Editor’s note: This essay serves as the introduction to the forthcoming translation of Ling Yu’s poetry collection Daughters, to be published by Balestier Press.

Winner of the 2025 Newman Prize for Chinese Literature, Ling Yu (零雨, pen name of Wang Mei-chin 王美琴) was born in 1952 in the district of Pinglin in southeastern New Taipei, Taiwan. Ling Yu’s works “span themes of meditation, travel, feminism, capitalism, the environment, mythology and more” by employing “classical and modern, Eastern and Western literary, philosophical, artistic, and esoteric sources,” according to Cosima Bruno’s prize citation.¹ “2025 Newman Prize Winner: Ling Yu.” <a href="https://www.ou.edu/cis/research/institute-for-us-china-issues/us-china-cultural-issues/newman-prize-for-chinese-literature">https://www.ou.edu/cis/research/institute-for-us-china-issues/us-china-cultural-issues/newman-prize-for-chinese-literature</a> Even the name Ling Yu is a heady mix of classical tradition and plain life experienced as a quiet shower. It means fine rain, taken from the oldest extant collection of Chinese poetry, Book of Songs, which dates to the 7th–11th century BC, “representing all that is contradictory and also the inner conflicts” in Ling Yu’s poems. Deeply influenced by Taoism, Ling Yu writes spontaneously: “guided by the moment,” which is how she “understands the fundamental value of life,” Ling Yu “only writes when it comes naturally, not for the sake of writing.” Or, as Ling Yu recounted, after reading Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus with her friends, her writing captures what Plato calls “Dionysian frenzy."¹ “2023 La Nuit de la Littérature” [2023 Night of Literature]. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpxKjsW387M&t">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpxKjsW387M&t</a> Daughters (2022), here translated, is Ling Yu’s ninth poetry collection, not counting the two bilingual Collected Works. Its tender response to caring for her aging mother is brought into focus by other effortless poems about love and meditations on art.

Daughters was awarded Taiwan’s OpenBook Prize and Taiwan Literature Award’s “Golden Book Prize” in 2022. In both acceptance speeches, Ling Yu refers to mothers and daughters in the same breath as the Japanese artist Utagawa Hiroshige’s (1797–1858) “floating world” prints, known as ukiyo-e (浮世絵). Daughters ponders “questions about daughters in society, family values and ethics, groups and individuals. It is dedicated to my mother. The last section of Daughters, though, pays tribute to Hiroshige,” an artist Ling Yu “considers a mother who gave birth to me, nourished me, and kept me company. So, Daughters is dedicated to mothers in a broad sense."¹ “2022 Openbook haoshu jiang, niandu Zhongwen chuangzuo <em>Nüer </em>zuozhe Ling Yu dejiang ganyan” [2022 OpenBook prize for Chinese-language writing every year. Acceptance speech by Ling Yu, author of <em>Daughters</em>]. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUzPbQnwCUE">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUzPbQnwCUE</a> Note here that Ling Yu calls Hiroshige mother rather than father. In the second speech, Ling Yu yet again connects familial roles to individual artistic inspiration. Literary forms help Ling Yu transcend norms in patriarchal society: “Daughters, multiple in this book, represent different experiences of wretched loneliness and helplessness from this era. I hope to convey the idea that the weak can similarly stand up to or communicate their hardships in life. Utagawa Hiroshige’s The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō (東海道五十三次) might seem like individual ukiyo-e prints, but they contain traits commonly found in Chinese ink wash paintings. They made me feel a certain way, so I thought of writing poems for them."¹ “2022 Taiwan wenxue jiang jindian jiang | Ling Yu<em> Nüer</em>” [2022 Taiwan Literature Award’s Golden Book Prize | Ling Yu’s <em>Daughters</em>]. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSsuBsyz-CA">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSsuBsyz-CA</a> Ling Yu’s choice of making style out of gendered tradition deserves attention. In my translations, I match the elegant concision of her classical references, but adopt a colloquial, pithy tone in English when the poem’s speaker redresses romantic and family dynamics, to express Ling Yu’s balance in the continuum of life and art.

Daughter’s eponymous ten-poem sequence, “Daughters,” is now repurposed into song by the singer Lo Sirong (羅思容) for a forthcoming video-poem by Fisfisa Media (目宿媒體). Poetic lines move across dimensions (次元), a Japanese loanword that Ling Yu uses in “Epilogue,” from art prints to word to video, laying bare the transmedial possibilities of Ling Yu’s thinking about gender. Audiences at Poetry International Festival Rotterdam and Hong Kong International Poetry Nights have heard Ling Yu’s poems read aloud. Now they are also visualized song-texts.

Like Daughters, Ling Yu’s other poetry collections are thematically crafted. But they share a trust in poetic language’s incessant energies to free nature and humanity from confined gendered spaces. In Ling Yu’s first collection, Series on a City (城的連作, 1990), nature haunts depictions of city life. In Names Disappearing on the Map (消失在地圖上的名字, 1992), nature escapes the spatial metaphors of cages, rooms, windows, and corners. Stunt Family (特技家族, 1993) won Taiwan’s Annual Poetry Award for depicting the boundaries between the alienating stunts of body language and human consciousness through portals like doors, corridors, and ropes, tracking spatial movement through light and darkness, presence and emptiness. Mudong Hymns (木冬歌詠集, 1999) delves into religion and proposes a feminine subject to imagine an androgynous Creator. Some Calculations of a Hometown (關於故鄉的一些計算, 2006) casts poetic language as protean creatures resembling deities, capable of renaming all things. I’m Heading for You (我正前往你, 2010) uses train imagery to reflect on capitalist modernity’s collision course with the environment.

Ling Yu taught at National Ilan University from 1992 to 2021, and lives in Ilan, close to Taiwan’s east coast, about an hour’s drive to Taipei. Idyll / 5.49 P.M. (田園下午／五點四十九分, 2014), which won the Wu Zhuoliu Literary Award’s New Poetry Honorable Mention (2015), depicts Ling Yu’s scenic observations on her train journey back and forth between Taipei and Ilan. They mourn the lack of bucolic spaces in the wake of industrial capitalism. Primordial female consciousness brings forth new vocabulary through fragmentary reorganization. Finally, Skin-Colored Time (膚色的時光, 2018) pays homage to various artists and writers, and thus, as Ling Yu tells me, is a collection “written in blood and tears."¹ Correspondence with the author, 20 January 2025. Cropping up in this volume are New Age beliefs such as Seth Material (1963–84) whereby Jane Roberts channels the spiritual being Seth and dictates his words to her husband. Spiritualists form the entourage of those who have inspired Ling Yu’s work.

Ling Yu obtained her BA from the Chinese department in National Taiwan University, and an MA degree in East Asian studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She was a visiting scholar at Harvard University in 1991. Ling Yu started writing poetry in 1983, after she had turned thirty. Chief editor for Modern Poetry (現代詩) from 1985 to 1991, Ling Yu co-founded the influential avant-garde journal Poetry Now (現在詩) in 2001, which ran till 2011, with poets like Hsia Yu and Hung Hung. Taken together, Ling Yu’s editorial work and creative practice are defining forces in contemporary Chinese-language poetry and world poetry. It is my deep honor to present Ling Yu’s Daughters in English.

〈女兒X〉

我在海邊唸誦金剛經
應無所住而生其心

我唸誦給她（──他們說這是迴向）
她被男人打敗，臥床三年
或三十年
（──但他們蒙面
都站立床邊）

換了七個看護，但是──

一生的疾病還是被發明出來
──糖尿病、高血壓、憂鬱症、呼吸道感染
骨折、褥瘡、肌無力、白內障
醫生搬出所有道具
──鼻胃管、導尿管、氧氣筒、注射筒、插管、氣切

她一次一次被挽救，被打扮成太空戰士
──嘴巴緊閉，一隻眼睛獨自張開

不想看太清楚？我說
我想帶你（──去看海）
在海邊
你可以呼吸最後一口氣

但我身為女人，我的嘴巴緊閉
（──來自於你的教導）

只能假借金剛經（──他們不知我在說什麼）
如此以心傳心──
微妙甚深的祕密法門

“Daughter X”

I recite the Diamond Sutra by the sea
Develop a mind that abides in nothing

I recite this to her (to transfer merit they said)

Defeated by men, she was bedridden for three
Or thirty years
(But the men were masked
Standing by her bed)

Changed nurses seven times, but

She could still invent illnesses worth a lifetime—
Diabetes, hypertension, depression, upper respiratory infection
Fracture, bedsore, myasthenia, cataract
The doctor carted out his props—
Feeding tube, catheter, oxygen tank, syringe
Intubation, tracheotomy

She was saved again and again, decorated
Like a warrior in outer space
Her mouth zipped shut, with just one eye open

Don’t feel like seeing clearly? I said
I want to bring you (to see the sea)
By the sea
You can breathe your last breath

But as a woman, I have zipped my mouth shut
(You taught me well)

I can only make use of the Diamond Sutra
(They don’t know what I’m talking about)
To produce a tacit understanding
This secret Way most deeply subtle

*Editor's note: The original format of this poem has been altered for web display.

〈然後，然後—— 〉

黑暗的樓梯。我好喜歡
那個黑暗。樓梯。通往大稻埕
繁華的宅邸



樓下擺滿宴席。我們在二樓
圓形廊柱間奔跑，一同指指點點
下面的客人，帶來歡樂、富貴氣象

僕役穿梭著，端出熱菜、湯圓、甜品
以及一些平時難得一見的精緻食物——
不是婚禮。該是因為戰後承平歲月
多出來的一份閒情。例如
一些節慶的藉口，或者輪流作東的
兄弟會。孩子們完全不理會這些


不明白戰爭（是什麼）。酬酢（是什麼）

節慶（是什麼）。只是高興。高興這麼多人
像為一齣大戲而演出。盛妝打扮。合宜的
禮貌。酒不停供應。食物從廚房無止盡出現

我們喜歡。從一樓掙脫大人的叫喊，跑上二樓
俯瞰樓下的鬧熱，然後繞著內室的露臺，再跑上
三樓。在那裡我們停下來。
我們看到那個黑暗的樓梯。
暗得好像藏了更多的熱鬧——

母親和姑婆，還有癡傻姑，她們在黑暗階梯上
坐著。說著小聲小聲的話
然後姑婆會流下眼淚，癡傻姑則楞楞笑著。
然後
我們會迅速變安靜。偷偷坐一會兒。沒讓母親發現
然後我們假意躡手躡腳，又跳回樓下，不知誰帶頭爆笑開來
然後又在宴席中跑著追著。快速忘掉那個黑暗的樓梯



不久，姑婆和母親會出現
她們重新補妝，頭上插著紅花，再配上珍珠項鍊
笑容燦爛。滿座的人都笑容燦爛

然後，然後，誰還會留在那個黑暗的樓梯

“And Then Later”

A dark stairway. How I liked
That dark. Stairway. Leading to Dadaocheng’s
Bustling mansion

Banquet tables filled the ground floor. A floor above we
Ran between the hallway columns, fussed over
The guests, bringing joy and a prosperous air

Servants shuttled back and forth, serving hot dishes, tangyuan, dessert
And exquisite food rarely seen—
It wasn’t even a wedding. But post-war peace
Must have made us chill. Ready to celebrate
Any red-letter day, or when frat groups take turns
To host. Children paid these details no mind

Not knowing (what) war (meant). (What) exchanging toasts (meant)
(What) red-letter days (meant). Only happiness. Happy that so many
Showed up to put on this great show. Rigged out in their best. Suitably
Mannered. With bottomless booze. The kitchen producing endless food

We enjoyed. Escaping from the adults’ stern voices, and running upstairs
To survey the din below, then running around the galleries, before going
To the third floor. There we stopped.
We saw that dark stairway.
Its darkness bristling with more excitement—

Mother and great-aunt, along with silly aunt, sitting
On the dark steps. Speaking softly
Great-aunt then started crying, while silly aunt laughed rashly. We
Then fell silent. Sat there in stealth. Not letting mother see us
We pretended to tiptoe away, bounced back downstairs. One of us let out a laugh
We then played catch around the banquet tables. Quickly forgetting that dark stairway

Soon after, mother and great-aunt came through with
Fresh make-up, with red flowers in their hair, decked out in pearl necklaces
Smiling rapturously. The whole audience smiled rapturously

And then later, who would remain in that dark stairway

〈（第33次）三盲女〉

摘自〈看畫──歌川廣重《東海道五十三次》〉

我們被教導旅途的艱難

三個人，手搭著肩，他們說我們是三盲女

但我們看得見

三弦琴的琴弦顫抖，因著旅途的新鮮滋味
──樹葉的香，土地的寥遠

雄壯的琴音，讓弱者開懷
瘖弱的琴音，讓邪惡更強大
但那是他們的命運



我們是旁觀者
看得見旅途
在三個弦中轉彎，共振，互相聲援的
這種曲折



我們不好宣揚

是誰
安排我們
出現在這旅途最曲折處
像是被派遣來做困難作業的使者

“33rd Station, Three Blind Women”

(from “Looking at Pictures--Utagawa Hiroshige’s Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō”)

We are taught the journey’s hardship
Three people, propping their hands on shoulders, they said we are three blind women

But we could tell
The shamisen strings tremor from the journey’s fresh taste
—the fragrance of tree leaves, the far-flung nature of land

Their heroic tones bring succor to the weak
Their mute tones reinforce evil
But that’s their fate

We are bystanders
Able to see how the journey
Takes a turn in the three strings, those bends that resonate
In mutual support

We better not name
Who
Arranged for us
To show up at the journey’s most winding spot
Like envoys dispatched to perform unenviable tasks