The mobile phone is the defining characteristic of millions of female migrant workers in China today. While in nearby Japan women have taken to cell phones in droves and use them to craft a new genre of fiction, in China phones have not yet become a tool of creative practice for women. This paper will discuss the vernacular and domestic technologies for an underserved demographic within the creative industries, and explore the challenges inherent in writing a story and designing an interactive app—called Wandering Meimei / Meimei Liu Lang Ji—for marginalized female factory workers. Carolyn Guertin was the inaugural recipient of the Outstanding Early Career Award from the CSDH in 2013. She’s Senior Researcher in York University’s Augmented Reality Lab and faculty at Transart Institute in Berlin. Her book, Digital Prohibition: Piracy and Authorship in New Media Art, was published in 2012 by Continuum.

1. Writing for Meimei:
Mobile Stories for
Women Migrants in
China Carolyn Guertin
Augmented Reality Lab, York University
Canadian Society for Digital Humanities/ACCUTE
26 May 14

2. After I completed the
writing of this book --
which compared
creative practices in
digital culture in the
West with the East --
I knew that I had only
scratched the surface
of Chinese culture.

3. Last Train Home, by
Canadian director Lixin
Fan about Chinese
migrant workers, was
almost
incomprehensible to me
the first time I watched
it. The barriers I had to
cross in understanding
the situation of migrant
workers were
enormous.

6. Chinese
girls have
few role
models.
Under Mao,
women
were given
jobs not
liberation.

7. “Leftover women”
• In a one-child-policy world, there is a surplus of
marriageable men:
• “In 2007 the Ministry of Education of the PRC
issued an official statement using the term ‘leftover
women’ … and criticizing such women as having
‘overly high expectations for marriage partners’. In
2011 the All-China Women’s Federation posted an
article on its official website titled ‘Leftover Women
do not Deserve our Sympathy’ which criticized
unmarried women of 27 and over for pursuing
education and career over marriage within a highly
competitive marriage market…” (Gladston 2014,
13).

8. In many cases, women factory workers have acquired
the skills they need to move into management or to
become enterpreneurs by the time they are 27.
Rural
villages
have few
opportunities
and little
appeal after
being
dagongmei.

9. Serialized
cellphone
novels
(Keitai
Shosetsu)
are being
written by
young
women in
Japan
7 of the 10 top bestsellers in Japan last year were written on cell phones by women for women

10. “I need to recharge.” “I am upgrading myself.”
Who is Meimei?

11. Arjun Appadurai • 5 ‘scapes’ capture the
movement of people, media, technology,
capital and ideas that traverse the globe,
facilitated by communication and transport
technologies
• Ethnoscapes
• Mediascapes
• Technoscapes
• Financescapes
• ideoscapes
These flows are impervious to borders and inseparable from the transformation of
Identities (Wallis 2008, 9).

12. Technoscapes flow
• Through deterritorializing culture, space,
place, and time, they necessitate new modes
of conceptualizing agency, autonomy, social
change, and power dynamics (Wallis 9).
Appadurai states, “The new global cultural
economy has to be seen as a complex,
overlapping, disjunctive order that cannot any
longer be understood in terms of existing
center-periphery models.”

13. Appadurai’s Effect 1. Pervasiveness of e-media
create new resources for “the construction of
imagined selves and imagined worlds” and “for
experiments with self-making”

14. Appadurai’s Effect 2: Mass migration, when
combined with the “rapid flow of mass-
mediated images, scripts, and sensations,”
produces a “new order of instability in the
production of modern subjectivities.” In other
words, Meimei acquires aspirations.

15. What does
Meimei
want?

16. Wandering Meimei, an interactive app from Dagongmei Productions

17. Sanmao Liu Lang Ji (1935) by Zhang Leping:
The genre of lizhi, inspirational and encouraging stories or tales
of courage, bravery and strength, is the logical choice.

18. The Water Margin (aka Outlaws of the Marsh) by
Shi Naian (1589) provided structural inspiration

19. Yingsao Fashi (營造法式; 1103) by Li Jie
"Treatise on Architectural Methods or State Building Standards"

20. This work summarized 1,000 years of earlier architectural writings and
provided the foundation for an unchanging model for architecture for the next
900 years based mostly on personal interviews with craftsmen. It is to
architecture what Herodotus’s Histories is to historical writing.

26. Gish Jen explains in Tiger Writing, her father’s
Confucian autobiography places his house
before himself
• My father calls it simply “the biggest and best house
in the town.” It was, he writes,
• “enclosed inside of a[ n] 8 foot [high] white wall, the
front [of which had] a set of 8 doors on South Main
Street. Once [in] a while, one of these door[ s would
be] open. As you walk thru the door [there] was an
open court yard and two rooms [,] one [to] each side.
The right side room ha[ d] another door to South Main
Street which was open all the time . Then a hall,
[which] open[ ed to] the courtyard. The back side of
the hall [also had] two doors. On … [those] doors
[were] posted [the] 8 words [that were] … the middle
names for our 8 generations. These two doors [were]
also closed most of the time.”

29. The wooden mechanisms that keep the house stable
function like giant springs in the rafters. The heavier the
roof, the sturdier the structure.

30. Yingsao Fashi reveals elaborate use of literary
metaphors (traceable in Northern Song
contemporary writing) related to tree branches
and flowers (Feng 2013).

31. This reveals not that craftsmen were aristocracy but that
widespread literacy was the reality during the Northern Song
Dynasty, the era when printing was invented (Feng 2013).

33. The genius in the design of the Chinese house is not the
metaphorical naming. The naming is apt because the house
literally reuses the engineered structure of organic forms in
nature to build buildings that won’t fall down.

34. Feng Shui is integral to complete the structure. The use of
the compass maximizes how much light enters during
each season and ensures that the structures are naturally
heated in winter and naturally cooled in summer.

39. The work has text and video and interactive features,
including SMS, QR Codes, locative attributes, puzzles to
be solved, and data to be input in order to move the story
forward.

42. Dagongmei Productions, June 2014

43. Contact:
carolyn.guertin@gmail.com