Lei Pingyang: poems of the earth
Author: Jessica On: Nov 29, 2010 In: Books, FeaturedLei Pingyang Notes on Yunnan
Among all provinces in China, Yunnan is a blessed one. Not only because it enjoys the richest mixture of ethnicities and flora and fauna, but also because it has many devoted writers and poets carving out the depth and pulses of its history and people, for example, Lei Pingyang ( ), a computer-defying writer who has won most of China s top literary prizes with his verses of narrow and paranoid love for this province.
Lei s love for Yunnan is a infiltrating one, one can only understand it in a context where most people of such a maddening world often rely on amplifying if not hollowing rhetorics for daily expressions:
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I love my dwelling place Yunnan only, because the other provinces/I don t love; I love Shaotong City in Yunnan only, because the other cities/I don t love; I love Tucheng County in Shaotong only, because the other counties/I don t love My love is narrow and paranoid, like honey on tip of a needle/if I cannot continue this one day/I will love my relatives only such a gradually dwindling process/exhausts my entire youth and compassion.
Relatives (Collection of Poems of Lei Pingyang)
Lei s narrow love , however, is most deep and filled with heart-wrenching pain. In one of his most memorable and striking poems Elegy for Father ( ), he murmurs the struggling life of his parents and country fellows plagued by war, famine, ignorance, social unrest and imposed political pressure, and bitterly concludes:
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his second son/me, had intended to write an epitaph for him: his whole life, with a fanatic/desire for survival, is but inflicted with double humility in both body and spirit! /but this idea was finally abandoned, and I am writing it down here, which may possibly/serve as mine as well. He as a farmer/and I as a poet, have the same destiny, hard to tell apart.
Lei Pingyang is extremely sensitive of China s rapid urbanization and the sense of loss for people s hometowns and roots. And in search of a true sense of homesickness, with the quality of the bright moon and autumn wind , he once said he would rather become a cacoon man, nestled in homesickness.
Looking for hometown in the graveyard
Drank too much again. A banquet on the mountains/I alone, cannot digest/so many cricket sound and starlight. Across the thick red earth/I speak with those underneath, while the wild grasses grow fanatically/From the crevices of wild grass and dunes/looking into a few miles away, the village that I once lived in/now with myriads of lights, roars of machines, it has/become a gigantic metallurgical factory/A thousand years of hometown, replaced by two years of factory, never/to bear the surname of Lei, or Xia, or Wang.
Slags piled like hills/covered trees, fields, rivers, and ancestral halls/I cannot go back anymore, I tried a few times/but kept away, by guards like soldiers/in mornings full of frost. Just like tonight/every daylight of every year to come, I can only, in the graveyard/push aside the tall grasses, staggering, looking for my hometown.
Like the image of ancestral halls, many poems of Lei Pingyang are related to specific Chinese cultural phenomenon, such as this one, concerning film projectors in Chinese countryside, a profession dating back to the Cultural Revolution:
Zhang Tianshou, a countryside film projector/he kept a parrot, in the bustling nights/of Hani moutain villages, whenever the films stopped/the parrot would give into the loudspeaker/a big shout: Don t hustle, film changing! /Zhang Tianshou and his parrot/went through the boundless and undulating Ailao Mountain/the parrot always flies ahead, when he spots a human, he d say/ Film screening tonight, Zhang Tianshou is here! /Sometimes, when the fog is heavy in the mountains, the parrot may bump into a tree/ Bianbian, from the rear Zhang Tianshou would call/the name of the parrot, and say: fog is heavy, fly slowly.
/The parrot knows every title of the films by heart/he would fly while shouting Tunnel War ! Red Lantern Opera !/ Shajiabang Battle ! his accent both like and unlike human/spreads far and wide along the mountain ridge. Master and parrot/thus brace themselves up in the cold and dark mountains with this/One day, walking behind the parrot, Zhang Tianshou/slipped, together with his projector/he fell from the cliff, abysmal, in the air/he cried out: Bianbian! , but the parrot didn t hear/The parrot arrived in the Hani village/and waited at the entrance for long,/he didn t see Zhang Tianshou/and had to return.
A heavy fog sealed the cliff/the valley was so thick, even wind couldnot pass it /after so many years, on the alley of Hani mountain/there is always a parrot flying back and forth/he always/asks anyone passing by, Did you see Zhang Tianshou? /Being asked for the whereabouts of a dead man, some/feel chill on their backbones, some roll their eyes in disgust
From Mansai Town to Aka Village, it only/takes a few hours, yet we spent entirely two days in walking/on the sight of a creek, the one from Xiangtang throws off his clothes, spurts/into the water. TIME becomes a fish, under the leaves/of watercress, its tiny gills open and close/Olives on the roadside trees have ripened, observes the one from Kemu/One olive, is a little paradise hanging on the tree/TIME, on top of the tongue, slowly/turns from bitterness to sweetness.
The white cloud is the pretty cousin of Dai people/and the clear breeze is their auntie. On the bamboo tower by the road/this Dai, drinks rice wine to deer meat and fresh bamboo shoots/and gets drunk. TIME, becomes a big balm tree leaf/makes his face blush. The one of Gino tribe, like a stone/remains silent, but his ears, highly alert/keeps on listening to the rain forest, spotting a bird s cry/from nowhere, and he jumps like a whooping arrow/TIME, taken away by him, comes back to this world/only after a long while from a dead silver pheasant/Throughout the entire journey, only a humble one from Bulang tribe/sits quietly beside me.
We sit on the top of the mountain/gazing at the sunset, watching the smoke rising from burnt grasses in Phongsaly of Laos/wind into an ancient temple in Myanmar in dusk, and as I fell in sleep/he left, he talked about Buddha in my dreams/his body embracing dust. TIME, in the pattra sutra/knelt down, some invisible hands, clutch closely/the hour hand, minute hand and second hand of the clock.
We as a group/together with Lalagu and Hani people, on top of the wilderness/Everyone has their own lover, TIME/the galloping horse hoofs, became transplanted into their lungs and viceras/Yet I, as a Han person, just so eager to get to Aka Village/urging, complaining, anxious, like a madman/and ended up going alone/and getting lost for many times, only could find, before it gets dark, a place of exile
- Tags: lei pingyang, literature, luxun literary prize, poetry, yunnan province