Yang turns briefly to a discussion of the wildly popular Tiny Times film series, noting that the widespread youthful obsession with the films belied the heterogeneous constitution of China’s younger generations—in terms of both economic class, educational background, and location (i.e., urban vs. rural). Yang then shares an anecdote about a trip he took to visit a friend in Dongguan, one of the rapidly developing cities of the Pearl River Delta region of Guangdong province. Though an encounter with violent crime made him fear for his life, he draws upon Benjamin and Engels to contemplate the role the modern city plays in creating the conditions for such a situation. He then shares several poems from a factory worker in Dongguan, showing how they express the individual’s emptiness and self-loathing alongside a seemingly paradoxical conscious drive toward a homogenizing material existence. Finally, he turns to Lu Yao’s novel Life and Yan Lianke’s The Explosion Chronicles to help understand the creation of the new class of “migrant workers” (nongmin gong), the notion of which strangely fuses the categories of peasant and worker. He then relates this to his own experience interacting with and interviewing migrant workers in Dongguan.