Scenes of Affliction

How people with illness and disability in China take to city streets to publicize their suffering and seek help

On the streets of every major city in China, people perform stories of poverty, illness, and disability, singing or sitting with written signs to solicit public charity. In Scenes of Affliction, cultural and medical anthropologist Trang X. Ta draws on ethnographic research and media coverage, primarily in Beijing and Guangzhou, to explore how individuals and families—many of them migrants from poor rural villages—publicize their medical plights to seek not only aid but also recognition of their moral worth and human dignity. Their testimonies of adversity and destitution represent a counternarrative to state propaganda about widespread economic prosperity and social progress.

By migrating to cities to seek medical care and public assistance, sufferers are asserting their right to life and a livelihood in the new China. But their continual solicitation and portrayal of need become a form of tragic injury, turning them into entrepreneurs of their own misery. Regarded as vagrants and even criminals, these supplicants constitute a working community engaged in performative labor. As savvy observers of human behavior with a streetwise understanding of the urban infrastructure, they use their bodies, voices, and stories as moral capital to earn a living in spaces hostile to their existence.

With its focus on urban spectacle, registers of moral value, and moments of both despair and resilience, Scenes of Affliction makes an original contribution to the comparative study of vulnerable populations engaged in unacknowledged care and labor.