Sao Xia: A Poet Who Embraces Joy

Selections from 瀕危動物, Endangered Animals

by Tsong Chang

The pen name Sao Xia (骚夏) means an unrest summer. “夏” means summer, while “骚,” comes from the title of Qu Yuan’s famous Chinese Warring States era poem, “Li Sao” (离骚), in which the “骚” means an unrestful sorrow. Out of the desire to remain pure amidst political corruption and out of grief for his lost country, the ancient poet Qu Yuan took his life by wading into the Miluo River.

In contemporary Chinese, “unrest,” (骚) is about an agitation of lust and libido, and Sao Xia has never been a poet who shies away from writing about queer love and lesbian desires. She holds nothing back when confronting her readers. Speakers in her poems, the lyrical “I” s, are always eccentric and temperamental, sometimes quirky, sometimes obsessive, sometimes grieving, but are always clear about what they want—from their heart to their lungs to their gullet, to the words coming out of their parted teeth, they all yearn, demand, and usurp.

Sao Xia was born in the late 1970s Taiwan, on an outlier island to Kaosuing City called Cijin. She took her name after Qu Yuan, because she was born on a summer day near the Dragon Boat Festival, established to honor the ancient poet. As perhaps the most read and most regarded lesbian poet in contemporary Chinese, Sao Xia is surprisingly underrepresented in English translations. My translation of her poem “Old Island Telephone Call,” which appeared in the journal Asymptote, is the first of her poems to be published in English. Poetry translated from Chinese to English has a long history of privileging Classical Chinese works by male writers that center the heterosexual body; the political pressures Taiwan has faced on a global stage further intensified this silencing.

Having grown up queer in China, I’ve experienced censorship, both in my life and my work. It was in the queer literature of Taiwan and Hong Kong that I have found a voice and sense of belonging. Sao Xia’s second collection, Endangered Animals (瀕危動物), where my translations below come from, was first published in 2009, a decade before the legalization of same-sex marriage in Taiwan. In history, queer writing in Taiwan reached a tipping point at the 1990s because of loosened legislation, and the queer literary scene has been vibrant ever since. However, most celebrated queer literature in Taiwan is fiction and prose, while the few poetry collections feature only the experiences of gay men. Endangered Animals is widely regarded as the first lesbian poetry collection in the modern Sinophone world, where Sao Xia’s confessional poetry portrays lesbian love and desire, actively deconstructing this intersectionality through her firsthand experience. Being queer and a woman means facing a double layer of invisibility; Endangered Animals names the sadness, anger, and confusion I had when I grew up, and has taught me to embrace joy through reflections on love.

In the collection, Sao Xia explores her sexuality, family history, and regional history of her hometown, Cijin Island. This exploration comes from her unique position, growing up as a queer daughter in a family that had immigrated from China to Taiwan.

It was in 1949, the year the Chinese Communist Party took control over mainland China, that Sao Xia’s grandfather immigrated to Taiwan. In order to marry her grandfather, Sao Xia’s indigenous Taiwan grandmother cut off connections with her own family. Although located within Kaohsiung, a major city of Taiwan, Cijin Island is a small town that feels left out from the urban sprawl. Sao Xia and her two other siblings grew up with their parents in a six hundred and fifty square-foot flat house. The compact living environment provided minimal privacy; homework and diaries of the three kids were often passed around and laughed at with one another. Therefore, Sao Xia started to write poems at a young age, as poetry contains far more obscurity that is hard to decipher. The speakers in her poems in Endangered Animals include young girls revisualizing family history through their dream space, daughters communicating generational trauma with their mothers and fathers through poetry, teenagers reimagining their bodies in different genders, young adults caught in the burnout of modern life, lesbian women redefining love and searching for belonging in the heteronormative world.

Sao Xia has openly described her writing as autobiographical. Her poems and essays revolve around “the reasons why I am me.” When she writes, she starts with self-interrogating questions about “where I am from, and where I am going,” driving the speaker’s introspection and extrospection. The four poems in this folio, “A Moment Poem,” “House,” “Sweet Speech,” and “Empty Seat,” are from the last set of poems in Endangered Animals. This set of poems recounts themes like age, passage of time, self-observation, enlightenment, and reconciliation. Sao Xia says literature is well-suited to address questions of life, and to rebel against reality; pain and depth are often directly proportional. These poems are written about a decade after the first edition of Endangered Animals. With time’s condensation, the pain, lust and anger Sao Xia has written about in an earlier age have transformed into self-actualization.

On a curious note, one of the reasons why Sao Xia describes herself as an atypical poet is that when she is not writing poems, she is a typical nine-to-fiver in the bustling Taipei City. Reading data reports and editing website content is her daily life. “I have no big ambitions in life,” she says. Within this atypical poet a contradiction lives, humility and intensity side by side.

Four Poems from Endangered Animals

“A Moment Poem” is where readers see Sao Xia’s signature confrontational style in writing about love and desire. The lover’s craving turns their body into a landscape, and they become a river of time, and later even pure abstraction, so that they can glide into the lover’s body. Lesbian sex is directly addressed through images of water, wetness, the double meaning of skin’s wrinkle (age, and the wrinkling skin of fingertips in a lover’s body), and the suckling infant.

Continuing the playful experimental forms Sao Xia has always used as poetic devices, each section of this poem is marked by a time stamp, as if the poem itself is caged in a schedule. I chose to keep Sao Xia’s use of military time, because the couple’s daily commute, which makes the speaker’s body seem stretchable and non-existent, is actually war-like.

As the introduction to the final section of Endangered Animals, the ending of “A Moment Poem” also departs from Sao Xia’s earlier works, when it arrives to the negotiation with reality and the dissipation of love. This becomes the theme she continues to explore in the collection.

A Moment Poem