Isolated, she finds peace in poems
Chinese writer says she likes poems because they’re ‘simple and don’t have many words’
HENGDIAN, CHINA— The woman who has become one of China’s mostread poets — even hailed as its Emily Dickinson — spent most of her 41 years in a brick farmhouse tucked away behind trees and surrounded by wheat fields.
Most days, she would limp down a dirt lane to a pond to feed the fish. She cut grass, grasping a sickle with hands that did not always obey her, to feed her rabbits. In the shade near the house, she wrote at a low table, struggling to control her shaking body — a symptom of the cerebral palsy she has lived with since she was born in this village in the central province of Hubei. Then, in 2014, her life changed. “Across China, everything is happening: volcanoes erupting, rivers running dry, prisoners and exiles are abandoned, elk and red-crowned cranes are under fire.
“I brave a hail of bullets to sleep with you. I compress countless dark nights into one dawn to sleep with you.”
That year, Yu Xiuhua posted these lines from her poem “Crossing More Than Half of China to Sleep With You” on her blog and created a sensation. Her poems were discovered by Liu Nian, an editor at Poetry, a leading Chinese literary journal.
Liu wrote about her and reprinted some of her works, and by February 2015 two volumes of her poetry had been published: In Such a Staggering World and Moonlight Drops on My Left Hand.
The latter became the bestselling book of poetry in China in 30 years.
Swarms of journalists descended on her farmhouse, eager to see for themselves the disabled peasant woman who wrote of erotic longing with such startling vividness. She was appointed deputy chair of the Federation of Literary and Art Circles in the nearby city of Zhongxiang. Liu invited Yu to a poetry reading at Renmin University of China in Bei- jing, where she was interviewed by People’s Daily, CCTV and other national news outlets.
Last year saw the release of a documentary about her, Still Tomorrow, by filmmaker Fan Jian, and the publication of another volume of poetry, We Forget That We Loved. This year, she left China for the first time, appearing at Stanford University and other U.S. universities for film showings and seminars.
“I think Yu Xiuhua is China’s Emily Dickinson: extraordinary imagination and a striking power with language,” Shen Rui, a professor at Morehouse College in Atlanta specializing in Chinese literature and feminism, wrote in the preface to Moonlight Drops on My Left Hand.
For the record, Yu says she dislikes being compared with Dickinson, whom she has never read. In fact, her grounding in world literature is somewhat lacking, she said on a recent afternoon at her home in Hengdian.
“I like writing poems, because they’re simple and don’t have many words,” she said, speaking haltingly as her mouth twitched. “This suits me because I’m lazy.” She now lives with her father in a newly built two-storey house, a short walk from their old farmhouse. A recent village renovation razed most of the old buildings and moved residents into new housing, but her family home has been preserved as a tribute to a local celebrity.
She shrugs off the fame and the labels usually applied to her as a writer: female, peasant, disabled. She claims to be indifferent to readers’ reactions.
“Writing poems means facing myself, first and foremost, not facing others,” she said. “It’s to express myself. It’s other people’s business whether they respond to my poems. It has nothing to do with me.”
Born in 1976 in Hengdian, Yu never finished high school. At 19, she married a construction worker 12 years older than her, in a wedding arranged by her parents. At 27, she began writing poetry. “I needed to do something to keep my spirit up,” she said. “Each day, I wrote one or two poems, and I felt I had accomplished something.”
Many of her writings centred on life in her village. In a poem about the wheat her father grew, she wrote: “Your happiness is the brown wheat hull, your pain the white wheat core.”
And often she writes about love and its turmoils. From her poem “I Am Not Alone”:
“I believe what he has with others is love. It’s only with me that it’s not.”
Yu concedes her marriage was not successful.
“I was too young and didn’t understand it,” she said. “I didn’t love him. He didn’t love me. Our characters weren’t at all compatible.”
Yu said of life after her divorce: “This is my best time. I feel great.”
“What is poetry?” she wrote in an epilogue to Moonlight. “I don’t know and can’t tell. It’s when my heart roars, it emerges like a newborn. It’s like a crutch when one walks unsteadily in this unsteady world. Only when I write poetry do I feel complete, at peace and content.”