Feng Na

Each of Feng Na’s poems offers a window into contemporary China, yet they explode narrow notions of Chinese poets as mere dissidents, or noble savages – as though their poems were only good as pamphlets, or expressions of their “ethnic selves” but nothing else. Chinese Fable, for example, recounts the tale of a man who departs the sleepy town of his birth and amasses a fortune in the metropolis. The town hears bits and pieces of his legend, and then the information dries up – until, years later, news surfaces that he has been executed for drug trafficking. A family member claims his ashes, but the box is stolen in the metro. “It obsesses me, this box”, concludes Feng:

Like a fable or something
Other people are like me
they want to know its whereabouts
like standing at the exit
searching for this story’s entrance.

One possible reading of Feng’s fable might be that the poem represents China’s post-reform journey from one of the world’s poorest and most egalitarian countries to one of its richest and most unequal, where some folks are willing to do anything to prosper – even pollute the commons. But another reading might stress how the purloined ashes, the uncertainty of the three “likes” of the final stanza, and the multiple trapdoors that Feng has built into the poem, hint at the surplus meaning that escapes even the most airtight analyses.

Bai is one of the ethnic “minority” groups in southwest China with its own language but Feng Na writes in standard Chinese like most ethnic writers in China today. She writes about her ethnic identities but at the same time avoids being stereotyped.