Disability cannot stop an honest poet

During a night in Beijing, Yu woke to feeling her mother's hands, rough like sandpaper after years of housework and farm work, gently touching her legs. Her mother murmured: "If we can't cure this, will you blame me for bringing you into the world like this?"

Not daring to move or make a sound, Yu tensed her body, replying only in her heart: "How could I blame you? I've been like this since birth, and this is how the world has always appeared to me. I've never thought of blaming anyone."

Yu remembers this as one of the few intimate moments between them in a 30,000-character essay, Caojianshang De Muqin (Mother on the Tip of the Grass), about her mother Zhou Jinxiang, who died in 2016. This homage to her mother is included in Yu's latest essay collection of the same title.