Yu Yan Chen (陈瑜燕) is an award-winning poet and literary translator. She won Singapore’s Golden Point Award in 2015 and garnered the top prize at the Flushing Poetry Festival in 2019. Her first poetry collection, entitled Small Hours, was published by the NYQ Books in 2011. Her second poetry Grandma Says (祖母说), was published in 2017. Her translation of The Chief Cellist, a children’s book by Taiwanese author Wang Wenhua, was published by the Balestier Press in 2015. She currently resides in Singapore and has translated short stories, essays and poems by Yi Sha, Mai Jia, Li Juan, Han Dong, and Zheng Xiaoqiong.

 

Zheng Xiaoqiong (郑小琼) was born in rural Sichuan in 1980 and moved to Dongguan City in southern Guangdong Province as a migrant worker in 2001. She is the author of eleven collections of poetry, including Women Migrant Workers, Huang Maling, The Rose Manor, Selected Poems by Zheng Xiaoqiong, Pure Plants, and Pedestrian Overpass. Women Migrant Workers (2012) has been hailed as “the first symphonic verse on women, work and capital in the history of Chinese poetry.” Her works have garnered numerous accolades including China’s Avant-garde Poetry Prize, 2006, People’s Literature Award, Zhuang Zhong Literary Award; the In-Presence Cutting-Edge Prose Award, and the Lu Xun Literary Award, among others. Some of her poems have been translated into German, English, French, Japanese, Korean, Spanish and Turkish. Her poems in Women Migrant Workers have also been set to music by American and German musicians and performed in a number of countries.

 

Child Labor, Liangshan

Zheng Xiaoqiong

 

(translated by Yu Yan Chen)

 

Life is bewildering, and time has gradually gone

blind. A girl of fourteen suffers the fatigue

of our era on the assembly line among us.

Sometimes she yearns to return to rural Sichuan,

to chop wood, to cut grass, to pick wild berries and flowers.

In her timid eyes a desolation lingers, something I don’t

know how to express in words. I only know

“child labor,” or a paper-thin sigh.

 

Her eyes are capable of breaking hearts.

Why must the tiny bits of leftover sympathy

be ground up by the machinery of the assembly line?

Her slowness often triggers a flood of scolding

from our team leader, but she doesn’t cry.

Tears circle in her eyes, “I am an adult now.

I can’t cry,” she says earnestly.

 

How bewildering – all that’s left of childhood

is nostalgia. She talks of the things in the mountains –

the hillsides, the blue sea, the snakes and the cows.

Perhaps living is about carving out a path in the maze,

going back to basics. Sometimes her dark face

is full of contempt for her friend.

Pointing at a girl even thinner and weaker, she says –

“She is younger than me, but she has to sleep with men at night.”

 

~

 

凉山童工

 

郑小琼

 

 

生活只会茫然  时代逐渐成为

盲人 十四岁小女孩要跟我们

在流水线上领引时代带来的疲惫

有时 她更想让自己返回四川乡下

砍柴 割草 摘野果子与野花

她瘦小的眼神浮出荒凉 我不知道

该用怎样的句子来表达 只知道

童工 或者像薄纸样的叹息

她的眼神总能将柔软的心击碎

为什么仅有的点点同情

也被流水线的机器辗碎

她慢半拍的动作常常换来

组长的咒骂 她的泪没有流下

在眼眶里转动 “我是大人了

不能流泪” 她一本正经地说

多么茫然啊 童年只剩下

追忆 她说起山中事物比如山坡

比如蔚蓝的海子 比如蛇 牛

也许生活就是要从茫然间找出一条路

返回到它的本身 有时她黝黑的脸

会对她的同伴露出鄙视的神色

她指着另一个比她更瘦弱的女孩说

“她比我还小 夜里要陪男人睡觉”