Wind Passing Through — Yu Xiuhua’s Still Tomorrow
When she appears, the wind is loud. Her body slants; her voice drifts. It takes great, great effort for her to gather herself together and move with the wind. I think of what she once wrote in a poem: that she likes going alone to the riverbed, to look at things cracking open one by one in the wind, or things being restored one by one. Without water, there is no need to imagine its source. She likes to stretch her feet into the cracks of the riverbed and let the silt bury them, unable to pull them out for a long time, as if she had taken root in the earth.
Her directness and her stubbornness are almost another kind of slanting and drifting, formed by the excessive force with which she tries to set herself upright.
Her body twists as she walks through the wheat field, and the wind is loud—the opening shot of the documentary Still Tomorrow catches the essence of Yu Xiuhua’s poetry. What appears so plainly is only the exposed, confessional tone of feeling; it is the roaring, invisible wind, opening and closing around her, that truly holds her lucid insight. Take, for instance, the opening of “At This Moment, Moonlight Falls on the Courtyard of Middle Age”:
A person enters the house, closes the door, blocks the moonlight in the courtyard with a hand
There are already enough stagnant things for one to bear, and more are coming to a stop
The first line strings together three consecutive actions, cutting off one space after another beneath the forward current of time, raising a hand to refuse the covering of light. This person does not close their eyes to keep reality from entering. Instead, they hold fast to a minute space of self-confinement, taking an active position within passive confrontation. The more the space of reality contracts, the more the space opened by their resolve expands.
The concrete image outlined in the first line arrives at the second line and suddenly turns an external phenomenon inward, shifting from the depiction of action to the expression of a state of mind. If “stagnant things” refers to an existence as irresistible as the moonlight falling on the courtyard of middle age, then what is “coming to a stop” seems to be the very act of resisting the irresistible. One becomes one’s own enemy.
What she actually writes into being is a hole: a hole made to gather wind, to scrape sound into existence. The blank spaces, pauses, and ruptures in her poems, and the layered reversals between the real and the unreal, light and dark, line after line, quietly muddy the clean, spare words, peeling open deep strata within ambiguity.
The two opening lines alone already branch into abundant meanings, forming tension through the opposition between motion and stillness and the rise and fall of their arrangement. This force continues forward. She writes that “a person is a wasteland.” Occasionally there are tenants, thunder, spring warmth and flowers in bloom; even though the speed of withering is far faster than the resolve to blossom, this person still wants “to tentatively grow grass again, covering the passing soil and water and the magma deep beneath the ground.” Even though this is middle age, even though by now he has everything he should have, still “the wind blows from time to time, and no one sees his panic.”
Panic over what? There are already enough stagnant things for one to bear, and more are coming to a stop, yet he still has to summon strength, to bring forth new blossoming and new withering, refusing to be trapped by middle age. That panic is a struggle against hopelessness, against a force larger than oneself. The wind blows from time to time, striking his wasteland, and also reminding him that there are still things that have not stopped, things worth grappling with body to body.
That resilient existence like a wasteland may well be Yu Xiuhua’s self-portrait. Bent, but unbreakable. Crawling forward, yet never overturned. In the documentary’s crosscutting, she and her hometown, Hengdian, also become mirrors of each other. She and those fields contain cuckoos, sorghum, and daydreams, as well as ice, snow, mudslides, and absurdity. The director films close to the many relationships Yu Xiuhua unfolds with her native land, her mother, her husband, the poetry world, and her readers, showing how she and reality encircle each other and make demands of each other.
She risks being accused of being unfilial and unrighteous in order to insist on divorce. When someone compares her to Emily Dickinson, she says indignantly, “Dickinson is unique, and I, Yu Xiuhua, am also unique.” She refuses dependency and pursues freedom and independence, however ungainly, misunderstood, or unblessed that pursuit may be. As she writes in “A Piece of Waste Paper”:
“What do you care about?” he pressed her again and again
She lowered her head and saw a piece of waste paper in the basket, a few strokes of color drawn on it
a few words smeared there
crumpled. As if it had never
been white
She likes being trapped by lines of poetry, and then exhausting her heart’s blood to find a way out. Like wind passing through, boring its way through all things. When asked what poetry is, she says: “I don’t know, and I cannot say it. It is only emotion leaping, or sinking deep. It is only that when the soul sends out a call, it arrives in the posture of a child. It is only that when a person walks unsteadily through this unsteady human world, it serves as a crutch.” Faced with a reality that cannot be revised, she also reveals an unrevisable will to struggle and an action of breakthrough. This is the most beautiful human form that she and her poetry leave to the world, even if she names it “Floating Dust”:
A drowning person bears a heavy stone. She keeps blowing bubbles
letting light bend inside them, then break, vanish
—this process that has never been revised
She can only keep blowing, blowing with her heart and lungs hollowed out
blowing on credit against fate
—this too is a process that cannot be revised
But forgive her
She pulls the distance into her body, and still there is fear she cannot pass through.