CW: rape, murder
Dear friends,
Two falls ago, in 2019, a poem visited me in a feverish burst after I woke to the stink of blood on my pillow—my ear having swallowed its piercing during the night. The cannibalization of my own body felt fitting for the heartache I felt at the time. A foreign sharpness lodged in the flesh.
At the time, I was freshly fascinated with exiled Chinese poet Gu Cheng’s poems and grappling with his violent legacy. His poem “一代人” “A Generation” is my father’s favorite poem, he often recited the couplet to me:
“黑夜给了我黑色的眼睛,我却用它寻找光明”
“Black eyes gave me black eyes, but I use them to seek the light.”
True to its title, this simple poem, written in 1979, permeated the Chinese consciousness in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution and influenced a whole generation. It became shorthand to say what cannot be said, taking on socio-political significance, most recently in the Hong Kong protests. It was also my first introduction to contemporary poetry, to the power of poetry to express the unsaid.
However, Gu Cheng also left behind a complicated, violent legacy—he is a rapist and a murderer. After becoming a leading “Misty Poet” —the most influential modernist Chinese poetry movement—he exiled himself to Waiheke Island, Aotearoa, (which he named 激流岛, Isle of Fast Flowing Waters) with his wife Xie Ye, where he lived a life of poverty, dreaming he had found Walden.
Examples of his eccentric survival: To make money, he painted portraits of the islanders, but ended up paying the islanders to sit for more portraits. He taught Chinese at a local university but would stay silent the whole class waiting for his students to speak (all the students quit the class). He was also staunchly prideful of being Chinese, and believed anything in English to be inferior, refusing to learn a single word — which is to say he made Xie Ye learn English and deal with life on the island. He famously wore a hat made out of a pant leg to protect his thoughts from the invasion of white men.
When Xie Ye gave birth to their son, Xiao Mu Er, Little Wood Ear, he was so jealous of his son that he forced her to give him away to a local Māori family, and forbade her from visiting him. He lived in a dilapidated house without running water and electricity, writing experimental work that would influence generations of poets to come, including the long, strange, stream of consciousness, erotic book length poem, Ying’er: Kingdom of Daughters, about the eponymous woman he brought to live with his wife, to live out his polyamorous fantasy of Dream of the Red Chamber—but it is also a misogynist projection of Ying’er, who he raped, and who eventually escaped to marry a white martial arts instructor.
I am more interested in the story of Xie Ye, who transcribed and organized the Ying’er manuscript, and who played a pivotal role as an editor of his poetry, who is a brilliant poet herself but—like most “muses” of males—could not pursue her own writing due to the dependency and jealousy of her husband. In her afterword of Ying’er, she writes a 篇外篇 “story outside of story,” “你叫小木耳” “Your Name is Little Wood Ear”— a prescient, heartbreaking letter to their son Xiao Mu Er (who no longer understood Chinese) longing to be known.
How does his story end? After Ying’er’s abandonment, Gu Cheng’s mental state unraveled. In 1993, he murdered Xie Ye with a knife and then hung himself—news which exploded the Chinese-speaking world, renewing interest in his work, and also fueling a societal portrait of poets in exile.
It is holding all of this violence that I wrestle with my fascination with his poetry, and the stakes of referencing him in my own work—how do I reference his poems’ undeniable influence on Chinese poetry (and my own imagination) while de-centering Gu Cheng the poet, and holding his poetry accountable for his violence? Is such a distinction possible?
I had to begin with my father and the language of Xie Ye—I also had to begin with my ear, eating itself on my pillow. A sort of dream logic led me again and again to Xie Ye’s life, to the imagined life of Little Wood Ear and the Generation of Ears who were called to “A Generation” which rang in my ears as I attempted to get my ear to spit itself back out—that morning, I wrote this twelve page poem, the longest poem I have ever attempted.
I do not have the right to speak for Xie Ye, or to place her life next to my own. I do not want to speak for Gu Cheng or for my poem to utter his name. So I start at the beginning, with a cast of characters. I hope you will read it:
You can read the rest here, in the newest issue of Narrative, along with wonderful poems by Nadra Mabrouk, Ghinwa Jawhari, Will Frazier, and more.
Here is what I said about the poem in an interview with Ligeia:
With all of these big ideas in mind—memory, responsibility, censorship, the pandemic, the potential power of words, and the things we pass on to others—what role do you think poetry can play in times of such intense global unease as this? Can it be a way for an individual to “speak out loudly”?
I inherited the belief in poetry from my parents, though they did not have a literary education and are by no means of the “literary” world—but it was with them that I learned how one turns to poetry when at a loss for words, how poems lend us language. I recently watched Ai WeiWei’s documentary “Coronation,” which was made with footage secretly filmed during the Wuhan Covid lockdown. There’s a scene that struck me deeply: an elderly woman holding her son’s urn on a park bench, suddenly throws her head back, howling a tuneless elegy. I’d never heard the song before, couldn’t even make out the words, yet something inside me recognized it. Her spontaneous, unmediated grief called to something beyond language. Poems, too, imprint onto our tongues so we can reach past the realm of meaning in moments of desperation, holding us when there is nothing else to be said.
Through our private utterances, poems ripple into the public, collective consciousness—which makes me think of what a poem can say outside of ordinary language. In my poem “On The Isle of Fast Flowing Waters” (cut from the chapbook due to its length), I riff off a line that my father—and others in his generation—always quote: ”Black night gave me black eyes, I use them to seek the light,” from ”A Generation” by the exiled poet Gu Cheng. Like its prophetic title, the poem awakened a whole generation in the 90s into social and political consciousness. It has been quoted in countless protests since then to say what cannot be said and was recently sprayed onto the walls of the Hong Kong protests.
Of course, I do not think poems should fall into this realm of symbolism, like how that poem became a shorthand against oppression, against the state’s silencing. What is important when reading poetry is how it stirs us into recognition of another. What is loud, then, is not necessarily its public outcry, but the clang of its aftermath echoing inside our bodies and memories. It is the deep recognition of another consciousness, of “you, too” and then, the awareness of me—us.
I hope you are taking care and staying safe, and please feel free to write to me if you have any thoughts on anything I have written. My thoughts are, as always, half-formulated, soft, and open.
I will end with this image from the recent cover of New Yorker, please stay safe and take care of each other, my fellow Asian friends.
with love,
JinJin