Profiles

Scent of a woman

By Chitralekha Basu (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-06-18 07:53

Light shines through the window of a Beijing coffee shop onto the face of Zhai Yongming, earlier this month. Zhai's poetry cycle Nuren, published in 1984, triggered what is known as the "Black Tornado" of women's poetry that swept China from 1986 to 1989. [Jonah M. Kessel / China Daily]

The phrase wenyi nu qingnian (young woman of literature and arts) sits easy on Zhai Yongming's slender frame. One of Chengdu's most admired cultural icons, Zhai lives a life awash with words and images. Arguably China's first feminist poet of the post-"cultural revolution" (1966-76) era, Zhai, who made her debut with the poetry cycle, Nuren (women, 1984), has since moved on to combine audio, visual and print in a way that could be a tough act to follow.

She has created installations by hanging sheets containing her poems juxtaposed against an endless series of X-ray plates and made the spectators walk through a befuddling maze of light and shade, drawn on by curiosity and anticipation.

She has collaborated with auteur director Jia Zhangke, writing the screenplay of 24 City - a family drama spanning three generations unfolding against the backdrop of a State-owned aircraft manufacturing factory that gives way to a high-end apartment complex - dovetailing the fictional with the documentary with panache.

In 1998 Zhai started a bar, White Night, in Chengdu's Yulin West Street, which drew the city's beautiful men and women of letters and the arts like bees to a beehive. The bar, now in its larger avatar in Kuanzhai Xiangzi, is more of a cultural space where films are screened, poetry is read and wannabe artists are often given a head start by their more experienced compatriots.

Besides the eponymous Du Fu Memorial Hall and Wang Jiang Lou - a park dedicated to the memory of Tang Dynasty (AD 618-907) poetess, Xue Tao - White Night is now one of Chengdu's most-favored cultural hotspots. At 55, Zhai looks as radiant and zestful as a fresh university graduate. She is self-effacing, almost unaware of the charisma that led to her being selected one of the 50 most glamorous Chinese by Southern People's Weekly. In a crowd of garrulous poets and artists, Zhai is likely to sit quietly, in the background, scribbling notes like a diligent student.

Just like the various artistic mediums - installation art, screenwriting, photography - that, Zhai says, have found her, her celebrity status too is an unsolicited gift.

The constant focus on her gorgeous and youthful looks is something Zhai has learnt to live with. "In the 1980s, when I had begun to write, there was not so much media exposure. People read me without knowing anything about my looks or indeed if I was a woman," Zhai recalls.

She would prefer people to connect more with her work but concedes that the misplaced media attention is symptomatic of the times.

Late in July, her flawless face will, once again, draw the crowds when a photography exhibition inspired by the life and works of 10 noted authors from Chengdu, including Bei Dao and Zhong Ming, is mounted at 12 Oak Trees Gallery in Chengdu. Zhai is curating the show and is, in fact, one of the photographers. The shots taken by her are closely connected to her first series of poetry, Nuren - a mystical and abstruse suite of 19 poems attempting to explore the writer's links with universal womanhood.

"Woman is a perennial theme in my work," says Zhai. "Here, I'm just expressing myself in a different media."

Nuren was a milestone. Following its publication in 1984, Zhai had supposedly inspired what is known as the "Black Tornado" of women's poetry that swept across China's poetry scene from 1986 to 1989. Many of the angry young women of the 80s, who wrote in imitation of Zhai, either got sucked into family life or, after the economic reforms in China, got into entrepreneurship.

"But there are a few new emerging writers," assures Zhai. "Yin Lichuan, Zhou Zan, Cao Shuying, Wang Xiaoli etc. are doing significant work."

At a time when feminist writing seems to have taken a backseat the world over, following the anti-feminist backlash in the 1990s, do Zhai's Nuren series and indeed much of her later poems, about child prostitutes, difficult mothers and abusive lovers still resonate with the new-age Chinese woman?

"In fact, the social and economic status of women has declined since I wrote those poems," Zhai says. "The fact that more women prefer to marry a well-placed man rather than have a career of their own is an indication."

Reading her poems might still help a few women believe in the dignity of women, she hopes.

Now in circulation for more than 25 years, the Nuren series remains an eternal favorite. Wolfgang Kubin, the redoubtable sinologist and cultural watchdog, says Zhai has evolved with the times in a way that's quite singular.

"She started writing about (young) women as individuals in the 1980s, then about mothers of all revolutions since 1949 in the 1990s, then she mocked typical men and now she is writing some kind of daring social criticism," says Kubin in an e-mail interview.

Zhai concedes that her writing has become more socially aware and reflective of contemporary reality with time. Kubin attributed the shift to Zhai's stint in Berlin as part of a Sino-German academic exchange program. Her last published book of poetry and essays, Bai Ye Tan, 2009, is a case in point.

"Previously my work would be largely internal, focused on my own feelings," Zhai says. "Now I am more concerned about the relationship between myself and my surroundings."

Zhai has managed to keep her personal life out of public scrutiny and media glare rather admirably. To readers who look for clues in her writing, Zhai says she rarely ever borrows material from her own life to use in her poems.

"The woman's conflicts with the man in my poetry are not so much based on real-life experiences as they are representations of her other struggles against society as a whole," she says.

As for the mother-daughter conflict in her writing, Zhai says: "Such fights are a normal part of one's growing up, a result of the natural tendency in a woman to fight the other woman in her life and take her position."

Her mother, who was a PLA soldier, never could make sense of why Zhai would want to give up a career in engineering (she has a degree in laser technology from Chengdu Institute of Telecommunications and Engineering) and be a poet. "But since the opening up of China my mother is trying to understand me and the choices I have made."

Trying to locate herself in the ebb and flow of Chinese literary tradition is what defines Zhai's artistic agenda. Her current preoccupation is another series of poems, titled Ai Shusheng (Sorrow of the Intellectuals).

"In it I am trying to find a link between my own work and ancient Chinese poetry, in terms of literary style, as well as trying to forge a spiritual connection, having a dialogue with the ancient Chinese conventions," reveals Zhai.

Drawing inspiration from iconic ancient poets like Du Fu, Li Bai and "feminists" Xue Tao, Yu Xuanji and Li Qingzhao, she is trying to explore her literary inheritance - to look at how today's young intellectuals might compare with and differ from their ancient counterparts.

In her poem The Song of Lady Time, the line, "And I write and write, writing myself into middle age", is repeated, appearing like a leitmotif.

Does the thought of losing the freshness and regenerative elements in her writing ever bother the perennially-youthful Zhai Yongming?

"Turning the fear of growing old into a theme of poetry is a way of exorcizing that fear," says the poet, serenely, removing the dark, difficult, puzzling and mysterious elements from her life and consigning them to her poetry.

Guo Shuhan contributed to the story.