A soul on wings

Yu asks a reporter to pluck off a white hair before a website conducts a video interview with her.

Like Emily Dickinson, the American recluse who scribbled a large body of poems and never published them, Yu writes for herself, baring her soul and employing the language in ingeniously idiosyncratic ways. She describes her father whose "gray hair dare not grow out of his scalp" partly because he looks younger for his age and partly because he has the responsibility to take care of her. (She got only 60 yuan, or $9.60, a month from a government subsidy for the disabled－before royalties started trickling in lately.)

With her sudden fame, press and local officials have trekked to her door, showering her with attention. Her first collection of poems will be published in February. Some netizens express hope that Yu will not lose herself in this maelstrom of publicity. More significantly, the part of her she had so far covered up, willy-nilly, will be revealed to a large readership. Lines like "How much worldly dust can cover up a woman/And her emotions that are bloody yet still shining" could be an irony once she is lured into the writing establishment.

Yu Xiuhua has, for her adult life, used poetry writing as "a crutch that someone walking unsteadily would use in a wavering crowd". But in the eyes of her adoring readers, it provides the wings for her soul to fly.

Diary: I exist only in this

Frogs' songs swell up, yet have my shoes any happiness left of cracking This is the happiness of the taste of a boorish farm woman's freshly harvested wheat and honeysuckle flowers And the taste of sunshine on the pajamas It has been so long since someone knocked onmy door, the path is strewn with withering petals I tumble down this world, and as quietly I'll hide amid a thousand things But sorrow is always so precious: You confirmmy existence So that you'd give me grace, compassion, love, hate and departures Right now, evening primroses trespass the window sill with their fragrance Insects chant high and low. How many people have I met In this world without companions I'm so fecund, heavier than a field of wheat But I lower my head And accept the moonshine over me.

Related: Farmer breathes life into poems