A Poetic Leave - the story of Poet and Scholar Zheng Min

From 1939, when she entered the National Southwestern Associated University and wrote her first poetic work, to the beginning of the 21st century, Zheng Min has been writing poetry for more than 70 years. According to poet Xi Chuan,

"Ms. Zheng continued to follow the latest international trends of thought even in her later years. She was both a poet and a scholar. This is not quite the same as poets of her generation."

"Poetry and art know no age," said Zheng Min, referring to her poetic muse as Alice. In her mind, Alice had always been a serene and quiet little girl who was impervious to any storm. Throughout her youth and difficulties, Alice was always there, providing her with the magical power to write many real poems.

Zheng Min was born during the early days of the Republic of China, a time when warlords were fighting each other. She received a Western-style education that placed great importance on physical exercise and being close to nature. In her autobiography, Zheng Min mentions that she used to enjoy spending time alone in the yard, observing everything around her, and listening to the sounds of insects. Her lonely childhood led her to develop a close relationship with mountains, rivers, grass, and trees, and "loneliness" became a recurring theme in her early poetry.

After the Mukden Incident, Zheng Min moved to Nanjing to attend junior high school. She often hid after school to read translated novels. Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra became her philosophical inspiration.

In 1939, when she was 19 years old, Zheng Min was accepted into the National Southwestern Associated University. She had to travel to Kunming in a van called "Yellow Fish" which was extremely uncomfortable. During her journey, they stayed in some dirty inns where rats were running all around.

Young Zheng Min

Zheng Min decided to study Philosophy at the National Southwestern Associated University. There was no uniform textbook for classes, so teachers had to create their own. Many teachers took delight in teaching from their own textbooks. Running the alarm during class was a common occurrence. When the alarm rang, teachers and students would rush out of the tin classroom and to the edges of the countryside, where they would descend into the graveyard. Zhang Yan, a student of Zheng Min, said: 

"Ms.Zheng was very fortunate to have been exposed to so many Chinese and Western philosophical ideas, and her later poems were very much imbued with philosophical connotations."

Each professor had a unique personality, but they all shared one thing in common - they appeared to be fully absorbed in their area of expertise. It was as if the subject matter became a part of them, and their life was a true embodiment of their knowledge.

The atmosphere of poetry creation was strong at National Southwestern University, where nearly all of the prominent poets from all periods of new Chinese poetry in the 1940s gathered. Li Yongyi went on to say,

"From the point of view of writing poets, it was such a blessing to have such great poets as Feng Zhi, Bian Zhilin, and Wen Yiduo as teachers, as well as fellow poets such as Mudan, Wang Zuoliang, and Du Yunxie!"

Zheng Min spent a lot of time reading new poems during her freshmen year. She even wrote her own poem, "The Gala," which was published in a supplement of a Kunming newspaper edited by the University's faculties and students. However, it was Feng Zhi who really inspired and introduced her to the world of poetry.

Zheng Min, in her autobiography, mentioned that during her second year in college, she took classes about Goethe taught by Feng Zhi. After reading Feng Zhi's translation of Rilke's Ten Letters to a Young Poet, she developed a keen interest in Goethe and Rilke and started to appreciate poetry with more intellectual elements. She also read a lot of early 20th-century British stream-of-consciousness novels and began writing some vernacular poems after school.

At Associated University, the teachers and students shared a close bond of friendship. Zheng Min often visited Professor Feng Zhi at his home. She would sometimes ask him questions, while other times she would simply listen to him chat with Bian Zhilin and other guests. Mr. Feng Zhi always welcomed her warmly. After graduation, Zheng Min wrote a song called "Ode to the Southwestern Associated University". In her song, she likened her alma mater to "the only sun that radiates in our memories".

In 1943, on Feng Zhi's recommendation, Zheng Min published nine pieces in Tomorrow Literature and Art, including a masterpiece later renamed The Golden Bunch of Rice. In the winter of 1948, Zheng Min traveled to the United States to pursue a master's degree in English literature at Brown University. During that time, her first collection of poems, Poems 1942-1947, was edited and published by Ba Jin, a renowned Chinese writer, himself.

From the time she moved to the United States until 1979, many years after returning to China, reality eroded Zheng Min's inspiration and ambition to write poetry. It wasn't until 1979, at the end of the Cultural Revolution, that the poet Cao Xinzhi invited several poets who had written new poems to his home, where he proposed that the poets retrieve their 1940s-published works and publish a collection so that young people would know that such poems existed in China. On the evening of the meeting, Zheng Min felt as if she had returned to the realm of poetry, and the "Alice" in her heart had reawakened.

The book "Nine Leaves" was named after the nine poets whose works it contained, having a huge impact on the literary world. During those years, Zheng Min experienced a second peak in his poetry creation and theory, writing over 200 new poems and publishing more than 10 collections of poetry and theoretical monographs, such as "The Searching Collection," "Images of the Heart," "In the Morning, I Picked Flowers in the Rain," and "The Collected Poems of Zheng Min (1979-1999)." Despite the hardships of life and the ups and downs of fate, Zheng Min's enthusiasm for poetry remained undiminished. Poet Xichuan praised Zheng Min's generation of poet-intellectuals for their ability to maintain their intellectual personality despite all kinds of suffering and setbacks.

In her later years, Zheng Min remained philosophical, Liu Yan said,

"She wouldn't discuss with you whether the clothes looked good, how much the groceries cost, and so on. She focused on grand themes such as humanity, the earth, war, poetry, philosophy, the environment, and traditional culture. She has always been concerned and thinking about the fate of mankind and has written poems about the Iraq war and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "

"Poetry was her life." In the last few years of her life, Zheng Min could no longer move her pen to write poetry, but Zhang Yan sensed poetry in Zheng Min's heart and the words she uttered.

Looking out the window one winter at the lifeless, barren trunks of the trees, Zheng Min said that the trees were pouring with life's blood inside.

She left this world with her Alice in 2020.

*This article was taken and translated from the WeChat public account "The Beijing News" post "The centenarian poet and her Alice".