An explosion of verse

In the 16 years working underground, Chen narrowly escaped death many times, but he could not escape other injuries. One accident caused him to go deaf in his right ear and caused nonstop booming in the left.

Working 10 hours in tunnels no more than 1.8 meters high has resulted in him suffering neck issues, which could lead to paralysis if not treated in time. The dusty working environment caused pneumoconiosis, which will gradually consume his life.

In April 2015, he underwent a vital operation on the fourth, fifth and sixth cervical vertebrae, where metal implants were added to keep the bones in place. Chen decided to use implants imported from the US, although they were more expensive.

"These exquisite pieces, produced in the US, were perhaps made from some of the ore that I helped extract from the pitch-black deep mountains. Transported far away to the US and turned into medical devices, it then traveled back across the ocean and became part of my body," he says.

In 2016, Chen won the first Worker Poet Laureate Prize. Commenting on his poems, the jury said that Chen used poetry to think about the fate of common workers in the globalized world, taking worker poetry to a new height. The cervical operation ended Chen's mining career. In the autumn of 2015, he came to Beijing for a TV program and stayed. After working in Picun for a year, he was introduced to a tourist company in Guizhou province as a publicity staff member.

Since the end of 2017, he started writing a column for The Paper in his free time. In 2018, an article, The Last Ten Years of a Rural Carpenter, went viral online, in which Chen used 6,000 words to write about his father, a carpenter in the countryside.