New Perspectives on Contemporary Chinese Poetry

among women) of her poetry and her point of view, and she was not
comfortable with the overwhelming response to the “Woman” cycle
and its preface. As she put it, a “Black Whirlwind” W7swept over
China during the second half of the 1980s, and she was taken aback
by the appearance of a crowd of imitators.^7 In March 1989, Zhai
Yongming wrote an article, published in the June issue of Poetry
Monthly X, in which she commented on this trend: “As a joke I
often say that I should change the first line of ‘The Black Room’ from
‘All crows under Heaven are black’ to ‘All women under Heaven are
black’” (Tang 1994: 10–11; Day 2007c).
Without a doubt, “Woman” broke new ground. Women poets had
in the past been forced to choose among three modes of expression
(the traditional “feminine,” the gender-neutral, and the “overtly mas-
culine,” to borrow Tang Xiaodu’s tripartite scheme) (See Tang 1994
and 1997), so that a writer who wanted to write as a womanwould
most likely have found herself straight-jacketed by the traditional fem-
inine. The limitations of this mode of expression are legion; but what
is pertinent here is that it offers no place for passion, anger, or any
strong emotion other than the pain of the injured (i.e., the abandoned
woman of guiyuanY怨poetry).^8
Rather than taking her inspiration from Chinese poets, she found a
model abroad, in Sylvia Plath. It is ironic that Plath’s poetry, as
empowering an example as it was for Zhai Yongming (and a genera-
tion of American women writers, too, for that matter), was unable to
defeat Plath’s own self-destructive tendencies. Be that as it may, her
work was clearly an inspiration to Zhai Yongming, who was able to
internalize the powerful voice of Plath’s persona, her sharp, hard-
edged, “unfeminine” imagery and attitude and then incorporate these
into her own authentic voice.
“Woman” consists of four sections, the first of which,
“Premonition” Yugan预(Zhai 1994: 5–6), introduces most of the
themes and images that form the substance of the group of poems as a
whole: women, blackness, and night, and the struggle of these female,
yinforces with the male, yangforces represented by the sky and the
sun.

The woman in a black dress
comes deep in the night
Her secretive glances drain me
I suddenly remember: this is the
season when all the fish die
And every road passes through
the trails left by birds in flight

The Poetry of Zhai Yongming and Xia Yu 115

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