272 chapter seven
junior high student out of class on the road between home and the classroom
the poet maintains his composure sizing up his reader’s chest like an honest man
but it dares not indulge in enjoyment of this wee bit of freedom
in the end having to become an appendage of something else
in the end having to team up with one colossus or another
petty lowly luminophor
firefly fearful of individualism
longing for surveillance by the lights of summer nights
just like the poet at the same time as writing poetry
also serves in a certain association he has a membership card
descending faster now losing all freedomStarting in the poem’s title and continuing throughout the text, the
conventionally lowly, inanimate object that is the raindrop is set off
against the conventionally lofty human being that is the poet. The ef-
fect is not just, shall we say, an ontological upgrade of the raindrop,
but also an ontological downgrade of the (male) poet, prepared in the
irony of the preceding lines (this sort of small thing happens every moment
/ i’m concerned with bigger things says the poet to his female reader). An in-
strumental moment comes in line 9 (obedient....), when there occurs the
first of several shifts from the poet to the raindrop as the grammatical
subject that remain unmarked by personal pronouns. Yu Jian could
have used the neuter third-person singular ᅗ ‘it’ but chooses not to,
and the reader discovers the shift only in retrospect. This is the reflec-
tion in syntax of objectification and subjectification combined.
Subsequently, the dis-similarity of the poet and the raindrop turns
into the similarity of the raindrop and the poet’s daughter. Both are
obedient to an invisible straight line produced by the larger systems of
which they are a part and that will ultimately disallow their indepen-
dent existence: the laws of nature and those of education. This subject
matter is familiar in Yu Jian’s oeuvre, and so is the mixing of linguistic
registers. Again, this pointedly implies that language is by no means a
transparent, neutral and reliable tool that describes “reality,” and that
its potential for shaping and distorting experience is greatest in institu-
tionalized discourses such as formal education and political ideology.
The passage in which the raindrop divorces itself from the (revolution-
ary) ranks (㜅行њ䯳ӡ) is a case in point.
The next step takes us back not to the poet and the raindrop but to
the raindrop and the poet, in that order. The raindrop with its appar-