AN WU

FIVE POEMS

translated by Zuo Fei, Kassy Lee, and Anthony Tao

Family Life 

Lived this way for thirty years until the building collapsed. 
—from "Killing the Man from Shijiazhuang" by Omnipotent Youth Society 

It was before breakfast. He stood for a while on the balcony where laundry 
was hanging out to dry, watching a woman in the wind peddling youtiao 
and wrestling with a weathered Jiangxi accent. He gulped back a cough. 
His wife had gone grocery shopping after she'd prepared a pot of congee. 
As she slammed the door, he realized she looked as fresh as ever, but not young, 

like someone who would disappear soon 

How tender the steaming hot kitchen was, like an alarm clock that always 
goes off on time at the center of family life. The congee on the stove 
was getting cooler and thicker. Many times he had wanted to wait 
for his wife to come back so he could eat at the table in her presence. 
Like a husband, he wanted once again to get to know his wife who 
would bury herself in cooking chunks of meat and sliced ginger 

for the rest of her life as a Chinese woman 

There were a few pot-stewed dishes on the table. A wife who sets the table 
could be one of the greatest inventions of all time:to his surprise, those ten long 
years ago she'd already been eighteen. He filled a small bowl with congee 
and recalled the night of their wedding. What a pair of staggering souls they 
had been: it was raining outside, no wind. In a quiet corner of the gray room, 

a box of condoms would always be there for them 

They had promised to love, for better, for worse. Their wedding photo was still 
on the wall of the living room. This meant they could live with the harm they 
were doing to each other. He tried to swallow his saliva. On the balcony now, he 
was impatiently making a call with his hand clinging to the railing. At that exact 
moment he looked like he was a man with no wife, while his wife, who'd forgotten 
her phone and keys, was ringing and ringing a doorbell he would never hear.

A Swaying Man

He steps out of his office at almost the exact same time as his supervisor 
and walks behind him deliberately. He sets a rule for himself: drift away. 
Cigarette halfway done, Li Bai and Du Fu halfway drowned. 
As his poetry trades with his salary, he turns darker minute-by-minute. 

His cracked and scarred outer skin clocks out, too; but his soul inside still 
sounds off like a warning bell: it's impossible to step back from fate. He 
has no complaints. He follows his supervisor like a carrot on a stick. He only 
knows half of the world; the other half is as obscure to him as he is to himself. 

The other half is in the tight grip of the security guard behind him, who 
wrings out of it sicknesses, sexy girls, skyscrapers, political crises—suffering. 
The guard, of course, grasps suffering in many ways and, for instance, 
pretends to see everyone there except for him. Forget it. It's nothing more 

than the road leftover after he dies, it's nothing more than the phase he buries 
his head in the sand about. Might as well flow fast down these flesh-strewn 
streets, go forward. Go ahead. Go. Ahead is just his obsolete middle-age, 
laid out like the cards of a fortune teller. He hears himself fall to the floor. 

At the corner, his boss turns around and sees him. He pulls himself together 
by reciting the long-unamended Party Constitution in his mind. Fate roars 
past him in an unlicensed car. With all these rookie mistakes, he'll rot away. 
A mended angel is looking for him, while he looks for his future self.

A Missing Man

"Once again, the sunlight overhead, conferences and wounds 
transfix the city of Beijing. Once again this back-up country 
can be used in a state of emergency, but why just for a crisis?" 

"Love's valve has been violently opened. Can you 
people resist and not go with the flow? A post office, 
a public school, a homeless shelter are up ahead. I, too, 
hope you can recall painful experiences without 
wallowing in despair. Some among you must be obsessed 
with your bank accounts. You should know there is no 
wisdom within the political elite, only stones, 
difficulties, and a bit of the legacy of the long-departed 
Lu Xun. You might have heard some anecdotes 
of failure and felt joy and sorrow. But do you all know 
failure is the nub of this nation? Whatever you do, don't 
rub it too hard. It'll react. It might have an orgasm or two." 

"Once again, the sunlight diffuses. From paper, Mao leaps 
into the free market, now the dazzling illumination conceals 
the turning tides. Go and see if the emergency flashlight is on." 

"That year I clapped my hands, galloping along the street 
you love. Who cried, 'You China-ed me!'? 
I taught Chinese and politics. What I had wanted to cry was 
'I history-ed you!'. You're more made-in-China than I am, 
more dependent on this giant dead end. Like you, 
I interfere in this country, but I neither oppose it 
nor try to turn it around. The more ideological I become, 
the more illegal resources I can get. Oh, you people, like 
a bunch of swamp cabbage, easily scrunched into a ball, 
are plain, flimsy, waiting to graduate and be assigned a job. 
There will always be paychecks making their way to your 
incompetent egos: do not be vigilant, do not falter.” 

"The phantom penis, freezing, frightening and desirable, 
rested in turn on our eyes, ears, mouths, tongues, and noses. 
After he, you, and I swallow the pills and our skeletons fall apart, 
do we go back to the standard-issue life and stand by China?" 

Elegy

1. 

On the last bus, dozing, she was ready to hurl 
but had no bag. Next to her, an unknown man 
not good enough, like a box of expired antiemetic 

Pop music floated in the dark, admiring the downtown 
fixed in her cosmetic mirror. Her post-work pain stacked upon 
the ruins inside love: like a repentant thief in her handbag 

She blushed after arriving. On the road home she crossed 
over to a trash can and threw away a familiar man she had 
put on hold in her mind: Oh neurotic vagina 

2. 

Old discreet lovers hand in hand in the street. She adored 
a huge billboard that had nothing to do with them. Suddenly, she endured 
the man on her left, and hid away the next second they'd been warned about 

many times. On the blind tracks, they shared a pair of earphones, 
trying hard to enjoy life, like the many ways a meal can swim 
through a salary. She and he occasionally wondered 

in secret whose heart pounded heavier. In this street where no one hugs, 
taxis came and went, correcting the defect in their way 
of clinging together; her – permitting the one selling socks on the street 

3. 

The center of family life regularly automated by coins, records of 
infidelity spilled out of an overturned salt shaker like breasts 
sagging under life's passion. She was busy washing 

vegetables from Walmart. The new apron bought by her husband 
covered up the Chinese nationality on her hip. The smartphone 
in her pocket continually vibrated. She decided to turn off 

the positioning function of Momo. Goodbye, the unrestricted life, 
two bedrooms and a living area. She wiped dry her hands to watch 
a hot comedy show, never again to be moved to tears.

The Long March 

——for a training school 

In the new semester I hunch over a bike performing on the playground 
one-handed riding techniques like a pigeon hopping in the empty 
stomach of the country. People around me practice soaring 
with old newspapers on their heads, hoping to fly to the rusty 
supermarket to buy prescreened low-grade happiness. 

In my bike basket are test papers of previous entrance exams. 
They remind me of the language teacher who quit to go to the coast 
and start up a business. He'd become tougher, I heard, 
as should a head teacher of high school seniors, to the extent that 
he no longer limped, for the walking stick of the civil servant 

had been discarded to the wall. "What a place, 
the foot of this wall!" Just as I was thinking this, 
a flash of lightning illuminated this confident starving era, 
hurling me toward a garbage can at the foot of the wall. In a flash, 
the red sun, the last generation, the awkward inland provinces 

all surged toward me. I was hesitant like a filthy cloud 
over various identities. The one thing I was firmly convinced of 
was that everything I ever did was for the purpose of my manipulation 
by the world. With white-out I revise the scars 
on my face. Above me, flocks of birds caw madly. 

Above me, my classmates will go to lunch 
lugging lunchboxes, and with tongues lick dry 
this piss-soaked nation. Such a pity, as they upturn the corners 
searching for me, I will already be hiding in the trash can 
watching an adult movie, pained as the pixels 

blotting out nudity. Years later, after I become the plastic people 
in the TV, wearing a tough face, with love within proportion for 
relevant government departments, I will still be able to recall 
the scene in that film: the heroine, like my country 
today, in the throes of an endless orgasm. 

I might as well speak again of my bike. Now 
where has it gone? I would like to ride it to college 
and, with those people rushing to get ahead, sleep 
with my tail tucked between my legs. I want to ride my bike toward 
drought-plagued utopia, where I'll study Mao's guerrilla tactics. 

Much too ideological. This training school has already put on 
a clean appearance, like a short-haired model 
extracting herself after sex. When I rip off her clothes, 
what is revealed is a long-cherished Auschwitz; 
it taught me how to pretend to be a naive adolescent.