Disability cannot stop an honest poet

"She can't possibly have that perfect, sweet love to give. She probably wanted a healthy child but ended up with a disabled one, which might have caused some resentment. There's no such thing as perfect or great maternal love, but the love she gave is genuine and undeniable. That's what I want to write about," she adds.

In 1976, Yu was born into a family of subsistence farmers in Hengdian village in Hubei. The physical difficulties due to cerebral palsy led to her dropping out of school after she had just started her third year at senior middle school. Soon after, her mother arranged for Yu to marry Yin Shiping, who was 13 years her senior, to ensure someone would take care of her.

The husband and wife did not get along. Yin worked in other cities, seldom calling Yu. They saw each other only during important Chinese festivals such as Spring Festival, and fought a lot, Yu told media in previous interviews.

Yu reportedly wrote her first poem, Yinhen (literally, Mark), in 1998. She favored the form for its brevity, given her struggles with writing. The poem has been lost, but Yu said in a previous interview that at the time, she kept trying to describe her own life experiences through poetry — she had been "crawling forward in the muddy water".

Yu started writing poems seriously in 2009, knocking out lines with her left index finger. In October 2014, her impactful poem Chuanguo Dabange Zhongguo Qu Shuini (Crossing Half of China to Sleep With You) became a sensation in China. In November that year, the Poetry Periodical ran nine of Yu's poems.

Commenting on her poems, Liu Nian, the journal's editor who discovered Yu, wrote in an article: "Her poetry stands out among female Chinese poets like a murderer in a group of well-bred young ladies — while others are neatly dressed, wear makeup, and are scented with perfume, their words clean and polished without a trace of sweat, hers are raw and gritty, with a smoky intensity. Between her words, you can see the unmistakable stains of blood."

In January and February of 2015, she published two poetry collections: Moonlight Rests on My Left Palm and The Staggering Shaky World. Within two months of its release, Moonlight Rests on My Left Palm went through four reprints. By March of that year, it had sold more than 100,000 copies, becoming the best-selling poetry collection in two decades in China. As soon as she received the royalties, she promptly initiated divorce proceedings, finalizing them in December of that year. She compensated Yin with 150,000 yuan ($22,155).

Over the next 10 years, Yu published two more poetry collections, an essay collection and an autobiographic novella collection, with sales surpassing 2 million copies. Her poems have been translated into various languages, including English, French, German and Spanish. In 2021, a French translation of her poem La Femme Sur Le Toit (The Woman on the Roof) was released. In 2021, the English translation of Moonlight Rests on My Left Palm: Poems and Essays was published by Astra Publishing House.

Since the second year of her marriage, Yu wanted to divorce her husband, but her mother was against it. The unfortunate arranged marriage had been one of the biggest miseries of her life and one of her deepest dissatisfactions with her mother.

"My mom was very hardworking, and I'm sure she loved me too; it's just that her way of showing it was different from what I wanted," she says.

"Honestly, I still haven't fully understood my mother, this woman. I also haven't figured out the true nature of my relationship with her, so I might need more time to think about this subject," she says.

Contact the writer at yangyangs@chinadaily.com.cn