Yi Lei, 1987
Translated by Tracy K. Smith
- Hope Beyond Hope
This city of riches has fallen empty.
Small rooms like mine are easy to
breach. Watchmen pace, peer in,
gazes hungry.
I come and go, always alone, heavy with
worry. My flesh forsakes itself. Strangers’
eyes
Drill into me till I bleed. I beg God:
Make me a ghost.
Fellow citizens:
Something invisible blocks every
road.
I wait night after night with a hope beyond
hope. If you come, will nation rise against
nation?
If you come, will the Yellow River drown its
banks? If you come, will the sky blacken and
rage?
Will your coming decimate the harvest?
There is nothing I can do in the face of all I
hate. What I hate most is the person I’ve
become.
You didn’t come to live with me.
Yeesh. Some of the stuff you post, my friend. I really feel like I can grasp this poem in its entirety until the very last line. “You didn’t come to live with me.” It upends it completely for me, in such a way that I’m left questioning my understanding, reading and rereading it.
Very memorable.
It has a very interesting context! When Yi Lei published this, it was still illegal in China for unmarried couples to live together. That and its acknowledgment (!) of female sexuality made it kind of a scandal in 1987.
It’s also a long-ass poem, and as it proceeds Yi Lei says it becomes less literally about its subject’s desire for intimacy and cohabitation than a criticism of the laws that prohibit them.
Read in that light, it feels like a pretty daring thing to print as a Chinese citizen generally, and a Chinese woman specifically. I imagine it spoke to her national status as a poet that she was able to get away with it, similar to Ai Wei Wei.