A migrant worker's 12-year relationship with a local institution underscores the social importance of libraries

It was dusk in late November in subtropical Guangdong province. Cool winds had dispersed the perennial shrouding humidity.

In the well-lit sitting room of a bungalow in an alley in Nancheng town of Dongguan, Wu Guichun, 54, was eating a 15-yuan ($2.3) takeaway dinner on a desk. It consisted of a box of steamed rice, a box of vegetables and three kinds of stir-fried meats as well as a boiled pickled duck egg.

The place belonged to a shoe factory owner whom Wu had known for 17 years since he arrived. Normal rent was 500 yuan a month, but Wu lived here temporarily free of charge.

The only furniture in the sitting room was a desk and a stool. Under the desk were a pair of dark navy blue plastic slippers and a pair of canvas shoes of the same color, all the shoes he owned besides the black leather ones on his feet, he said. For years, Wu had been a minimalist with his belongings, given that he was always having to move, he said.

The most expensive clothes he had ever bought was a 600 yuan suit he wore when going on a reading show on China Central Television in October.

Standing against the right side of the desk was a jar of liquor, inside which swollen scarlet wolf berries were soaking. It also used to contain reishi mushrooms and sea horses, too, he said. A disposable clear plastic cup was sat upside down on the jar's lid. He always had one cup every evening during supper, he said.

"All through these years, my only partner has been this drink," he said.

A door led to the bedroom, where there was a bed, a closet and a dressing desk. Wu looked for another stool for himself without success so eventually emptied a white plastic paint bucket, turned it upside and sat on it.

In June, Wu, one of 6 million migrant workers in Dongguan, became an instant celebrity nationwide after working there for 17 years because of comments he had made about the city's main library, comments that millions found both touching and inspirational after they made their way onto the internet.

Wu, from Xiaogan, Hubei province, said he first came to Dongguan to look for opportunities in 2003 after his wife left him.

Dongguan, which many know as "the Factory of the World", has attracted young people from all over the country. The most popular employees in the early 2000s were young women aged about 20, popular because of their energy and their deft fingers, most working in the city when labor-intensive light industries held sway.

As a result, Wu, 37 at the time, was deemed too old for these manufacturing behemoths and had to look for opportunities in small shoe factories, where his job was to put glue on shoe parts.

In those days, when pork cost 10 yuan a kilogram, a fraction of what it costs now, Wu had a monthly salary of 3,000 yuan, which grew to more than 10,000 yuan in busy periods. In recent years he has been happy to receive 5,000 yuan a month.

Wu was thrifty, eschewing gambling, dining or entertaining, saying:"If I was free and easy with my money who was going to support my son and father? I'm sure I would have regretted it for the rest of my life."

Instead, he came across a very cheap form of entertainment.

At first he bought cheap books, but in 2008 started going to Dongguan Library, a 20-minute walk from where he usually lived.

There the conditions were pleasant, there was access to water, you could read anything you liked and, best of all, it was free.

Over the past 20 years, as Dongguan's importance as a manufacturing center has grown, its GDP has risen 20-fold to 950 billion yuan. As the economy has grown the city has tried to improve people's cultural lives.

In 2002 a library covering 45,000 square meters was built, the largest of its kind for a prefecture-level city in China.

Two years later the city set about building an extensive library network, opening branches around the city. A bus library delivers books to different towns every day so that workers in factories can borrow or return books without traveling long distances.

In 2005 Dongguan Library started offering services 24 hours a day, believed to be a first in China.

It also began organizing free lectures and classes that would help migrant workers to pick up professional skills such as lathing and milling, courses that are now also available online.

Six years after this great literary adventure began, the American Library Association bestowed on Dongguan Library the International Innovation Award for its services, the first winner of the award outside the United States.

Wu, who had ended his formal education as a primary school student in grade three, was one of the library's hundreds of thousands of registered members at the time of the international accolade.

At the start he was barely literate, having to look up characters in a dictionary to understand newspapers, fiction and history books, he said. In this way he eventually finished reading ancient classics such as A Dream in Red Mansions and Record of States in the Eastern Zhou Dynasty, two of his favorites books.

"Confucius, Mencius, Chuang Tzu and other figures in Record were among the wisest masters in ancient times, contributing a lot to China's development even after their eras," he said.

Gradually, his vocabulary grew, and after 12 years he is a quick reader, devouring at least six books a month.

In most of his years in Dongguan, adhering to his thrifty ways, Wu, unlike hundreds of millions of other Chinese, did not return to his hometown for Spring Festival.

"I didn't have a home to go back to, but I could easily have gone and stayed with my brother. But that would have meant spending at least 5,000 yuan. In Dongguan I spent the days reading in the library and slept at the place of a friend who had gone back home. I cooked for myself, too, so in 10 days I spent no more than 100 yuan."

Asked if he was lonely, Wu gazed at the questioner and blushed after downing half a cup of his curative liquor.

"My son's all I've got. I earn money for him or I die. Forget about loneliness; it's no big deal. Of course there's meifeng jiajie beisiqin (a poetic line referring to missing one's family especially during festivals). But no matter how hard life is, I just need to get on with it so I can save money for my son."

Then, as his eyes became watery, Wu added:"After all, books teach me that loneliness is my fate."

In January last year Wu unusually went back home for the Spring Festival. He did not return until June because of the COVID-19 lockdown. However, the pandemic had reduced orders for shoes, so many shoe factories had closed, and he, like many migrant workers, decided to return to his hometown.

On June 23, a Wednesday before the Dragon-Boat Festival, Wu, aware that he might never return to Dongguan, went to the library to return his 12-year-old library card and get his 100 yuan security deposit back.

Librarians at ground-floor reception were inundated with similar requests at the time, and had a few thousand yuan of cash on hand at the desk every day, Wang Yanjun, a librarian, said.

The day Wu went there, Wang, on staff since 2004, was at the reception desk, where she also worked on Mondays and Fridays, otherwise working on the third floor. One of the most popular programs she had organized, in the year she started working there, was free Cantonese lessons.

"Our chief librarian requires us to take the receptionist shifts to know better about our users," she said.

She often saw Wu at the library, and the two had discussed at length A Dream of Red Mansions written by Cao Xueqin in the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), both having read it three or four times.

"But our views on the novel are very different," Wang said."I understand it from an aesthetic perspective, about private lives in ancient times, but he looks at it from a political angle."

That Wednesday when Wu went to the reception desk his 12-year-relationship with the library, its books and its staff loomed large in his mind. Taking out the card and rubbing it against his shirt, he thought again about what he was about to do. One hour passed before he finally made his decision.

Wang, sensing his hesitance as she took care of the paper work, took out the library's comments book and asked Wu to leave a comment.

"I've worked in Dongguan for 17 years, and been reading at this library for 12 years," he wrote."Books enlighten people with only benefits. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a lot of factories have closed, migrant workers cannot find jobs, and we choose to go back to our hometowns. Thinking about all my years in Dongguan, the best place for me has been the library. As much I want to stay, I cannot, but I will never forget you, Dongguan Library. All the best for the future. Enlighten Dongguan and enlighten migrant workers."

Another librarian, moved by the comment, took a photo of it and posted it online, and before long it was doing the rounds of the internet and moving many more people.

"Before long many more people were using the library and applying for membership," Wang said.

"I'm very proud of my librarians," Li Donglai, the chief librarian, said in an article in the academic periodical Library and Information Service.

"We've tried to create a good working environment and atmosphere. Librarians can work hard and enjoy a rewarding life. The goal is to nurture peaceful, friendly, wise and respectable librarians.

"Wu Guichun is not an accident or an aberration but rather the result of years of professionalism and the idea of equal service, which has been widely adopted by libraries around China."

On a Wednesday afternoon, more than half the seats in Dongguan Library were taken by readers. Many were studying English, law, and finance for examinations. Others were reading literature and studying courses online.

In the reading room on the ground floor four people sat before a long desk. A young man wearing a white shirt was reading an English book. A gray-haired man in coffee-colored coat, his gray trousers rolled up to the knees, was reading a book with a red cover. A pair of sports shoes lay nearby, his bare feet on the floor.

For years libraries in China have promoted an ethos of being open to all. In 2016 a reader suggested that Hangzhou Library in Zhejiang province stop people who earned a living by collecting street junk from entering because their clothes were dirty and they smelled.

In response, the chief librarian, Chu Shuqing said: "I have no right to stop them reading here, but you have the right to leave."

Dongguan Library had similar complaints. "We have toilets upstairs, but it would be disrespectful to ask them to wash themselves, so we simply asked complainants to move to other seats," Wang Yanjun said.

She recalled the instance of a mother and daughter showing up in the comic library, the girl 5 or 6, her clothes dirty and her hands soiled.

The mother told Wang she had been the victim of beating by her husband, and she and her daughter had fled the family home. The librarians took pity on them and began to buy meals for them and allow them to stay in the 24-hour library during nights.

They stayed in the comic library for more than a week until Wang asked the woman whether they should help her to contact social workers. The woman smiled, and the two disappeared the next day.

Ten years has passed, and Wang says she has often thought about them, blaming herself for handling the matter poorly.

"Perhaps I shouldn't have mentioned social workers," she said.

In an article titled Library: Warmth and Hope, Li wrote: "For many marginalized people in cities, public libraries offer not only an intellectual and spiritual haven, but are a physical shelter as well."

Wu said reading has greatly changed him. "Reading gives me a lot of help in terms of personality, mentality and vision. Otherwise I'd be a lot more irritable."

In October he went back to his hometown and found that although his granddaughters wanted to read books, there was no book available in the village. So he decided to spend a 6,000 yuan book coupon donated to him and mail all the books back to his hometown. "My current goal is to build a small library for my hometown," he sad.

As a result of the publicity generated by his Dongguan Library comments book entry, Wu eventually received an offer of employment in the city, but the job did not work out and he and his employer went their separate ways after four months.

When China Daily spoke to Dongguan Library's most celebrated member in November he had ceased visiting the library because with the fame he had gained he had been inundated with books that people all around the country had sent to him. More recent reports said he had returned to his home province of Hubei.