THE manufacturing city of Dongguan helped a migrant worker find a new job, whose parting from the city’s library touched many netizens.

Wu Guichun, 54, on June 24 left a farewell message in the visitors’ book of the Dongguan Library saying he had been a frequent visitor for the past 12 years while working in the city as a migrant laborer.

“The best time I’ve had in the past years were in the library. I had to leave the city, but I will remember you for the rest of my life,” read the comment by “a farmer-turned worker from Hubei Province.”

“Books are the only things in the world that will never hurt us,” said the message, which went viral on China’s social media as netizens hail the power of reading that transcends social strata.

Wu told Xinhua he started working in Dongguan, dubbed the “world factory” in Guangdong Province, in 2003. He used to buy cheap books from street stands to vitalize his monotonous life that centered around factory work. Later a friend introduced him to Dongguan Library.

His rendezvous with the library continued for the next 12 years. Although Wu only had primary school education, he looked up unfamiliar words in a dictionary .

After losing his shoe factory job during the COVID-19 epidemic earlier this year, Wu had no choice but to return to his rural home. “I felt particularly sad about returning the reader’s card,” he said.

Wang Yanjun, who works with the library, said she saw a man gazing at his reader’s card and murmuring before returning it. After learning his story, Wang asked Wu to write some comments for the library, which were later posted online.

The city government of Dongguan was among those impressed by Wu’s story. It reached out to Wu and invited him back to work as a gardener at a residential compound near the library.

“We wish to bring back someone who is attached to Dongguan, so we sent our staff to negotiate a job for him,” said Zhao Liping with the city’s human resources and social security department.

Wu is satisfied with his new job. “It is less demanding than my previous job, which will give me more time to go to the library.”

Dongguan is known for its dense concentration of factories and the enormous migrant population, who constitute over half of the city’s population. The city library said many of its readers are migrant workers who often wait in long lines before the library opens on the weekend.

(Xinhua)