Zhang himself had been a farmer before attending Beijing University and he had cousins who were migrant workers. "We had finally found someone who really knew Picun," Fu said.
When everything was ready, Fu and other founders made a loudspeaker announcement, telling workers in the village they were welcome to writing lessons every Sunday evening.
Fu remembers one of the group members, Yuan Wei, once told her "I don't know how to write that character."
"Draw a circle instead," she replied.
"Then my paper will be full of circles," Yuan said. But workers love the group.
Wang Chunyu changed his job to work in Picun because of the group. He came to Beijing in 2003 and has worked as janitor, gardener and delivery driver. He wrote a poem about Picun that was adapted into a song by another worker.
Xiao Hai (not his real name) has written more than 400 poems during his 14 years of migrant life, many on the bus home from work. He used lines from John Lennon and Bob Dylan to record his own life.
Workers have their own journal, Picun Literature, in which they talk about love, about life, about their impressions of the city and nostalgia for their family, under different pen names.
Fan Yusu had been active in the group. "She didn't talk much usually, but in class, she liked speaking, sometimes with extravagant gestures," Fu recalled.
"I feel a sense of dignity in this yard," Fan said. "No discrimination here." She attended classes there until she found a job elsewhere in Beijing and had to leave Picun.
BETWEEN LITERATURE AND REALITY
"I am a woman struggling to survive at the bottom of society," Fan said in an interview with a local media in Beijing.
Her younger daughter now studies at a school in Hebei. "She has no chance to study in Beijing. But if she goes back to our hometown, she would not be able to see her mom," she said.
China's reform and opening-up drive started in rural areas in 1978 with collectively-owned farmland contracted to individual families. This freed about 100 million peasants from farm work. A policy change in 1984 first allowed farmers to find jobs in cities but the massive migration of redundant rural laborers did not start until after China decided to move to a market economy in 1992.
According to a report by the National Bureau of Statistics, at the end of 2016, there were 280 million rural migrant workers in China.
Migrant workers and their families face many problems, such as left-behind children and elderly parents, and household registration, or hukou which is a crucial document entitling residents to social welfare in a given city.
Fan once wrote a poem, Monologue of a Migrant Mother:
I only dare to weep in the depths of night
I am a migrant, and so are my daughters
If possible, let me alone face the plight
Leaving my dear children only the happiness
"She is not alone. In fact, Picun is an icon, an example of the life of their group," said their teacher Zhang Huiyu. "They managed to carry on thanks to their literature dreams."
On the back cover of Picun Literature there is a sentence: Without literature our history will not be preserved; without history we will have no future.
Fan Yusu plans to write a novel based on the real stories of her acquaintances, but she is still not confident about writing.
"I have no talent," she said. "I have never dreamed of changing my destiny with a pen. I am used to labor work and will continue to be a migrant worker."
