Moonlight Rests on My Left Palm: Poems and Essays

by Yu Xiuhua, Fiona Sze-Lorrain (Translator)

Overview

Starting with the viral poem “Crossing Half of China to Fuck You,” Yu Xiuhua’s raw collection in Fiona Sze-Lorrain's translation chronicles her life as a disabled, divorced, single mother in rural China.

Yu Xiuhua was born with cerebral palsy in Hengdian village in the Hubei Province, in central China. Unable to attend college, travel, or work the land with her parents, Yu remained home where she could help with housework. Eventually she was forced into an arranged marriage that became abusive. She divorced her husband and moved back in with her parents, taking her son with her.

In defiance of the stigma attached to her disability, her status as a divorced single mother, and as a peasant in rural China, Yu found her voice in poetry. Starting in the late 90’s, her writing became a vehicle with which to explore and share her reflections on homesickness, family and ancestry, the reality of disability in the context of a body’s urges and desires.

Then, Yu's poem “Crossing Half of China to Fuck You” blew open the doors on the patriarchal and traditionalist world of contemporary Chinese poetry. She became an internet sensation, finding a devoted following among young readers who enthusiastically welcomed her fresh, bold, confessional voice into the literary canon.

Thematically organized, Yu’s essays and poems are in conversation with each other around subjects that include love, nostalgia, mortality, the natural world and writing itself.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781662600470
Publisher:	Astra Publishing House
Publication date:	09/14/2021
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	5.69(w) x 8.56(h) x 0.66(d)

About the Author

Born in 1976 in Hengdian, Hubei Province, China, Yu Xiuhua is a poet from an impoverished rural background who was born with cerebral palsy. Yu began writing poetry in 1998. In 2014, her poem "Crossing Half of China to Fuck You" became an online sensation, launching her career as a celebrity poet and writer. Her poetry collection Moonlight Rests on My Left Palm (Guangxi Normal University Press, 2015) sold over 300,000 copies, a record for Chinese poetry titles of the past three decades. Yu received the Peasant Literature Award in 2016. Still Tomorrow, an award-winning documentary film about her life and poetry, was released to critical acclaim the same year. She was also the recipient of the Hubei Literary Prize in 2018.

Table of Contents

Translator's Note xi

Crossing Half of China to Fuck You 1

Essay: My Crazy Love Feels More Like Despair 3

Ah Le, Again I Think of You, Alas 9

Snow Dream 10

To Lei Pingyang 11

Those Secrets Suddenly Dignified 12

Our Whereabouts Unknown in This Night 13

I Love You 16

My Body Too Contains a Train 17

A Man Stops by My Room 18

How Can I Make You Love Me 19

Essay: My Nostalgia Differs from Yours 21

Well 37

An Afternoon in Hengdian Village 38

Listen to a Love Song 39

Leading a Dog's Life 40

Irrigate the Rapeseed Fields 41

Midnight Village 42

Background 43

Gratitude 44

A Woman on the Rooftop 45

Essay: The Swaying Mortal World 47

I Tripped in the Afternoon 51

Dust 52

A Pool of Water 53

Rain Falls outside the Window 54

Two Voices Late at Night 55

Wriggle 56

But Not for Me 57

Hillfolk 58

Hanging Rock 59

Essay: I Live to Reject Lofty Words 61

All You Need Is to Be Alive 71

A Leaky Boat 73

Wheat in a Threshing Ground 74

Marvels 75

A Day Bestowed by God 76

Essay: Gift 77

Essay: Lesser Spear Grass 85

Dusk behind the Mountain 91

Short 92

Gardenias in Bloom 93

I'll Sing Every Spring 94

Temptation 95

May · Wheat 96

Past a Cemetery 97

On the Plain 98

Longing for a Snowstorm 99

Untitled 100

Essay: Bright Full Moon, Towering Tree Shadows 101

My Dog Is Called Little Wu 115

Ancestral Worship on Tomb-Sweeping Day 116

Wheat Has Ripened 117

Early Winter Evening 118

Marriage 119

In the Cotton Fields 120

Callosity 121

Love 122

For You 123

Autumn Rain 124

Essay: Dusk on My Brow 125

Acknowledgments 135

About the Author 137

About the Translator 139

Editorial Reviews

"Yu finds the numinous in the very dust and air of Hengdian....Sze-Lorrain’s translation successfully evokes Yu’s transcendental connection to the world around her, from the grass at her feet to the sky above her."
—Anne Henochowicz, Los Angeles Review of Books

​“...a lyrical translation by Fiona Sze-Lorrain...The ruminative essays, rendered in elegant but somewhat mannered prose, offer context and insight on her life and poetry, [...] The poems, which compress her thoughts into daring and disconcerting forms, are another matter. [...] The multiplicity, therefore, becomes essential, as the poems are rarely frozen in a single feeling. Yu renders her life in a way that is irreducible.” 
— Chris Littlewood, The Washington Post

“Yu Xiuhua’s writing is steeped in the imagination [...] Many of the poems included in this work are moving precisely because of how they register the limits of the imagination, rather than its transformative capacities. [...] Rejecting the poetics of metaphor, lines like [Yu’s] call on us to look closely, listen carefully, and notice the world around us.”
—Rebecca Ruth Gould, Harriet Books, the Poetry Foundation

"Yu Xiuhua’s Moonlight Rests on My Left Palm, translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain, grows out of highly personal terrain. This farmer-poet says in an essay (Moonlight is sectioned by eight lyrical essays): 'We have man-handled so many words that I only dream of using them anew.' Yu says exactly what she means; and Sze-Lorrain honors the feeling and music in intimate translation. Thus, the poet’s language rises out of the natural, tinged by elemental soil and light."
—Yusef Komunyakaa, author of Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth 

“‘Truth once spoken tends to be false,’ writes Yu Xiuhua in her incredible debut of essays and poems. I am smitten with Yu’s powerful writing, erotic poetry, and reflections on disability in daily life. One poem reads, ‘So risky, so heavy / O this love.’ I want nothing but risk in poetry and I feel proud to be a disabled poet in Yu’s company.”
—The Cyborg Jillian Weise, author of Common Cyborg
 
“I love reading these poems and essays by Yu Xiuhua. I feel befriended by them, by her. Courage, honesty, a love of words, and a wry sense of humor run through the pages of Moonlight Rests on My Left Palm, translated with grace and simplicity by Fiona Sze-Lorrain. When Yu writes in an essay, ‘There is no better ode to life than a weed that grows ruthlessly and arches out of the ground, despite its trauma,’ we know she is telling us her own story. And yet, in a poem called ‘Wheat Has Ripened,’ she says, ‘I am pleased to have landed here / like a sparrow skirting through the sky-blue.’ How can we be anything but grateful to a poet who ends a poem of love lost: ‘I still hope / to err over and over’?”
—Mary Helen Stefaniak, author of The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia
 
“I couldn’t stop underlining phrases, sentences, whole passages that I wanted to quote, and think about! Yu Xiuhua’s marvelous collection, a hybrid of poetry and poetical essays, each reflecting back on the other, is a transport into the soul, heart, and sensibility of a unique and exquisite mind. Fiona Sze-Lorrain’s translation, generous with silence, space, and pitch-perfect transparency, is a triumph in its own right. This is the sort of book that you’ll want to share immediately with your most thoughtful friend.”
—Minna Zallman Proctor, author of Landslide: True Stories, editor of The Literary Review, and translator of Natalia Ginzburg and Fleur Jaeggy

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