【About the Book】

 

In 2014, Yu-Hsuan Wu returned to her hometown of Chishang to teach poetry to children in a rural community. While living close to the mountains and fields, she found herself unable to write—confronted with a landscape so rich and intimately tied to her lineage, she felt that existing artistic languages were inadequate.

 

Faced with nature, she set down her pen and began to observe in silence, training herself to see things precisely as they were. A year later, she discovered she could enter the inner life of a dead branch or a mountain, effortlessly midwifing their emergence into language.

 

This collection of 99 short essays documents Wu’s efforts to rediscover language—a new form of rebirth writing that enabled her to articulate the immediacy of nature and the quiet rhythms of everyday life. She came to understand that to truly resonate with the natural world, one must repeatedly shed the self and return to a space of emptiness. Only by releasing the grip of cognition and distinction could she begin to touch the infinite within herself through the boundlessness of nature.

 

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【Author’s Note】

 

During my year and a half in my hometown, I often surrendered myself to the wilderness, hoping to attune to its innate intimacy.

 

I stayed outside, watching attentively. I refrained from thinking or interpreting—so that language would not stand in the way. When I slipped

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

into a crevice and sensed all things responding as one, I shed another layer of skin. Gradually, I grew a body and mind capable of waiting for things to emerge.

 

As the landscape came together, I dissolved into it—walking the earth as one of its own.

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【Selected Works】

 

Encroachment

 

On the skin just beneath my collarbone, a small pink lump surfaced—like my father’s island, breaking through the tides of time, rising on my horizon seventeen years after his death. And so, we came to share the same island.

 

They say it can drift and migrate. I began a daily ritual before the mirror, patrolling this smooth, pink islet with my hands and eyes. I stroked it, pressed it, stirred the waters around it, learning how each crease and rise of the land formed under shifting light and shadow.

 

Before long, the outline of the island bent. The terrain began to shift. The once-soft soil thickened, as if searching for a posture to permanently inhabit.

 

It is my father’s burial mound, erected on my chest.

 

So weightless, it hardly holds anything. Like all graveyards, it is occupied by emptiness. That too was what my father repeatedly pointed out to me—what lies near, and what lies far.

 

When I was little, my father called me into the bathroom, its light still on. It sat tucked beneath the staircase, bent in shape, bathed in a yellow glow—like the temptations of a devil. Above the wooden door was a frosted glass pane, letting in a bit of aging sunlight. He pointed to a rinsing cup: it had three shadows. I could not see the body of light, but I saw how it gave a single object shadows of varying depth, length, and direction.

 

There was no face there. And yet it touched me.

 

When I was even younger, my father lay down with me on the riverside levee. I stared at the blue sky. Nothing happened. What was there to see? Aside from the occasional bird darting by, or a slow-drifting cloud, it was simply an expanse of pure azure. We returned to that same spot every day, lying down together beneath the same sky, keeping watch over the same silence. Only after a long, long time would we get up and go home. Father—what was it you wanted me to see?

 

I never asked. I simply opened my eyes and looked—looked for a long time, not in search of anything. The longer I looked, the more I saw the air spiraling in the light, falling toward me bit by bit, then vanishing. My gaze peeled open the floating bodies of air, and the sky descended in front of me—so weightless, it had almost no mass. It shrank to fit inside my eye, or perhaps I was the one swallowed by its vastness—there was no way to tell. I held my breath, afraid of being separated from it.

 

Later I learned: that wasn’t air. Just as I would later learn: emptiness is not the absence of everything. But did my father know the sky would stay, encroaching upon me? I write poems now, and I dance, as if still watching that sky—gazing and gazing, into the hidden and profound within the ordinary. It is the borderless embrace between the world and myself.

 

When I returned to my father’s hometown, I lay down in the fields each day, watching the sky reach out through the light, offering its tiny brilliance. I shifted my focus back and forth—sky, dust, sky, dust—and realized they were not different at all. Only then did I begin to understand: both nearness and distance point to me. Fineness and vastness are not out there—they reside within my body.

 

What my father wanted me to see was not what the sky contained, but the act of seeing what contains nothing—without the need to conquer or name. It is in patiently keeping watch over the awareness of emptiness that the sky emerges, that the first word of a poem arises, that the first movement of the body stirs.

 

And only when that sky, that word, that movement arise within me—only through their answering pulse—can I step out from emptiness and walk the earth, toward an island that will surface only in the future, where in every fold of its encroachment, I will come to recognize myself—everywhere. So weightless, it holds emptiness—and all that ever was.

 

 

【Reviews & Reflections】

 

“Living in Nowhere speaks of ‘a place of dwelling’—‘a vast space never granted to me, an unrelenting pressure to take on shape’—a place that can receive the self, silent and unembarrassed.”

 

—Sharky Chen, “Mountains Move: On Debussy Forest and Yu-Hsuan Wu’s Living in Nowhere”

 

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“Living in Nowhere is a book of being en route—it is the sum of all the poetic sites she has moved through. Thus, ‘living in nowhere’ is liberated from its surface meaning of having no fixed abode, transforming instead into dwelling in nothingness. To have nothing, and so contain everything.”

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—Shen Mo, “She Moves Poetically”

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【Book Launch & Performance】

 

Rather than launching her new book in a bookstore, in 2016 Yu-Hsuan Wu invited a group of unfamiliar readers to journey with her to her hometown. Together, they wandered through the fields, captured the poetic essence of dawn beside a pond, and composed poems through movement—barefoot on open grasslands.