Disability cannot stop an honest poet

"If there is a next life, Mother, please let us be strangers," the essay concludes.

"We didn't have an especially close mother-daughter relationship. … Just a faint emotional bond," she said, answering Yi's question about the relationship at the book event.

However, she undoubtedly loves her mother, although her mother criticized her and rarely offered any encouragement, "just like a mountain weighing on me".

She writes in a microblog on Sina Weibo: "After she died, the dewdrops on the tips of the grass dried and gathered, gathered and dried again. It took me five years to slowly gather her back, bit by bit." She spent five years completing the essay about her mother.

In China, writings about mothers often highlight their selfless love and greatness, but Yu says she does not think "great" is the right word for parents.

"Just because they gave birth to you doesn't make them inherently great; they deserve their own lives," she says.

"When I write about my mom, I want to show a different side of her.… I want to portray her as a real person, full of love, hatred, contradictions, and warmth. I want to depict her as a living, breathing woman, not just as my mother," she says.

She says that she is more interested in exploring how a woman lives, especially when she has a disabled daughter.