Moving words in print

March 3, 2023

BEIJING – Popular online video-sharing platform becomes a hotbed of poetic expression for young Chinese, resulting in the publication of a new book, Fang Aiqing reports.

The hustle and bustle of life’s routines, wandering back and forth from the ideal to reality, and the inner turbulence hidden behind a social mask. Some from the young generations have recorded their daily fragmentations in lines of poetry, not necessarily neat and metrical with verse, many with a hint of the burlesque, on a video-sharing platform over the last few years.

Some of these works, either displayed in user-generated videos, comment sections, or personal channels on the website, have been selected to form a collection published recently, I No Longer Work Hard to Become Someone Else: Writing Poetry on Bilibili.

The book reflects one of the ways young people attempt to find their identity in an uncertain modern era. They are actively creating things and expressing themselves, and not, as the frequent criticism claims, ‘no longer thinking critically’.

A representative of Bilibili

One of the 132 pieces reads: “There are so many things we can’t help. Sometimes I feel like I’m no different from a roll of toilet paper. Every time I finish work late and gobble a night snack, a torrent of heat splits my body in two, half-innocent and the other sentimental.”

Anthropologist Xiang Biao, director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Germany, comments that this piece of work conveys the writer’s earnestness toward the present moment.

He says the writer sees clearly the weariness of everyday life, the cure of a certain trifling matter, and has questions of self-doubt — Who am I? What am I doing? — that we may not get the answer to, but linger on and keep humming at the bottom of the heart.

In his preface, Xiang recalls generations of Chinese writers, who, since the 1980s, have created poems in their youth.

He says the strong philosophical meaning of menglong (misty) poems came from their sense of history, the feelings that young people generated at a historical turning point.

This style of writing, emerging in the late 1970s and the beginning of the ’80s and represented by figures including Gu Cheng (1956-93) and Shu Ting, was once perceived as obscure, but now stands as an important school of contemporary poetry.

Since the 1990s, the rise of “campus folk” cultivated another group of poets, such as the late singer and songwriter Shen Qing, who transcribed their youthfulness and literary talent through the guitar.

These works emphasized the poetic images chosen to present current tastes of life, and highlighted the self-awareness of the writers, Xiang adds.

However, from his perspective, the poems of young people today are colloquial, direct and empirical. Without the extra philosophical expressions or rendering of images, they may not necessarily look like art, but describe personal experiences and status with sincerity, and avoid rigidifying the Chinese language.

One example is At Work: “I’m sitting at the office. Boss is sitting at the office. I don’t know what the boss is doing, and they don’t know what I’m doing.”

The value is that these poems “sensitize” daily experiences and arouse people to observe and be alert, Xiang says.

“OK. Fine. I know. Ha, funny.”

This one titled Perfunctoriness draws the readers’ attention to a kind of stylized, smooth but empty exchange commonly seen today, by pointing to an objective statement of existing relations, without involving feelings, judgment or a reflection upon them.

According to staff from Bilibili, it was after Dai Jianye, an ancient Chinese literature professor at the Central China Normal University in Wuhan, Hubei province, uploaded an online course interpreting poems from the Tang (618-907) and Song (960-1279) dynasties in 2020 that a large group of users started to post their own creations in his comment section.

Dai’s followers were seeking comments and suggestions from the professor about their original pieces. The 67-year-old now has more than 3.6 million followers on the video site.

Internet influencers known for interpreting or chanting literature, including Youshan Xiansheng and “The Naive and Sentimental Novelist”, both with over 1 million fans, joined later to introduce the phenomenon and proffer their own thoughts about the creations in their posts, meanwhile calling for more submissions.

The spontaneous phenomenon once made it to the trending list of microblogging platform Sina Weibo, too.

Jing Yan, one of the editors of the book, says, although quality of the poems varies widely and that he tends not to include this book in the “literature” category, it’s helpful to see the innermost thoughts of the young, and some expressions are very novel and moved him.

Bilibili grew in popularity partly because of its danmu (“bullet words”) feature, which allows real-time comments to “float over” the video being played, inspiring interaction among viewers.

Many of these comments play on words and become online buzzwords, which can be seen as a sort of writing practice, he says, adding that poetry often requires counterintuitive transitions, which is consistent with comments that are meant to catch the eye.

A representative of Bilibili says in a written interview with China Daily that, from the company’s perspective, “the book reflects one of the ways young people attempt to find their identity in an uncertain modern era. They are actively creating things and expressing themselves, and not, as the frequent criticism claims, ‘no longer thinking critically’.”

And the company is continuously collecting original poems on multiple topics, potentially in cooperation with universities, and it’s likely there is another book like this planned in the future, it adds.