her. There may be a fine shade of difference between these two inter-
pretations, but the second reading places less emphasis on irony and
inclines to take the sequence of actions at face value and as a direct
expression of the narrator’s revenge fantasy. “Sweet Revenge” is
indeed at a polar opposite to the lyricism of the earlier generation of
Chinese women poets, especially poets such as Xiong Hong and
Rongzi ?Ê (b. 1928). This fantasy is not at all “feminine” in the tra-
ditional sense of the word, but its overwhelming (and continuing) pop-
ularity with readers attests to its authenticity.
Irony is more clearly on view in “Common Knowledge” ý@
(Xia 1984: 78), a 1982 poem that presents a critique of traditional
misogyny:
a woman A女
bleeds once VA月
a month BC血
understands the snake’s language EkF的ïG
is good at ambush 適IJK
is not prone to keep appointments 1 LMN
(Yeh [1992] 1994: 226)
The speaker demonstrates the insidiousness of prejudices by citing an
objective fact that is “common knowledge” and then by following a
chain of associations. People do not generally speak of this “common
knowledge”—after all, the thought of blood is unsettling to many—so
that this assumption becomes a hidden one. The narrator proceeds
from the disturbing image of blood to images of snakes and ambush.
At first, we only read that women bleed, which could be a value-
neutral statement, but with negative images of snakes and ambush
following directly after, the implication is that anyone who bleeds in
this way is not trustworthy. In fact, the poem concludes, women are so
unreliable that they tend not to keep appointments.
One could almost stop here and read this as a sarcastically recited
litany of women’s faults, with a somewhat biblical cast (snakes, deceit-
fulness). But the poet has a witty last word, because the concluding
statement is disproved by the opening one: because what is menses, if
not a monthly appointment that women are “prone” to keep? In this
way, the poem further demonstrates that if you let a bigot talk long
enough and make enough sweeping generalizations, he or she will
eventually undermine his or her own arguments.
While Zhai Yongming’s approach is less pithy, she does not shy
away from expressing negative emotions. Indeed, undercurrents of
anger and resentment at the world’s inequalities run throughout her
The Poetry of Zhai Yongming and Xia Yu 113