Before the millennium, I graduated from university and went to work at a high-tech company in Shenzhen. The coastal cities were at the height of their rise in those days — the market economy moved fast and broke things, and individuals were driven relentlessly by performance targets and property prices, running at full speed. Buried in work as I was, it was only when I received a phone call from my parents that I remembered there was, somewhere far away, a fading and melancholy hometown called “Our Factory.”

“Our Factory” was a third-line military industrial plant nestled deep in the mountains of western Liaoning. My parents had worked and lived there for forty years; my older siblings were born in the factory’s worker hospital, attended the company school, and went to work in the factory after finishing their studies. Our whole family believed, without question, that our roots were in “Our Factory.” Yet at the same moment the millennium arrived, this state-run enterprise had fallen into a gloomy twilight; by 2006, when it was declared bankrupt by government policy, the tens of thousands of workers and their families were dispersed to the winds, and the hometown I had known was uprooted entirely.

Though the great factories of the planned economy era have long since vanished, the experience of life in those factory communities left deep imprints on all of us.

Through my work, I have traveled frequently to all parts of the country and come to know many people who grew up in factory and mining communities. Gradually I came to understand that the children of these communities form an enormous group nationwide — most of them have lived through the flourishing and the finale of that collective factory society, and they carry within them a very particular kind of homesickness. Many have shown me, with great warmth, old photographs of life “at their factory” — copper mines in Jiangxi, steel mills in Sichuan, nuclear industrial plants in Gansu, aviation factories in Guizhou, thermal power plants in Henan. Looking through the photographs, I was struck by how much we had in common: trade union clubhouses, dormitory buildings for single workers, company schools, worker hospitals, collective ice cream factories, factory newspapers and factory television stations… It turned out that everyone’s childhood environment had been so similar, so alike — there were not, after all, the vast differences between north and south I had imagined.

Then in 2016, I happened to read a news article mentioning that the final step in the reform of state-owned enterprises was to complete, across the country, the “separation of enterprises from their social functions” — meaning that the company schools, worker hospitals, and residential compounds of tens of thousands of enterprises nationwide would be transferred to local government management. This meant that the original “enterprise mini-societies” would cease to exist, and that the deeply familiar collective life of the factory and mining communities would become a term in the history books.

After reading the article, several ripples stirred in my heart: first, the thought of the glory and decline of my own old hometown factory; and then, by extension, the thought of the shared experience of countless children from countless factories everywhere. From that moment, a seed was planted in my heart — a determination to write the story of the flourishing and fading of factory life in those years. And so, during the Spring Festival holiday the following year, I wrote the first draft in a single burst of energy. During the repeated revisions that followed, I hesitated for a long time over the title, and thought of various names that might catch the eye. But in the end I chose the distant, wide-angle title Children of the Factory to carry what had already been expressed in the story, and what had not yet been fully said.

That is the origin of this novel.

The final draft was completed in early 2020 — the very year the first wave of post-1980s children reached the age of forty. Forty is a resting point at the midpoint of life, a moment when many people grow still and take stock of where they started and where they have arrived. If turning away from one’s hometown in youth is a kind of inevitability, then the homesickness that stirs again in middle age — is that not another kind of inevitability as well?

Unlike our parents’ generation, whose migrations were driven by social and political movements, our generation’s migration has been driven by economic forces. We are like a flock of kites rising on the wind toward the splendor of the great cities, while the hometown behind us grows ever more distant and indistinct — and that fragile thread connecting each person to their hometown will, in the end, snap somewhere deep in the passage of time.

The tides rise and fall; people gather and scatter. Every era has its own particular romance and hardship. The stories of this world flow on in a thin, unbroken stream. It is with this novel that I cup my hands and lift out one small portion of the turbulent homesickness of the children of old factories.

This serves as my afterword, with thanks to all the editors.