A soul on wings

Yu Xiuhua takes a break between media interviews on her bed and uses QQ on a cellphone.

At the age of 19, her parents married her off to someone she was not in love with. This experience left her with painful memories－and a son who is now in college. In 2012, she traveled to another province to search for a job. Because she was slow with work, not only did she fail to make money but she could not even recoup her traveling expenses.

Yu reads and writes poems in the same way that her fellow villagers play mahjong. She takes on some light jobs, such as shushing away chickens from the barn floor, but she invariably turns inward, as is shown in this poem: "After the birds and chickens left, the sky's blue shortened/In this village deep inside central Hubei/The sky forces us to gaze at its blue/As our ancestors force us to gaze at our innermost narrow void/Forces us to enter September's abundance/We are comforted by our smallness, and hurt by it/Such living sets one at ease."

While she has accepted her physical limitations, she does endure physical pain, which is entwined with mental agony. In I Please This World With My Pain, she writes: "When I notice my body, it has gotten old and beyond recovery/Many parts ache in turns: the kidneys, the arms, the legs, the fingers/I suspect I have done evil in this world/I have spoken ill of blooming flowers. I suspect I have fallen for the night/And ignored the morning/Fortunately some pains can be omitted, deserted/And collected by loneliness and longtime desolation/These I'm ashamed to mention: I have not been/Good enough to them."

In the eyes of her neighbors, Yu has a bad temper, which she attributes to her discomfort in her living environment. She is not understood by her family or her fellow villagers and those who get to know her online would leave once they see her in person. Gradually she starts to use a form of brutal honesty as a defense mechanism.

Maybe because she did not have an audience－until recent weeks, that is－she vents her frustrations, including sexual ones, in her lines. The poem that startled many is the one titled Cross Half of China to Sleep You, which is her fantasy of online dating, using "sleep" as an ungrammatical verb for fly-by-night sexual relations. "Actually it's not that different I sleep you or you sleep me, but just/Two bodies clash with a ferocity that opens up a flower/Which simulates a spring that misleads us about the reopening of life."