involved in the Picun (皮村) Literature Group until the entire Picun area was demolished. Rather than highlighting the suffering of a work life in which people were treated as machines, the work is nostalgic and extremely sweet and touching. Readers of sociological studies of migrant workers in Dongguan and Shenzhen likely have come to expect tales of sadistic torture, but Xiao Hai’s words are humane and relatable. We can see in him the cool older brother or fun classmate we could trade CDs with, sharing the music that meant so much to us and made our lives feel like a dream, imbuing us with the feeling of significance.

Reading it now, when those dreams of adolescence are remote and forgotten, it gives me back the feeling of that youth. Academic accounts of migrant and factory workers in China too often take a cool scientific distance, with the author as an elite observer, translating the experience of social inferiors into tales of pity and woe for the consumption of an imagined readership of soft-handed members of the professional class, ushered from private high schools to private universities and right into white collar salaried positions. I always felt the creation of such a distance in scientific works is so false and shaming. The proximity of Xiao Hai’s work is its charm – I see in him so many of my old coworkers.

I remembered all the friends of my childhood, people who lived free of guilt or shame, who, despite living in squalid houses or apartments with too many people and animals, and spending most of their time at work, had so much energy, vigor, and beauty. They were living at the center of their own lives, and their gravity pulled others toward them as well, just as Xiao Hai was drawn to the energy of Picun, where he can live with a feeling of pride in himself and deep connection to those around him.

Xiao Hai succeeds in writing a work that captures the beauty of youth, when you have nothing but your dreams, without falling into the false pitfalls of socialist literature. He captures the life of normal people without making any demands on his reader. He lives the life of an artist, and he sees the world with an artist’s eye.

I wanted to collect the songs and bands he mentions in his work, to memorialize a period of time that we can never go back and recapture. I hope that listening to this music can make you once again feel the raw energy and excitement of adolescence, when fantasies were more than enough to sustain us.

Playlist