Wild Shanghai Grass

Abstract

OCTOBER 133, Summer 2010, pp. 75–105. © 2010 Molly Nesbit. In late April 1927 the writer Lu Xun sat as a refugee in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou and wrote a preface to his new group of prose poems, which he was calling Wild Grass. “When I am silent, I feel replete,” he began. “As I open my mouth to speak, I am conscious of emptiness.” Words came to him. Past life had died. Dead life had decayed. From its clay, no trees grew, only wild grass. “I love my wild grass,” he wrote, “but I detest the ground which decks itself with wild grass.” He pointed to the fires underground that would one day erupt red and devour it. At that point he would laugh out loud and sing, he claimed, and he repeated this laughing and singing, because this fierce turn of events was the fair proof that he had lived.1 The poems that followed had been written to stand apart from the fray of the press. Pulled back and collected, they were a motley group. Freeform meditations rife with inversions, vicious observations, visions exploding; cackling, tart, wafting, they were his dreams, he said—his wild grass. These pieces were not uniform. He shifted voices and cadences. He gave them titles that charted no path: “The Shadow’s Leave-taking,” “Snow,” “The Passer-By,” “Tremors of Degradation,” “The Wise Man, the Fool, and the Slave.”