Sheng Xing: A Poet's Suspicions

I was born in 1978. I have an older brother and an older sister. My whole family settled down in a small town in this mountainous region of ours when I was very young, and even then we still moved around a lot — we were very poor because my father was the only one earning an income. My father is a man with a peculiar character: at home he is extremely tyrannical, and this has made all his children unsociable and eccentric by nature. The world has always looked grey to me, I don’t like to say very much, I don’t have any friends, and when I was growing up I used to wander around in the hills near where I live by myself. Now when I come to think about this, it is extremely disturbing because in those days I was still a very small child but there was nothing in the least bit innocent about me. There is a direct connection here with my later writing. At the moment, I feel that someone who writes should first and foremost have a lonely and placid spirit, his relationship with the world should be forever weakening, he should be forever turning back to the world in his own heart. By looking for a way out of his own inner world, he solves the problems of the world.

The biggest problem on this earth is the problem of each individual’s inner world. No one is really able to change another person, nor can they really change the world. Such things are just too unreal. Even if such change were possible, it would only really be an influence at best.

I’m highly suspicious of things such as ‘thought’, but I believe in the spirit. In comparison with the spirit, thought belongs to a shallower level, it’s a step backwards that aims for generality. Generalities can be found everywhere, however. The importance of thought is in the way it summarizes all these surface-level things.

I’m highly suspicious of Buddhism. Buddhism makes an illusion out of everything, it’s totally unreal. Its unreality is what allows it to solve all our problems, but this makes it an absolute impossibility. For this reason, I’d rather believe in death: talking about death is much more down to earth, it’s the end of an individual’s inner world/life. Death allows me to catch a glimpse of existence’s original shape as well as the impossibility of solving the problems of one’s inner life on one’s own.

My poetry’s existence is in my relationship to myself; it is the relationship between me and this world.

If I were unable to [go on] writing poetry, I would feel both extremely deprived and very bored — I would become a blind man in my own inner world. I really don’t want to turn into that kind of person. Nor would I wish to become that speck of dust that Buddhism talks about.

I began writing poetry when I was in high-school. Due to my limited exposure to literature, I currently only like one poem by a foreign poet: Charles Baudelaire’s ‘L’Albatros’.

At present I work in one of the local offices here of the Ministry of Communication doing work that bears absolutely no relationship to my poetry. The people around me — including my own family — have no understanding of my writing. And so I live amidst the crowds like a man with a secret buried in his heart.”