A Review of Yi Lei’s My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree — July 15, 2021 by Bernie Groves
In 2017, I sat at a café called Wormhole in Sun Li Tun’er. While there, I had the pleasure of listening to a reading by former poet laureate Tracy K. Smith. It was midafternoon and I was enjoying an Irish whiskey latte. Snippets of Mandarin conversations floated around, unintelligible to my untrained ears. Soon, American English broke those conversations apart. Being a lao-wai is hard. Harder still, when most of the English you come across is British. So, starved of the familiar blunt twang of the American accent, I followed that voice.
Inside of a cozy room packed with people, Smith murmured into a mic at the front. She was serene and calm, her brass skin—the same as mine—a warm greeting. She was describing the effect that China’s natural beauty had on her poetry.
My Name Will Grow Wide like a Tree is a collection of poems by Yi Lei, translated by Smith and Changtai Bi. In the introduction, Smith talks about the time she spent with Yi Lei in China after years of electronic correspondence. She made the trip to China at the same time I left for Beijing. So, when I found out about this collection, I was excited to get my hands on it. It’s a recent publication, published in 2020 posthumously, following Yi Lei’s death in 2018. It includes one of Yi Lei’s most famous poems, “A Single Woman’s Bedroom.”
The poems are dynamic, oscillating from an unapologetic sensuality with her “boundless” nature, to an enigmatic loneliness. The collection is a journey of self-discovery, existentialist at its core. In a poem called “Discourse,” she observes, “Mostly, I think people live / for the sake of living.” She expands on that idea to talk about her value as a woman that doesn’t procreate. She says of herself, “My chief function is obsolescence,” which also extends to those who live just for the sake of it. She questions the nature of living and whether the act itself renders us into obsolescence because of life’s ephemeral nature. The first poem that greets readers is “Green Trees Greet the Rainstorm,” or “Lü shù duì baò fēng yü de yíng jiē.” The poem sets the tone for the entire collection: we are trees battered by storms and still, we await these storms with our roots buried in the ground, waiting for the moment we’ll be reduced to dust:
I belong to the nation of startled cries, voices flailing in wind And I know you bound to unravel me, but how can I not Lift my head and look you in the eye? How can I fail to greet you Though my living gown will soon be shredded, shed? Better to be ravaged straightaway in youth Than to live out another year’s quiet undoing
The speaker in “Love’s Dance” thinks about what it would be like to be savage for once and the poem reflects this desire with sensuous language:
Lights first dim, then sordid—bright As a marquee of the underworld Your animal heat, heart in full gallop I gripped you with my heels, fingers Knotted into your hair
Smith welcomed the reader to do their own translating, to enter into the discussion that she, Yi Lei, and Changtai Bi began. Changtai Bi translated the poems verbatim, and Tracy studied Yi Lei’s voice, the structure of her poems, and the emotion evoked by certain words.
Readers get a peek into Yi Lei’s experience as a woman of the 1980’s—a time of social upheaval, of political dissent, and increased importance on individuality. “A Single Woman’s Bedroom’’ was penned during this time. The poem on its surface is a woman lamenting the fact that her lover chose not to live with her. However, the poem also carries a sense of political rebelliousness:
Authority flings a struck match in our direction then Gasps when we flare into flame Law: a contest between lowlifes and sophisticates Though only time knows who is who Tonight I want to commit a victimless crime You didn’t come live with me
My favorite line from this collection is in “A Single Woman’s Bedroom.” Thirteen poems comprise it. And each poem focuses on an image from the speaker’s life: her elusive lover, the banks of the Yangtze, and the tumultuous political atmosphere of 1980s China. In “Invitation,” Yi Lei contemplates womanhood. She asks in the English translation: “But how can I be a woman / If he is a child?” In the Chinese version translated verbatim, we get a sense that the speaker is desperately lamenting this fact—the irrevocability of this guy’s immaturity and her foresight that nothing good will come from a union between them. He will always be a child, and she will always be searching for something between them that brands her into a woman recognized by society.
He will always be a child, a child How can I prove that I am a woman.
tā yong yuan shi hái zi, shì hái zi wo bù néng zhèng míng zì ji shì nu ren
The English version emphasizes the causal relationship between the subjects: “But how can I be a woman / If he is a child?” So, because he’s a child, she cannot be a woman. This question gets at an inner longing to prove womanhood, but as readers we wonder if this longing is intrinsic to the speaker or imposed on her through socialization. In this one line, Yi Lei talks about social constructs, she talks about meaning in relationships, and about compatibility, all while lamenting the loneliness that these interactions leave us with. In the end, she says to her elusive lover with quiet acceptance, “ni bù lái yu wo tóng jū,” “you won't come live with me.”
Yi Lei compels us to ask uncomfortable questions of ourselves—what is womanhood, and why must it be proven through relation? My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree is an evocative collection of Yi Lei’s most moving poems, deftly translated by Tracy K. Smith and Changtai Bi. It transports me back to that café in Sun Li Tun’er where I sat in a corner sipping Irish whiskey, trying to find myself.
