Yu Xiuhua - A Life Lived In Poetry

She is a subsistence farmer with a ninth-grade education and a disabled person with speech and writing challenges, yet she has been the most talked-about and best-selling poet in China. Her name is Yu Xiuhua, and her life is a triumph of poetry.

- Dian Li

The year 2015 started with a bang for Yu Xiuhua. In a span of months, her name graced front pages of newspapers, prime-time television shows, and far corners of the internet. A country woman no longer, she had become the most talked about poet in China. Three years later, the “Yu Xiuhua Craze” shows no sign of abating, sustained by the new poet laureate’s consistent presence on social media, her untiring appearances at promotional events, and three best-selling collections of poetry, in addition to debate and controversy, all of which continues to attract readers to her work and helps pique their interest about the person behind her writings. Already, an award-winning documentary has been made about her, and two of her poems have been set to song by popular musicians. A feature film based on her life story is reportedly in the making.

Yet Yu Xiuhua’s existence before her sudden fame was quite unremarkable, in fact, so prosaic as to be indistinguishable from the lives of China’s rural masses. She was born in 1976, the only child to subsistence farmers in the marginal lands of Hubei Province. In contrast to the country’s flourishing urban centers, Yu Xiuhua’s village of Hengdian is an unintended time capsule of remote rural China: rustic, isolated, and unchanging, where the only signs of modernity are early-model cell phones and slowly arriving internet connections. A typical life path for a girl like Yu Xiuhua, if she wants something better than the life of her parents, would be to migrate to the big cities after basic schooling and become an assembly-line worker in the plant of a manufacturing powerhouse such as Foxconn, the famed iPhone maker. This life path, however, was not possible for Yu Xiuhua because of the cerebral palsy she suffered from a difficult birth.