This Is Not an Inspiring China Story

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A 66-year-old migrant worker in northern China was asked last summer by an influencer on the street to choose between 100 yuan in cash and a chance to win 1,000 yuan by writing an essay.An Sanshan, the day labourer from Shanxi province, took the second option. Sitting in an empty restaurant, he wrote an essay of more than 800 Chinese characters titled “My Mother.” The video was later posted on Douyin, China’s equivalent of TikTok, on July 9, 2025. It quickly went viral, turning a man who spent his days carrying bricks and cement into an unlikely literary sensation.Readers were struck by the blunt force of his memories: a mother who never rested, a son who hasn’t been able to call out “mama” for over 30 years, and a grave whose grass turned green, then yellow, then green again, like his yearning unending.Yet what makes the essay so devastating is not only grief. It is continuity. The mother was worn down by a lifetime of labour; the son, decades later, is still living by the same logic of bodily exhaustion. His story is therefore not just about memory, love, or literary talent. It is also a plain record of how poverty can travel across generations, and how the lives of China’s lowest-paid workers are often built on toil so relentless that it becomes almost invisible.Nearly a year later, the essay found a second life online after a Beijing-based English-speaking content creator translated it into English and read it aloud. The English clip, uploaded on 23 April 2026, again spread across Chinese social media.The translation was then picked up by Chinese state media and officia…