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❀ Chinese Queer Feminist Poetic Intimacies: A Translation Play
❀ Daybreak

_{This translation play is a response to Wang Zheng’s “Feminist Struggles in a Changing China” (Chapter 5) from Feminisms with Chinese Characteristics, co-edited by Ping Zhu and Hui Faye Xiao.}

Translators: huiyin, fran yu (CAO Collective members)
Writers: participants in Chinese Artists and Organizers’ Collective’s exquisite corpse poetry workshops

Translator/Artist Statement

by huiyin

This translation series feature poems from Chinese Artists and Organizers Collective (CAO 离离草)’s collective poetry writing workshops, which engaged over 200 Chinese feminist participants during the White Paper Movement (白纸运动), sparked by the Urumqi Fire in November 2022. Most of the participants grew up in the PRC and are currently based in the US. These poems, each collectively written by seven to twelve people, are processes of collective narrativising and theorising of our grief, anger, and dreams in the ruins. These are intimate conversations with each other, with #MeToo survivors and arrested feminists in China, with the mothers and daughters in the lockdowns, and young people and workers who have bravely protested on the streets, in factories and at school. The processual, communal aspect of the exquisite corpse method itself is in and of itself an ensemble, a play. At the end of the workshops, CAO facilitators always invite participants to read out loud the poem(s) they initiated and experience how others have carried their words into different lives. These collectively written poems carry the presences of feminist/women ancestors, queer kin, and spirits when physical access is limited by geographical distance, the pandemic, international travel bans, and lockdowns. These poems have been chanted by many in vigils and protests, in community spaces and living rooms across oceans and borders.

The translation of these poems is another way of engaging with the changing political landscapes of Chinese feminist organizing in the diaspora, inspired by Wang Zheng’s chapter “Feminist Struggles in a Changing China”. Wang Zheng’s chapter contextualises different waves of Chinese feminist activism and the different articulations of resistance under shifting state apparatuses. Now, with more transnational Chinese feminists who are mainly based internationally and still concerned with events happening back “home”, reimagining transnational solidarities that traverse nation-state borders opens up new possibilities. In many ways, these poems and their new lives in translation, by yet a new generation of Chinese feminists, speak into the affective, diasporic, imaginative, and relational intimacies in transnational Chinese feminist organising.

The translation process is more than transferring meaning from one language to another. This artful translation is an inquiry into the tensions between political legibility in English and the disruptive untranslatability of the texts and the affective life-worlds they have inhabited, rooted in specific movement language and invocations of recent events in China that are impossible to render in English. What is the politics and aesthetics to not translate something? How can the translation, mostly by a single translator who readily has access to the entire text, resist the urge to impose a consistent thread into the whole poem, when the writing process itself was intuitive, messy, without knowing how your words will be carried through another’s voice? How can we juggle the different political affect between retaining the original chaotic entanglement and rendering a stand-alone poem in English?

These translations, therefore, are not intended to be a final form in any way. Although different from the original poetry-writing process, these translations are different forms of play, an improv duet between the two translators. The poems are intentionally selected out of more than a hundred collective poems to represent some of the common threads and concerns. We encourage the readers to read for moments of the negotiations in the translations as a process, to see these words as living, and to read for the different articulations of a diasporic/transnational Chinese feminist consciousness in relation to the rich Chinese feminist lineage discussed in Wang Zheng’s chapter. These poems and their translations are an invitation and provocation for an intimate, collective witnessing with each other, holding space for (re)emergent.

❀

The Poems

[Download the original Chinese poems HERE.]

Our flowing skin drowns D’s wall

Do not draw back your antenna
unfold it like lightning
striking out tongues of flames in the riverbed
birthing endless spells into the cold night—
—with my mother tongue
a language I can’t learn or utter
to reach you over and over
to feel your trembling in my sound waves

一，一，一，一，一
呜呜呜呜呜呜呜（lasting three seconds）
咳，咳，咳
呜呜呜呜呜呜呜（lasting three seconds）
一，一，一，一，一

the desire to touch each other with our most intimate murmurs
ungendered, desexualised—to kiss, embrace, hold hands, nibble whispers into ears
or, to simply be with each other. our hearts pound to the seconds of silence
unspoken emotions flowing across our bodies

written on blank paper
is our shared language of the world
once again I whisper to the world’s ears
how many sounds does it hold?
the love it carries
is hopelessness
but it’s also a heart
blooming in silence
please, come close to me. hold me tight
nakedly I speak, nakedly I scream
nakedly I cry
right by your ears
between skin and skin the distance is still too thick
between sound and sound there is too much silence
so we have melted onto the white papers

my antenna, your antenna
the traces we leave across the blankness
are blurred by tears

our fluids flowing, our kisses flowing
into a messy, uncontrollable
world we inhabit

❀

(Can we) (Can we) (Can we)

Our voices are scattered in the winds
(Is that us) (I can’t hear through the noise) (the wind blows like willow catkins like blades)

Our bodies melt into the night
(Oh, it’s you) (You shouted your name out loud) (your palms are sweating)

Our thoughts splash all over the seas
(Are you okay) (Let me give you a hug) (Let’s cry together, laugh together!)

Across from Us there are so many of You
Wearing (bright yellow police jackets) (creamy white cotton-padded coat) and (blue masks glued to your faces)

Our blood is drying under the moonlight
(What’s my crime?) (I just wanted a breath of fresh air) (don’t hurt me don’t hurt me don’t hurt me don’t hurt me don’t hurt me)

Blood dry, the moonlight seeps out of the darkness
(my song their song) (we are standing together) (chant for me, chant for them: huan xiang, illusion, imagination, impossibility, of home.)

In the dark night, the stars are watching for us
(不能不明白) (我们都是她的朋友) (我们为自己的历史作见证) (can you see me)

Our fears and longingness dance in the air
(Can you hear?) (Who are you missing?) (I want to go home but I don’t dare to go home
but I want to go home) (Please protect our young people) (I am the new youth, mama) (I
am a vibrant life under the bloody sky, I am every you, I am one another.)

❀

Mama, I am born here
妈妈, 我生在这里

The poet Tennyson once sang
“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”
What do our bodies hold?

妈妈, I am still walking on this land
妈妈, today the sea will wash over me
妈妈, I’m here. I’m still here.
妈妈, the mothers of all oysters
how we have unfolded ourselves to the night tides
妈妈, I don’t dare call you
afraid that once I see you, the spring tides will rush out of our clenched shells
妈妈, don’t worry about us
we will come home tonight.

妈妈, we never did anything wrong
if I confide in you, could you promise your heart won’t break for me
妈妈, my life is a treasure you gave me
How can I not let it pursue that freedom?
Freedom reminds oysters that we were boundless waves in our past lives
riding with winds across the surface we struck and buried
the decaying empire’s riches under the sea

You are afraid that I will get hurt, 妈妈,
afraid that the billows will toss me away to corners you will never see
afraid that my body will be clogged with silt and pebbles
afraid that I will be stuck in the crevices of the reef
picked up by stray dogs

Reefs are also already wounded and broken
but they still stand tall above the toiling waves
wearing the traces of abrasive tides
the dents from clashes
the barnacles that can’t be rooted out
all as badges of honour

Still standing in the eyes of torrents, we have long become reefs
like flowing rocks
bedrocks planted under the earth
sitting on each other’s shoulders
budding through, bit by bit

❀

Dismemberment

My body is a boat
sailing oceans after oceans
carrying memories, cultures, histories
nutrients from there
it is holding me, I am holding it
to wander, to be withered
by winds, suns, and rains
to root here

To start anew, being towards death
I bring hope and seeds
spread the saplings of fire
on this earth

On the earth grows light
light grows shadow grows
seas grows boats
The boat is one of my bodies
crossing mountains after mountains
it is touching the clouds, the clouds
are touching me

My camera
captures the fires on people’s faces
the fires in their hearts
to burn down the fortress of injustice
a new garden

I bundle up the places I’ve been into my backpack
I wear the weight of all the stories I’ve gathered

Weight becomes lightness, on my passport densely
words, identifiable for the ancient civilization
Secrets of the growth of plants, in the heart
A riddle of love.
I love you, I mean.

In my eye sockets brewing boiling are my words
On the back of my hands bulging are my words
Strapped on my shoulders by my backpack are my words
Rubbing my heels with the soles are my words
on the water, floating
How much more weight
of love’s whisper
can I hold?
I will say it to you

I want to row the boat home now
but where is my home
I want to transform my body back to a boat
Dismember me.
I want to build a house with my companions
a house that belongs with us
our home

❀

Alive Raw Dreaming

生的。It’s raw.
Bloody. Red.
A body. Peeled open.
Mucous,
pain,
spit out from a strangled throat.

Nails.
Knives.
Rotten leftovers.
Cotton swabs from PCR tests.
Blank papers

Sneakers and sweeper neatly set by the edges of the balcony
a living room and nobody home
Downstairs, a corpse
I have swallowed them all
but there’s not a bit taste to this stuff
I lift my head and see
it’s my lunch.

I guess I still remember today’s life
standing in my lunchbox
like a single match

I turn off the lights in the room
let that match become the only light.

A mother with her daughter
is taking down the iron sheets
making appealing phone calls with one hand
breaking the barricades with the other

A brave mother
A daughter with their head held so high

Mother and daughter
holding hands
with another mother
another daughter
standing with endless other mothers and daughters

Weaving into an umbilical cord soaked in fresh blood and amniotic water
At 5:30 am woken up by a wave of a warmth
flowing from my crotches, salty waters
With a blunt knife, aliens wearing white hazmat suits are cutting off
our umbilical cords

A mother
fell
from the window
We lower our heads and see
all our mothers
falling from the windows
every daughter who has ever opened their eyes on this earth
now becomes an orphan

I became my own mother
I sing a lullaby to myself
“sleep tight
my dear child”

Header: Hand-drawn headshot of CAO Collective’s five current members, designed by yanki.

How to cite: Zhou, Huiyin, and Fran Yu with Chinese Artists and Organizers Collective. “Chinese Queer Feminist Poetic Intimacies: A Translation Play.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 18 Jul. 2023, chajournal.blog/2023/07/18/poetic-intimacies/.

Founded in August 2022, The Chinese Artists and Organizers Collective (CAO 离离草) creates art as a form of organising and (re)building a sustainable community. The practice is rooted in China, the Sinophone diaspora, and diverse experiences in between. They make art to organise and support social justice movements, collective healing and empowerment, and systemic change. They make space for political conversations and community-oriented art in solidarity with other marginalised communities. Contact: caocollective.com | instagram @caocollective | caocollective@gmail.com

Born and raised in China’s industrial hub of Dongguan, Huiyin Zhou 徽音 (they/she) is a transnational queer feminist organiser and community-based artist, writer, translator, and documentarian. Working with prose, documentary poetry, and digital/film/polaroid photography, huiyin speaks into the revolutionary politics of feminist living/rooms and imaginative intimacy/kinship beyond physical presence. They are building a Chinese queer feminist base in the triangle area, NC and NYC. Their original and translated works have been published by Sine Theta Magazine, Margins, <<金土地>>, Shanghai Literature and Art Press, Shanghai Far East/Yuandong Press, and beyond. huiyin is a co-founder of Chinese Artists and Organizers Collective (CAO 离离草). They also volunteered as an editor, translator, and proofreader for unCoVer initiative 疫中人.

Fran Yu / 嚼嚼 works with words, clay, paint and other earthly bodies. They graduated from the Creative Writing MFA program at Pratt Institute. Their work weaves through authoritarianisms in both systematic and intimate structures. To them, collective survival means joy and resistance and art and rest, with their people. A story they wrote lives in the Massachusetts Review. They are a co-founder of the Chinese Artists and Organizers Collective (CAO 离离草).