Like a drowning man who thinks he can only save himself, sometimes he can't help but push himself into the depths. That's when someone reaches out to you. She grabbed it. As to whether or not she continued to hold that hand afterward and walk away to a faraway place, she didn't have that expectation. Boredom would always come, but she coveted the warmth coming through the palm of her hand at the moment. It made her feel relaxed, happy, and it was a rare moment in her life.
Writing Dai Minjie
Editing Samuel Yang
Photo Dai Minjie
One evening in the spring, Yu Xiuhua put on a white lace dress, held her boyfriend's hand, and went out to walk.
"My body was probably the first to feel the arrival of spring ......," she once wrote, "and the nights felt less cold, and the quilts were sometimes not so tight or necessarily cold. And my body gave birth to a yearning for flesh. All winter it slumbered, and I mistakenly thought I had reached the age of forgetting my desires. And it was an incredible thing that she responded so positively to the trumpet of spring after but a few tentative blows. Spring is also a season to struggle with desire."
Yu Xiuhua has written many times about her body's struggle with desire, and this spring, the poet's desire for spring was fulfilled.On New Year's Day 2022, her boyfriend, Yang Chinkage Ce, announced his romance with Yu Xiuhua on a short-video platform. Yang Chinkage Ce was born in 1990, 14 years apart from Yu Xiuhua, who called him Xiao Yang. This spring, they traveled together in Xiao Yang's hometown of Shennongjia, after which Xiao Yang accompanied Yu Xiuhua back to her home village of Hengdian.
Hengdian village is full of traces of Yu Xiuhua. There are four huge signboards erected at the entrance to the village, with the words "Hengdian Village" occupying one piece, and the names of Yu's three poetry books engraved on the other three. Because of the construction of the new countryside, the lotus ponds, wheat fields, grass and trees have all disappeared. The sensitive poet also notices that the poor birds have fewer places to go and have to converge in a bamboo forest behind the house, "as if there were one or more birds standing on each bamboo. A wide road passes through the village, and on both sides of the road are rows of two-story houses with ABC zoning, which are new everywhere, leaving behind the old house of Yu Xiuhua's family, which serves as a cultural tourist attraction and a part of the new countryside. Next to the old house also opened a bed and breakfast for tourists who come to visit the old house to live.
The village has changed, and so has the life of Yu Xiuhua, whose "disability" and "peasant woman" are no longer her first labels. As a poet, she has a best-selling collection of poems, and is widely recognized for her achievements; as a Netflix star, she is known as a "keyboard warrior smasher" for her playfulness and anger. In her second year of fame, she gave her ex-husband 150,000 dollars and managed to get him to agree to a divorce. With the money she earned, she renovated her house in the village, bought her son a house in the city, and recently planned to buy him a car. The house is stuffed with books she bought for herself, and she has recently been working on 'The Winds of Chu'. She has over a hundred dresses and a hundred pots of greenery.
Brightly, she held Xiao Yang's hand as she walked through the village on that wide road. There were a few chatty people sitting in front of the kiosk, their eyes cast over, and a few more on the bridge, staring straight at her. She walked up to the man and greeted him, Brother-in-law. The man called brother-in-law reached out and smacked her on the head, saying, Drinking again.
They said nothing more. On the wall behind the brother-in-law is a poem by Yu Xiuhua, "The Dog I Keep, Called Little Witch" - "When he grabbed me by the hair and knocked me against the wall / Little Witch kept wagging his tail / For a man who is not afraid of pain, there is nothing he can do." The 'he' in this poem is Yu Xiuhua's ex-husband.
The documentary "Shaking the Earth" recorded Yu Xiu-hua arguing with her ex-husband as she stormed into the room, pointing her finger at him, "Why don't you divorce? I just want to divorce you, it is out of the name to divorce you, I want to divorce you what's wrong with me?"
The man leaned on the head of the bed, holding his elbow, covered by the quilt, revealing his feet. Clipped her excited voice, he returned a few words, "shut me off? The more famous you are now, the more I won't divorce", he pointed at her, suddenly his voice became louder, "Wherever you go now, I will follow you."
"You are nothing", the two began to curse each other. Yu Xiuhua walked out of the door, sat down on a chair, and took several breaths. And rushed in again, "why not divorce" ...... looped the content of the argument. This is her 20 years of married life.
Fan Jian, the director of the documentary, came to Hengdian Village in mid-March this year. It was the first day Yu came back from Shennongjia, and they got on the wine table together, and still did the next day. They are now very good friends. Male friends who are close to her would be referred to by her as 'boyfriends'.
The drinking started at noon, and in front of people she knew well, Yu laughed uncontrollably and would jokingly rip off her shoulders. She also likes to joke with Fanjian, such as going over to him and saying he smells good. Fan Jian says that this is a very comfortable state for her, and that when she speaks she doesn't think about the norms of language or the moral constraints of what a woman should or shouldn't say; she doesn't care about them. But Fan Jian also senses that Yu Xiuhua's flirtation with herself is actually very measured. Her father lives with her, and she is also very measured in front of him. She knows how to banter within a safe range.
When confronted by Young, she's much more reckless, indulgent, and free. Anytime she puts her hand on his thigh, she will smile with satisfaction when she sees him dodge.
On the way to the walk, Xiao Yang folded a willow branch to Yu Xiuhua knitted a wreath and wore it on her head. There was a swing in front of the old house, Yu Xiu-hua climbed on it, Xiao Yang pushed behind her, she was a little scared but enjoyed it, and laughed out loud.
A new Yu Xiu-hua emerges from Fanjian's lens, 'one that is very genuinely happy and very relaxed, like a young girl'.
In 2015, when the documentary was filmed, Yu was still in a tense and pained posture, very thin, 158cm tall, only 80 pounds, living very hard, in order to get rid of constraints, including marriage, 'she had to use a lot of force'. Fanjian sometimes puts down the camera in his hand and just stays with her. He's seen her shed a night's worth of tears when she's in real pain.
They stayed in touch for a few years after that, and he saw her start to drink as a way of escaping the pain, and by the time of a video interview with Out of the Loop in 2020, she was in a kind of self-imposed exile, holed up in a cultural attraction that the local community had built for her, either drinking or wandering off on her way to do so. She takes buns out of the freezer compartment of her refrigerator, basks in the sun, and eats them with her wine. She was barely sober and red-faced for the interview. Interviews were frequently interrupted.
Nowadays, poets still drink, but the nature is different, says Fan, "and now this drinking is what I think of as her having a good time, her having a good time". This spring, the poet drank, traveled, fell in love, took walks, and wrote no poems.
A cluster of bright yellow rapeseed flowers dotted the concrete countryside. Walking to a canola flower, they sat down, Yu Xiuhua lying in the arms of Xiao Yang, Xiao Yang reached out to hold her. The family dog was lying next to her. I snapped a photo behind them. Yu Xiuhua put the photo on the internet, and many people talked about her poem, Maybe Not About Love, in the comments - "Come on, let's go to the back of the mountain and do a big job of shying away all the flowers of a spring."
That night, Fan Jian posted a friend circle with a photo of Yu Xiu-hua sitting on a swing in a lacey white dress, with her long hair draped over a wreath of flowers, her face a little round, smiling at the camera. Fanjian wrote, "enjoy the love, like a spring breeze.
In March, I met Yu Xiu-hua at Xiao Yang's house in Shennongjia, where she was so offended by my presence that she told me to drink three bowls of yellow wine first to thank her. A few days earlier, she had been drinking with two local 'chiefs', one of whom was carried out on all fours, the other reportedly suffering a bit of stomach bleeding. She's put down countless people just like that. Accepting her drink and getting drunk seems like a rite of passage for Yu Xiu Hua.
On this night, Yu Xiu-hua was still reluctant to talk to me. And while Yu Xiu-hua was chatting with the bystanders, Xiao Yang pulled me to the back of the house, began to tell about his life: elementary school home from school need to go to fight hogweed, junior high school, he took the initiative to hand in a white paper and dropped out, with a copy of the "Compendium of Materia Medica" to go up to the mountains to observe the plants, and then his mother was paralyzed, and he came to take care of it; there has been a marriage, but his daughter is he alone to pull to grow up; he used to have an occupation is a beekeeper, because of beekeeping he traveled all over the world.
He took me on a tour of the old childhood house, with its mottled walls, and carefully told me how the empty rooms were once filled with furniture, how the family lived in overcrowded conditions, and how he observed how a colony of ants by the wall survived and disappeared. Now he wants to preserve the old house as a vestige of the family's existence and as a stopping point for future visitors. He rambles on, and his 9-year-old daughter listens.
The next day, Yang went with Yu to Hengdian Village, where he ordered several pairs of Chinese herbs to regulate Yu's sleep. I don't know whether it was because of the Chinese medicine or the white wine, but Yu Xiuhua slept most of the time. At such times, Xiao Yang would broadcast live in another room, telling his story over and over again, constantly brushing through the comments and private messages that popped up on the platform. Before dubbing a video, he writes what he has to say in a notebook and reads it over and over again.
These days, Yang's live studio outnumbers Yu's, and Yu sometimes jokes, you're rubbing off on my traffic!
This is also the public's evaluation and imagination of the romance, a 46-year-old famous female poet, a 32-year-old man who keeps bees, how can come together? On New Year's Day, without telling Yu Xiuhua, Xiao Yang announced his romance with Yu Xiuhua on a short video platform. Initially Yu Xiuhua was angry. She wrote in her public profile, "I delayed speaking out because I was unsure of the nature of the relationship and my personal attitude towards it."
She told me, "Then I thought, X, this is someone else's business, it has nothing to do with me, it's his business, if he wants to fire me let him do it, I'll just take it as a service to the people." Xiao Yang let her family, coworkers and daughter know about her, and she said thank you to Xiao Yang. Perhaps it was this honesty that allowed her to gradually accept and recognize the relationship, followed by the daily life, Xiao Yang hardworking, obedient, good to her, "I think he is very good, so I'm willing to accept him".
Once upon a time, Yu's life was all about staying in, sleeping, reading, writing, and raising plants. Using a wall-breaker to beat everything to eat, coffee beans among them. She hardly ever went downstairs, and when anyone came knocking on the door, she didn't open it. When her mother died and her son worked downtown, she lived with her father, often with only two dishes on the table; in the morning she didn't eat and he didn't eat, and at noon she drank and he drank. She describes it as "living like shit".
"It was almost decadent," she said of her time. Drinking, reading, writing poetry, missing someone, that was all her life was about, 'it was as if I had everything and a profound sense of overflowing emptiness'. She found various ways to vent herself, including live broadcasting. She and Xiao Yang met in the live broadcasting room. The two of them added WeChat after Yang sent her honey.
Yu Xiuhua said, "Thank you for the gift. Xiao Yang sent Yu Xiuhua a verse he wrote: "Encounter is a belated confession / I believe in fate / it must be the memory of a previous life / so that I can find you in this life / there is a destiny in the netherworld / 500 times of looking back in the previous life / in exchange for a brush in this life / I love your words / I love your poetic words / I love Yu Xiuhua even more."
This poem is certainly not good. Yu Xiu-hua has been famous for many years, and her private messages are full of men courting her, "all of whom I have beaten back". But Yang is different: "He can talk, his mouth can talk. Yang is a man who is never cold, he is not stingy in praising others, and he is very good at making people happy. In Yang's own words, "he's like a loach, he's more flexible."
If you don't understand Yu Xiuhua, it's easy to be stung by the violence in her words. A fan couple came to see her at home, and she said to the man, "How many wives is she your first? The two were embarrassed. A group of people claiming to be painters and choreographers also came, and she said, Go, go, go, waving her hand and leading them to the door and unlocking it. When confronted by Xiao Yang, she was also often sharp - Do you love me? Drink if you love me. Do you not love me? Drink if you don't love me. You drink Coke is to apologize for my love for you.
But these words, which sound like cannonballs to outsiders, were defused by Yang. Being a 'loach', no matter what she says, he just scrunches up his mouth, squints his eyes, and, with a bit of hopeless irritation, fires back - "Trying to put a smelly sock in your mouth." How feeble it sounded. It's the same line every time.
One of the important things that Yu brings up about the difference between Yang and her own ex-husband is that 'he doesn't take the heat'. Her ex-husband always had a sense of superiority when confronted with her, "He just thought damn, you're a disabled woman so powerful". 19 years old, she passively accepted this man under the arrangement of her parents. At that time she knew nothing about marriage, love or sex, and only after marriage did she realize that the two of them had to sleep together. The next year she gave birth to a son, her only child, and after that, 'was adamant that she would not sleep with her ex-husband because I didn't like him and I felt bad'. They were always badmouthing each other, unloved people tormenting each other for 20 years, "he just oppresses you and makes it hard for you, so it must be divorced".
Fan Jian said that Yu Xiu-hua's entire 20-year marriage was a state of doubt, denial, and emptiness. Yang was the first man she dated, and the relationship was her first love affair.
"I may not be rational, but I'm not that stupid. I do think he's really good for me, and I'm willing to go along for the ride."
The public's worries don't matter so much. She knows that Xiao Yang will benefit from her, but what's more important to her is getting along on a day-to-day basis. "I thank Jan for allowing me to find so much joy in a man for the first time."
What were some of the first experiences that Jan gave you?
"The body."
Besides that?
"Love, the feeling of being loved."
In a way, Jan is attuned to her. His life could revolve around hers. He combed her hair, carried her on his back for walks, and he could even run forward on her back. During the few days she stayed in Hengdian Village, he helped her pack up more than 100 dresses in the closet, reorganized the yard, books were neatly packed on the shelves, and the succulents were placed in new pots. After many years, Yu resumed sitting in a chair that had once been littered with clutter. He also managed to get Yu, who walks shakily because of cerebral palsy, to join him in a smooth ballroom dance.
After spending a few days with the lovers in Hengdian Village, Fan Jian felt that Yu was in a position of absolute dominance in the relationship, and that no matter how much Yu joked, Xiao Yang did not get angry, "I think Yu knows that many of the things she does are more capricious, the language ah, the behavior ah are more capricious, but of course she enjoys this capriciousness as well as this feeling of being coddled." From the details of life, Xiao Yang is a good companion, accompanied her to many places, "there is such a person who can make her happy.
Yu's father had a girlfriend, whom Yu called Auntie. Auntie, who had lived with Yu for a few years, said that Yu used to stay alone in the house, without ventilation, and that the house smelled, and that the smell dispersed when Xiao Yang came.
"Sleep" - in Yu's words and poems - has always been filled with expressions of lust.
She has always been a vital person, publishing poems on the internet before she became famous, and she was always the most active one in the forums and QQ groups where small poets gathered, cursing and being blackmailed, over and over again. 2015's "Going Through Half of China to Sleep with You", which made her famous, was also written during this period. The poem was written for a netizen in the group, the other in Inner Mongolia, she was in Hubei, the thought of going from Hubei to Inner Mongolia to travel so many roads, a trip can not take a look at it and run back, "always have to play a shot, it, the poem was written into the well, this is the real idea at that time.
They have never met.
"It's nothing more than the force of the collision of two bodies, nothing more than the flower that this force has spawned/nothing more than the spring that this flower has created virtually, which makes us mistakenly think that life has been reopened", there is a kind of vigorous desire in the poem, but in real life, the marriage has become her biggest confinement, and the direct source of her pain.
Under the repression of marriage and physical disability, it is precisely this lack of access that strikes Fan and many readers, "that is why it is strong, that is why it is longed for, that is why it is longed for intensely enough," says Fan. Her everyday words are also littered with eroticism. If you ask her what she's been reading lately, she'll tell you, Men's Nudity; when a Chinese medicine practitioner takes her pulse, she says, You don't have to look at me with affection; to the sky, she says, A bird flew past with its buttocks exposed; and in the live broadcasting room, she tells netizens, You guys like a million things, and I'll give birth to a child for you to see.
It seems wanton, but how strong and moving this 'not getting' is also means how much she suffers.
"I'm naturally very pessimistic by nature and always think the worst. Thinking that anything can go bad. But then my personality seems to be very positive, it's very contradictory. This character is sometimes very difficult for myself, very twisted." Yu Xiuhua said. So "writing is about love, life, and pain".
She believes that this is something eternal, "I think only human emotions are eternal, only human feelings do game is visible. If you love someone who is fake, he can see it, and really can see it, it does not fool people."
Do you fear that your relationship with Yang is an exchange?
"I wish it had ended sooner. I want him to forget about me, I still want to live alone and want to drink and drink. Exchange is normal, I would give him everything I have, as long as it does not violate human morals, and I would give him whatever he wants, as long as I have it."
She smiled, "I love him too, I love his body. I'm telling you, you live in the world, don't be calculating about your worth, you give out what you can, what others want, you give it out, you give it out. Whether he loves me or he doesn't love me, I repay him, and I'm willing to repay him for this even very worthless love, that is, a drop of kindness when the spring returns."
What is his favor with you?
"Sleeping with me, don't laugh. He'll never find a girlfriend as good as me again. That's 100%, so in that respect, I'm a disservice to him as well. If he separates from me in the future and he gets another girlfriend, he'll find it tasteless, and that's the damage I'm doing to him, and I've already caused him damage, so I'll give as much as I can. I don't have any money, but what he wants I can give I give him."
She doesn't think there are eternal relationships. There are eternal relationships, but relationships are so complicated, "Relationships are one of the most obscene things on earth. Have you seen the Thai movie Eternity? You see the Thai movie Eternity, where two people are chained together, and they start out so loving and inseparable, and then they end up going crazy and dying, and that's horrible. People still need distance."
Now do you still want to figure out who you are? Do you still feel divided?
"I haven't been thinking about these issues lately, and I'm afraid I'm becoming more and more superficial". She wants Yang to hurry back to Shennongjia, "It affects my writing, it affects my reading, it affects my sadness, it affects my pain."
Do you still want that pain?
"It's not a question of whether you want it or not, it's a question of whether it exists or doesn't exist."
One day, she woke up in the middle of the night and felt her body twitching. But she didn't wake up her boyfriend, who was lying next to her, "I can do it alone. In the darkness, she stood up and went to the empty room next door, and when she lay down, she thought she was going to have a stroke and die.
Luckily, the day dawned and she made it through one more time. This day her whole body ached, and she kept tapping her arms, her thighs, and her toes had to keep moving on both feet, which were wearing different socks.
This could be the aftermath of drinking. That day during the day, at lunch, Yu Xiu-hua took a sip of Coke and finally took out white wine. Her father poured it for her. Drinking went from a self-indulgence to the smoothest of everyday behaviors.
Starting to drink heavily a few years ago, Yu said, "because of a lot of things, such as those who scolded me ah, and the speech and not free, it is very depressed, very frustrated, mixed together with alcoholism." There were also emotional problems involved. In fact, there was a very specific object that she loved for many years.
"Before actually still want to be close, but he was afraid, he liked me, he did not dare, he was afraid of me this broken mouth." Yu said. Caught up in reality, they could not become lovers. So what seemed to her to be an everlasting relationship turned into a constant love affair and intermittent self-torture. Alcoholism was one of the most visible ways. Fanjian said that at that time, she both physical and psychological pain to the point where it can only be dissolved in alcohol.
"Because I can't see, I'm very anxious, he doesn't know what to do, I don't know what to do, I'm suddenly stuck in that kind of uncontrollable emotion, I can't get out. I'm not sure what I'm doing, but I'm not sure what I'm doing," she told me.
But, "I don't think I've drunk myself to death.
Pain is like a kind of proof, "proof of one's own vitality". Love is also a kind of proof, "one has to find someone to prove that there is no obstacle for one's body to get love, and that love has nothing to do with the body". And then she realized that it was very much about that, and she just couldn't get love.
But Xiao Yang always praised Yu Xiu Hua's body, like a young girl.
At the lunch table that day, in the messy kitchen, Yu Xiu-hua wore a cheongsam-style black lace dress and drank a few taels of white wine. She cracked a few more shocking jokes with Xiao Yang, who left in fake exasperation, leaving the two of us behind. She stopped laughing and put her elbows on the table to support her red face, her whole body suddenly showed a sense of exhaustion, and her words became serious.
"Don't you think that between two people, even if they completely understand each other, after a long time, you will feel that he violated your personal space. And Yang chinking ce is not up to this level, he has no way to understand me, what he said is wrong."
"The physical problem is solved, the age problem is solved, there is only the thought problem left, and the two people can't be unified. You can temporarily accommodate, one year, two years, three years, four years, you can not accommodate the whole life ah, this is my pain. He can't reach me."
"I think it's still difficult. It's hard for me. He doesn't feel embarrassed, he feels happy with me. He's not capable of thinking about these things."
"There's something wrong, I don't know. I feel like he loves me in every way that we know each other, but it just doesn't feel right. I can't reach that deep love in my heart, can I? Can't say."
But this is not a denial of Xiao Yang, "in this world, I myself is not perfect ah, no qualification to ask him to be perfect." Yu Xiuhua said.
Love carries with it dilemmas. "I am also puzzled. You say the world is two kinds of people, a man and a woman, why is love so difficult. This is not God to make a trap, so that you can never get it. God's broken."
Just like a drowning person who thinks he can only save himself, sometimes he can't help pushing himself deeper. That's when someone reaches out to you. And she grabbed it. As to whether or not she continued to hold that hand afterward and walk far away, she didn't have that expectation. Boredom would always come, but she coveted the warmth coming through the palm of her hand at the moment. It made her feel relaxed, happy, and it was a rare moment in her life.
With that said, she began to call out for Xiao Yang. Xiao Yang, Xiao Yang. Yang came over and helped her out of her seat, and as she hugged him, he lifted her legs and carried her up a flight of stairs and laid her on the bed. Again she fell asleep.
Now, every day, she yells that she wants to lose weight, that she wants to stop drinking, that she wants to live. "Joy obscures the pain. As for the feeling inside, after waking up, she answered me as she lay in bed, "It feels like flying. Floating in the clouds, floating in the fog. The Chinese medicine on the bedside table was cold, and when Xiao Yang came in to bring her a cup, she lifted the covers, opened her arms to Xiao Yang, and said, "Hug".
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(Intern Lu Yan also contributed to this article)