both have intimately described a woman’s life in ways that are
unprecedented in their bluntness and honesty. Such pieces account for
a greater proportion of Zhai Yongming’s oeuvre than Xia Yu’s; indeed,
the bulk of Zhai’s works are rooted in autobiography and personal
experience. Although she has made forays into collage and borrowed
language (popular songs, overheard conversations, clichés) in her later
compositions, she remains largely concerned with self-definition and
identity, both of which would be particularly compelling to someone
who came of age during the Cultural Revolution. Xia Yu, however, is
less worried about originality and authenticity and has become
increasingly interested in exploring language per se, to the extent that
some of her poems are metapoems that probe the nature of poetry in
ways that are both formal and thematic.^5 One has to wonder if this
relatively light-hearted attitude to originality is partly a product of
growing up in a society where the originality espoused by Modernist
poetics was a politically acceptable choice. Xia Yu delights in parody
and pastiche, which has led at least one critic to refer to her work as
postmodern, although one must do so advisedly. Although Xia Yu has
declared herself incapable of writing a “sad” poem and seems irre-
sistibly drawn to satire and lampoon (Xia 1991: 120), as Zhong Ling
(Ling Chung) has pointed out, even a poet as dedicated to overthrow-
ing and undermining the lyric tradition as Xia Yu nonetheless creates
moments of tenderness and lyricism in her poetry (Zhong 1989b).
However, the scope of this chapter does not permit me to examine the
full range of Xia Yu’s expression, and I will focus instead on her more
irreverent or socially transgressive side, in particular her powerful cri-
tique of tradition, a project that she and Zhai Yongming both engaged
in early in their writing lives.
One aspect of tradition that both Zhai Yongming and Xia Yu take
on is marriage, an institution that had historically defined a woman’s
social status and identity. Zhai’s poem “The Black Room”
(Zhai 1994: 75–76) is especially caustic. This poem is part of Zhai’s
1986 cycle “Living in the World”
在, which is largely an explo-
ration of the poet’s social role as a woman. Numerous allusions to
fortunetellers and matchmakers reflect the view that women’s lives are
overdetermined, with marriage a seemingly ineluctable fate:
All crows under Heaven are equally
black, and this
Fills me with fear, they have so many
Relatives, their numbers are legion,
they’re hard to resist
The Poetry of Zhai Yongming and Xia Yu 107天,
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