Tangled in a Woman’s Body: Reflections on Yu Xiuhua and "Still Tomorrow"
By Lux Chen
Yu Xiuhua always walks alone on the ridges of wheat fields or along the country road outside her house, balancing her uneven steps with open arms. In the harvest season, she imagines herself as a sparrow “holding the blue of the sky in its beak.” After learning of her mother’s cancer diagnosis, Yu never cries in her mother’s presence but instead goes into the fields to reflect. “Several wild strawberries glitter in the dusk / Like the blood clots I coughed out at night.” Yu says, chocking with sobs, “Poetry is my walking stick when I stumble around.”
In the essay “A Room of One’s Own,” Virginia Woolf illustrates the anguish and despair at the heart of women writers’ experience during the Renaissance by conjuring up the tragic fate of Shakespeare’s fictional sister Judith. Although as “gifted,” as “adventurous,” and as “imaginative” as her brother, Judith receives no formal education and hides or burns her writing for fear of reprisal. When she resists a marriage arranged by her parents – the only destiny available for women of her time – her father beats her severely. Driven by the “force of her own gift alone,” she runs away, only to find her interest in theater ridiculed everywhere. In the end, Judith Shakespeare is seduced and impregnated by an actor-manager and commits suicide.
Yu Xiuhua, the subject of director Fan Jian’s documentary Still Tomorrow (摇摇晃晃的人间, 2016) endures a starkly similar fate. Disabled by cerebral palsy at birth, Yu married the much older laborer Yin Shiping at the age of 19 by her parents’ arrangement. When Still Tomorrow starts, their marriage has become a mutual torture. The couple sleep in separate rooms; quarrels and condemnations comprise their only form of communication. Like “Judith Shakespeare,” Yu never finishes high school, writes in her scarce spare time, and hides her writing on her blog. To make things worse, writing further alienates Yu from her husband. The poet laments in the film, “My husband finds it annoying when I write poetry; I find it annoying when he just sits there. The awkward feeling is mutual.”
Yu’s position as a rural woman poet in the age of social media, however, offers her unique opportunities and challenges. In 2015, her poem with the eye-catching title “Crossing Half of China to Sleep with You” was reposted over one million times on Chinese social media, making the poet a national celebrity overnight and inspiring reactions ranging from “China’s Emily Dickinson” to “slut.” With intimate access to the everyday life of the characters, Fan’s empathetic documentary reveals the blood, tears, and dirt behind Yu’s now-celebrated poetry, using excerpts from Yu’s poems to punctuate and advance the story. In particular, the film follows the poet’s struggle for “a room of her own” when sudden fame awakens her self-awareness, boosts her confidence, and brings her potential opportunities for independence and freedom.
Pondering on the agonizing fate of “Judith Shakespeare,” Woolf laments, “Who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?” The tension between a heated and violent “poet’s heart” and a battered and entrapped “woman’s body” also haunts Yu’s life and poetry. Yu’s poetry is born out of her life-long struggle against the entrapments of physical disability, a loveless marriage, rural domesticity, and, above all, patriarchal oppression that suffocates her talents and threatens to bury her alive.
Domestic life, with all the restrictions it imposes on women, imprisons Yu and stifles her creativity. Beneath the tranquil surface of rural mundanity – reaping grass, feeding rabbits, fishing, cooking – Still Tomorrow reveals the harsh reality of overwhelming loneliness and alienation. At family dinners – a recurring scene in the documentary – when her husband and parents discuss scarce job prospects and scarcer income, Yu usually keeps silent and appears out of place. On sleepless nights, a sentimental radio show is her sole companion. A sense of alienation saturates Yu’s poetry, where she laments the “dazzling solitude, unregrettable solitude / It opens itself, opens with pain, pains without a cry.” After another ugly quarrel with her husband, Yu compares herself to a butterfly with broken wings:
She got up, her body filled with sounds of breaking bones
A butterfly breaks a wing, slipping down the leaves of grass.
Yu uses poetry to protest her husband’s physical and emotional abuse. In the eyes of Yin, femininity and disability both condemn his wife to the position of subhuman. In front of his mostly male coworkers, Yin openly ridicules his wife’s “crooked mouth.” A coworker even suggests to him, “Women are pigs. You must cajole them.” In response to such humiliation, Yu depicts her husband’s abuse with cold aloofness as if it were an out-of-body experience:
When he grabs my hair and knocks me over the wall
Little Wizard (Yu’s dog) keeps wagging his tail
Facing someone not afraid of pain, he is powerless.
In the same poem, she also uses bold carnal details to protest her husband’s affair with “A woman in Beijing, prettier than me. . . .They know how to moan and groan in a sweet voice. Unlike me, making no sound, always covering my face.”
Yu yearns for the outside world but finds herself everywhere in chains. Just as disability restricts her body, social prejudices confine her to domesticity and humiliating dependence. Discussions about divorce with her parents are futile since all they care about are “a good reputation” and “a harmonious family.” “If you get a divorce,” Yu’s mother warns her, “your son would be unable to find a wife.” Her attempts to find a job outside the home were frustrated. To a disabled rural woman, the only option in the city seems to be begging, but Yu’s self-esteem forbids her to beg on her knees. In a quietly observant poem, Yu depicts this failed adventure, contrasting the professional beggar’s supple body with her stubbornness:
He knelt in his white beard, kowtowing time and again
To the people hurrying east and west, to the clouds floating south and north
To a vast void
I leaned on my crutches, crouching at the same height as him
Offering neither words nor alms
He lit a cigarette by stealth
I was choked into tears; they smashed onto the ground, keeping dust down
In “Professions for Women” (1931), another Woolf essay, she identifies two challenges in her career as a woman writer: “killing the Angel in the House” and “telling the truth about my own experience as a body.” The “Angel in the House,” named after a character in a Victorian poem celebrating domestic bliss, is not a living woman but a “phantom,” an ideal femininity imagined by patriarchal culture to censor any honest depiction of female experience. “Telling the truth about [her] own experience as a body” also aptly describes the endeavor of Yu Xiuhua’s poetry. The phantoms Yu constantly strives to kill are the demeaning labels imposed on her female body: “peasant,” “disabled,” and “cerebral palsy.”
At the heart of Yu’s “truth about her own body” is the clash between flesh and soul. In an interview, she laments, “I don’t think my body deserves my soul.” In her poetry, she conjures up an able, free, desiring body to match her free-spirited soul, using extravagant imagination to transcend the suffocation of her insular, backwater environment. In one unrestrained poem, she imagines her body containing nothing less than a train:
The train in my body, whose paint begins to flake
It is in no hurry, allowing drunkards, beggars, huskers, or leaders
To get on and off
The train in my body is never derailed
Thus allowing blizzards, tempests, mudslides, and absurdity.
Sensual and carnal desire is at the center of Yu’s “bodily truth.” She is refreshingly candid about her yearning for love and intimacy, boldly visceral about her romantic and erotic fantasy. Eros, in her poetic imagination, is the foundation of vitality and gender equality. Sexuality offers her a channel to assert herself and to transcend her environment. In “Crossing Half of China to Sleep with You,” Yu imagines herself pursuing love across the vast and turbulent landscape of a changing China:
Anything could happen across half of China:
Volcanoes exploding, rivers drying up
Neglected political prisoners and vagrants
Elks and red-crowned cranes running all the way to gunpoints.
On such a vibrant and chaotic landscape, eros connects the lovers, body and soul, on an equal basis:
In fact, to lay you and to be laid by you are the same, nothing
But the force of two clashing bodies, but the flower bloomed under this force.
The uninhibited depiction of the “truth about her own body” brought Yu national fame as well as controversy. When the documentary follows Yu as she faces the outside world, with its elite critics and urban readers, the phantoms of “suffering peasant woman,” “disabled poet,” and “cerebral palsy” begin once again to haunt her by way of the pitifully narrow lens mainstream readers use to interpret her poetry and her life. “Have you experienced true love? What’s your idea of ideal love?” Journalists are more obsessed with Yu’s frustrated romantic pursuits than with her poetry.
At a seminar devoted to Yu’s poetry, literary scholars (who happen to be all male) interpret Yu’s poetry in terms of her humble rural background and her isolation from the mainstream literary scene. For them, Yu embodies the outsider, the recluse, the “madwoman in the attic.” Yu’s candor and sharp wit shine through the mediocrity of every reading, seminar, and talk show she attends, but she remains detached. At one moment, she claims proudly, “There is only one Emily Dickinson; I am equally unique.” At another, she falls asleep on a sofa in the red satin shirt she wears on camera, tossing and turning restlessly as if in a nightmare. She confesses, “I have lost so much in life. I am scared, not knowing where fate would lead me.” While the stereotypes society imposes on her mean nothing in her life, the “train in her body” has finally “crossed half of China” toward an unknown future.
Still Tomorrow punctuates these clichéd discussions and dreary domestic scenes with interludes of Yu roaming alone in the pastoral countryside of central China, immersing herself in nature and solitude. Nature is also a recurrent theme in Yu’s poetry, where the moon, clouds, grass, sparrows, and butterflies acquire lives and spirits of their own, comprising a panorama of what the poet describes as the “love-making of all the things on earth.” Yu’s romantic and erotic desire as a woman and her meditation on life and death are integral parts of this panorama.
It is to nature and solitude that the newly-liberated poet returns at the end of the film. A new year has started. Yu has won another “star of the year” award, but she reflects, “Awards cannot give you lifelong happiness or pleasure”; “sorrow and desolation” still dominate her personal life. The last scene of Still Tomorrow repeats a previous one, in which Yu sits once again at a tiny outdoor desk, typing with rapt attention in the sunshine and early spring wind. In the words of Woolf, Yu has earned the “five hundred a year and a room of her own” necessary for a woman writer to create. Her room is empty now , her notebook ready for new verse.
Lux Chen is a Chinese/English bilingual writer, translator, cinephile, and feminist looking for opportunities. She has published film criticism in Cineaste, The Brooklyn Rail, and dGenerate Films blog, and covered arts and culture in New York for Mandarin Quarterly. She holds degrees from Peking University and UT-Austin and has guest lectured on Chinese cinema at the New School and Emerson College.