My Lifelong Bond with Poetry by Changming Yuan
In the winter of 1972, shortly after moving from Lianhuadang, an isolated village in central China, where I grew up as a foster child, to the county town of Songzi, to attend high school, I stumbled upon a tattered copy of Shikan (Poetry Journal). Only then did I discover that there were readings far more engaging than the Chinese textbooks we were given in the village school. From that moment on, I not only “borrowed” poetry chapbooks from the library without permission but even struck a bargain with my Chinese teacher to hand in poems instead of prose for composition assignments.
After graduating from high school and being sent down to work on the Mayuhe Forest Farm on the southern bank of the Yangtze River, I secretly wrote more than twenty poems, which I thought were reasonably good, but every submission I sent out disappeared into void – I didn’t even receive a standardized rejection slip. Utterly discouraged, I set poetry aside until, years later, I wrote poems again while courting the girl who become my wife. After our marriage, I carried with me a collection of 500 love poems to Beijing, where through my thesis advisor’s recommendation, I sought guidance from Du Yunxie, then an editor of Shikan. But before I hardly finished my self-introduction, he mocked me bluntly. Mortified and shamefaced, I left in silence. Back in Tianjin, I devoted myself entirely to scholarship and abandoned all my literary ambitions.
It was not until more than two decades later that my literary dream revived. On the evening of August 6, 2004, the day before I returned to Vancouver after my first and only family tour to Banff, I proposed at our dinner table to climb the hill behind the hotel to get a panoramic view of the landscape, but neither my wife nor my two sons showed any interest. To follow the ancient Chinese tradition popular among literary scholar-officials, I decided to go alone and “climb high to see afar.”
At first, I enjoyed taking this solitary walk at twilight. However, when I was half way to the hilltop, I suddenly felt a strong impulse to yell as hard as possible, like the mad man in Edvard Munch’s famous painting. For God knows how long, I had been hoping to deflate all the negative feelings deposited at the bottom of my heart over the past years, including disappointment, despondence, dissatisfaction, hopelessness, boredom, fatigue, exhaustion, nervousness, anxiety, stressfulness, shame, anger, fear, self-contempt, self-hatred, loss of direction as well as an ever-strong sense of deprivation of love and the loss of meaning, which had made my life so full of hardships it was now only half-worth living at most. To me, this screaming was relaxing enough though it was merely a momentary discharge. Without having done so, I knew that I would explode down the road, like the high tech bubble. Then, standing at a high point on the stiff slope, I turned around and didn’t see a single soul within sight. Accompanied by my own shadow only, I started to sing aloud just as I had done during my first solo patrol as a forest ranger in Mayuhe thirty years before. While singing the old songs that I had most loved to sing as a zhiqing [educated youth during the Cultural Revolution], I became choked with emotions that presented a contrast to my adolescent sentiments. Back then, I was full of hope and energy, prepared to take any tests, endure any physical hardships, and make any sacrifice to secure a rosy future. Whether it was a devil or a deity, I would readily stand up to take the challenge and fight with all my courage and strength should it block my way in any sense. For reasons unclear to myself, I had highest expectations of myself. Naturally, I had felt uplifted and light-hearted even when I faced nothing less than a torture there as a pest controller. But at this antlike moment, after all that I had gone through, despite all the achievements I had made in this world, I found myself downgraded lamentably to a petty, poor and powerless money-making machine, running endlessly without any lubricant or maintenance. At age forty seven, my heart had long since become overfilled with every kind of negative feeling. Such striking psychological contrast was so bitterly ironical that the more I sang the songs like a braying donkey, the harder I found it to hold back my emotions. Then and there, I broke down finally, shivering violently with sorrow, anxiety and despondency, deeply worried that my life would soon come to a meaningless end before I could find meaning in it. For the first time in my entire life, I was so overwhelmed with fear and self-pity I could not stop crying until I totally collapsed. In so doing, I somehow got a refreshing sense of relief. Perhaps I had just gone through a process of Aristotelian catharsis, like those who were watching a heart-wrenching tragedy? Probably. I knew that I was the most serious and most sympathetic audience of my own tragedy, so I was the one most touched.
As I climbed to the hilltop, I found myself standing in the heart of a copse of tall pines, a scene so strangely familiar or familiarly strange, which made me feel as if I’d returned to Mayuhe as a ranger patrolling alone. Quite lost between memory and reality, I felt an increasingly stronger urge to write something. With neither a pen nor any paper in hand, I desperately looked around and luckily found a broken pencil beside a rock as well as a faded piece of poster in a ditch. As it was getting darker, I squatted down against a tree and began to compose my very first poem in Canada. Probably because I thought of the title “The Lonely Climber” first in English, I used English rather than my mother tongue as my chosen language of expression. For the record, here’s the piece, however clumsy or lousy it was:
The Lonely Climber
You are tired, terribly tired,
Tired of climbing alone,
For too long,
Along an unknown path near Mt Quazilla.
Your sons refused to join you;
They don’t like your company.
Your wife laughed at your idea,
Unable to share your eccentricity.
Your fellow tourists are relaxing
In their cozy rooms in the villa,
Indifferent to your intent or interest.
You spotted a muffin-colored rock,
Wondering if it is the philosopher’s stone
Or what Nuwa used to mend the sky.
Encountering a deer,
You sang above the top of your voice
To release your feeling against the clouds
But the echo scared her away,
Reminding you of your loneliness and tiredness
***
I have been hoping
To get my own vision of the world
Beyond the hills and mountains,
But each time I climbed onto a little ridge,
I found another one just ahead of me.
I stopped, hesitated and looked back,
More times than I can remember;
I know there is nothing for me on the peak,
Except a few wild plants,
Or a new branch of an old tree.
No matter what, I kept climbing,
Driven more by the inertia of life
Than by my own free will.
***
It is not a question of
Climbing or not climbing;
Nor a choice between two roads:
He will eventually see
No road, no human footprints.
“When there are more people climbing
There will be a path,” as someone had said
On the other side of the earth.
All he tries to do is to forget
The human world with all its frustrations
Hardships and boredoms.
Even if he can never escape,
He can leave all negativities down there
At the foot of the mountain
At least for now.
I finished the last line at 8:35 pm when a shower began out of the blue. So, I quickly put my poem in my pocket and ran down all the way to my hotel.
I had no slightest idea if I was going to scribble more pieces in English after this incident, nor did I feel like going on to pursue my forlorn dream to become a serious poetry author; however, I knew that this improvisational work had a special significance to me, not because it marked something unique in my career as a student and teacher of English as a second language, but because it documented my most intensive feeling at a most unforgettable moment in my entire life.
In the following week after I return to Vancouver, I turned out several more pieces not as an exercise for the improvement of my writing skills, but as a way to blow off some steam. As I continued tutoring around all over the city, I came to see poetry writing as an unfailing way of getting some peace of the mind. This became clearer after I did some reading about Buddhism and Daoism with a view to obtaining spiritual support that I had been looking for in recent years. However, I realized that the prose work by Lin Qingxian, a renowned writer from Taiwan, was much more readable and intriguing than any other Chinese books I could borrow from the local library. In particular, I found the chan element in his writing both spiritually soothing and literarily entertaining.
Meanwhile, I thought of John Keats’s sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” a poem I had taught at the University of Saskatchewan, and got a more sympathetic understanding of how the young English poet felt about the spiritual pleasure that he had experienced in reading the great epic for the first time. Of course, Lin’s prose sketches were incomparable to Homer’s epic in a literary sense, but I did find Lin’s writing as inspiring to me as the poetic elements in Chapman’s translation work to Keats. With this new discovery, I began to see poetry not merely as a reading material of general interest, but as my personal salvation, my soulmate or my most helpful psychological therapy. Whenever I felt my soul wandering lonely as a cloud in the wasteland or lost in nowhere between misery and darkness, I turned to poetry, where I could find some light, warmth, peace as well as a cozy dwelling place for my inner self, whether I was engaged in writing or reading it.
By the end of the year, I had written as many as three dozen poems, ranging thematically from philosophical musings over my own life experiences to the most ancient myths in Chinese history. On the Christmas day, I decided to take a few hours off to do something about my poetic work. After selecting those I considered best written, and printing out twenty copies of them, I mailed them out without letting anybody know it, just as I had done in Mayuhe as a teenager. Several months later, I received a rejection slip, and then more and more, but this did not really discourage me; instead, I felt quite encouraged because I got some responses at least. Given my early shameful experience with Chinese editors, I found that though standardized, a rejection in print was much more comforting than total ignorance.
As I doodled additional poems in English, I kept refining and sending them out secretly whenever I had time, until sometime in May, 2005, when I finally received my very first acceptance letter in my whole life. It just so happened that on my wife’s birthday, my contributor’s copy arrived with a ten-dollar cheque from Byline, a small US-based literary press. When I took my wife and children to Number 9, our family’s favorite restaurant, to celebrate her anniversary as a rule, I presented the magazine with the cheque to her as a birthday gift. This is my first poem ever published:
South China Cicada
no human ear has ever heard of you
cloistering yourself deep in the soil
silently sucking all sounds from roots
for more than thirteen years in a row
until high up on a summer painted twig
you slough off your earthly self
pouring all your being in a single song
before the sun sets for the yellow leaf
Knowing nothing about the contemporary North American poetry scene, I believed it was sheer luck for me to get my English poems occasionally accepted. To gauge my true level of skill, I sent my work to a veteran American poetry critic as advised by my newly made poet-friend Koon Woon in 2006. The critic’s response was objective enough, but his conclusion sounded subtly sarcastic to me when he noted how lucky I had managed to get some of my poems published. To prove myself, I ignored my wife’s complaints as well as the ridicule and dismissiveness of others, and kept writing poetry. As time went by, I wrote more and more, averaging over 13 poems a month (one day I drafted as many as 33). I constantly expanded my subject matter and pursued diversity and innovation in style and form. To date, I have published poems in over 2,000 English-language publications across 52 countries and 16 solo poetry collections. Some of my works have been recommended as reading materials for colleges and high schools, and others have been included in various “best” poetry anthologies. I have been nominated for the American Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net multiple times; in 2022, I was even invited to serve on the poetry jury for the 44th Canadian National Magazine Award. Looking back on my 20-year writing career, I’ve gone from a poor village boy who didn’t start learning the English alphabet until around 19 to becoming probably the most published poetry author from contemporary China in the English speaking world. The most important contributions I have made are 1/ I invented what I call “bilinguacultural poetry,” a sub-genre that seemed to have been received quite well; and 2/ I have written and published more love poems than anyone I know, because of my “puppy love” I reencountered in 2019 after nearly fifty years of separation.
As a poetry author, I realize that self-affirmation may be important and necessary, but self-challenging is more rewarding. Still full of self-doubt, I’m not sure if I have true poetic talents, while few of my fellow Chinese-speaking editors or readers have demonstrated any interest in my poetic work. However, I firmly believe that I have a deep bond with English poetry. Seeking neither fame nor money, every time I write, I simply respond to the call of my heart. For me, as for ancient Chinese literary critics, “poetry is an outlet of emotions”!
[Note: This article was based on two personal essays, one titled “My Connection with Poetry,” originally written in Chinese, published in 《世界华人周刊(文学版）旧金山专版第183期》(World Chinese Weekly, literary supplement, Special San Francisco edition, issue 183), the other “Sublimation,” first published in Spinozablue (2024).
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