Sickened by Steel

Abstract

Sickened by Steel Zhou Lunyou (bio) Translated by Ming Di and Frank Stewart I’m always afraid of reliving that night—the fires erupting,my rushing blood burns through my body again,the powerful cries jolt me out of my quiet life.In flames, the square expands and contracts—swelling in the soaring enthusiasm,then suddenly shrinking. The exploding lightsblind the witnesses. (I don’t want to resurrect the emotions of that nightor cause other people to relive them through me,the deaths, the pain.) That night has sickened me.The grinding steel has become a diseasethat’s made me sick with rage. In this new era, that is withoutheroes or butterflies, I can calm myselfwith the smell of fresh oranges, orby making tea and chatting about cowardice. When memories threaten us,we simply enroll in a school in the suburbs,find a job, or ring a bell every daylike a monk marking the hours. We go on living like that, pretendingto be lightheartedas if nothing had happened. [End Page 158] But deep inside, we are infected.We laugh then abruptly stop.We are sad, so sad that we are nothing,like a river without fish,a sky without birds. Living a meaningless life—Struck or not, a bell is still a bell.A monk is still a monk.Even airplanes would be sickenedseeing the world through dark glasses.Like a failed abortionwe are scraped out, hollowed,boring and meaningless souls. Before that night I lived like a feather.Now, when I awakeI have turned to dead ashes. Sichuan1990.10.19 [End Page 159] Zhou Lunyou Zhou Lunyou was born in 1952 in Xichang, Sichuan province. He started writing poetry in the 1970s, founded the avant-garde group Not Not (Feifei) in 1986, and edited its influential journal and subsequent volumes of poetic theory. His poetic manifesto was titled “A Stance of Rejection.” A collection of his poems and theoretical articles, Opening the Door of the Flesh: Not-Not-ism, From Theory to Practice, was published in 1994. He received the Rougang Poetry Award in 1992 and the first Contemporary Chinese Poetry Award from Nanjing University in 2009. Copyright © 2019 University of Hawai‘i Press