Year 8012
Hey, when I saw you off into that alley where you vanished, scuttling
past the steel gates, a flurry wet my hat.
All those feelings, like hot mist from the street vendor’s buns,
whirling, whirling, they dampened the misty-eyed alleyways
and threw themselves into the bleak morning.
It had been some time. I liked listening to her voice in the dark,
a language studded with dark gleaming minerals. Bitterness
sprinting up my nose, messy fists threatened to burst out of my chest.
My anxious ears, always raining, always pouring,
always waiting for the gold ray of some strong will to shoot me clean through.
Hey, they call this Year 8012.
Foreheads rot quickly after eating too many lies.
Tyranny rotates its delicate wrists—
I see you, scuttling from this end to that end of the year
on the train platform, against the thinning lamplight and the crowd.
The more a person clenches failure in a fist, the more dignity bleeds vividly out of them.
Someone once said: “raise a toast to liberty”.
In the snow white of one’s eye, those urgent cries are scattering…
Still that scuttling, legs running up a breeze,
a breeze snuffs out those cold, aching ears.
And so you see me, always going backwards.
Going backwards into a single tear at the edge of your rapidly blinking eye.
8012年
嘿，当我送你消失在那口巷子，铁门前
一阵小跑，小雪沾湿了我的帽子。
心情很多，像路边包子铺的热雾
翻涌着，翻涌着，雾透了善感的窄巷
向冷寂的清晨倾投而去。
好些日子了。我喜欢黑里听她说着话，
那些语言嵌满闪着暗光的矿物。酸涩在
鼻尖踊跃，有一顿乱拳要闯出我的胸口。
我的耳朵紧张，总是下雨，总是滂沱，
总在等候一道意志的金光把我整洁击穿。
嘿，他们称这一年为8012。
因为吃了过多谎言而获得速朽的额头。
暴政轻轻转着它的手腕——
我看见你，从一年的这头小跑到那头，
逆着月台上越来越稀疏的灯光和人。
一个人攥紧失败，一个人就越渗出鲜艳的自尊心。
也有人说： “勉励自由一杯酒。”
雪白的眼哞里，要紧的喊声在失散……
还是那一串小跑，两腿卷着风
风卷灭了冻得发疼的耳朵。
于是你看见我，不断倒退，
倒退进你眼边飞眨的一滴泪。
Originally published in Shige Yuekan (Poetry Monthly, the New Youth Issue, placement 10.037, 2019).
New Jersey
The ground trembles with thin light.
Before cracking open its shell
the sky is a giant egg that incubates a day’s worth of colors.
Just before daybreak, rebar and concrete entwine into valleys
before our eyes
and stand as a black and white shan shui painting.
Light’s brush has yet to ignite all those dazzling hues.
Be it five star hotels or business buildings,
shopping mall or swimming pool,
all are humbled by the shortage of human touch.
Our nest has also become spacious
the exhaustion from day-to-day reincarnations
buttresses our Jing Ting Mountain layer-by-layer.
It’s nice, moments like this
even though there’s the guilt of delaying tomorrow,
the hours rise like waters under the levee
steadily coveting me.
There’s also the small joy in the occasional ripples.
We call this place “New Jersey”.
Neither of us have actually been there.
In this high-rise building, people are assigned four-digit door plates.
I clutch the marble belonging to us tightly, it is so small.
What soaks into the root of our tongues
may just be the kind of distance that comes with dreaming.
Like the wine mailed from Japan, “Haku Shu”
I don’t even know if that’s a place or a name.
On the seventeenth floor, Moroccan carpets spread all over the balcony.
We’ve saved up some faraway incense and reforged them.
“I fell in love with you watching Casablanca…”
So many things happen at once, a hawk darts by
those papers buried in my subconscious, when my breath
lands on your airport tarmac.
Light’s musical pitch climbs higher
dark shadows silently increase in density
the landings of daylight’s flight are always unnerving.
We are like translucent rivers
shakily melting into one.
You love me,
at the tail end of the day, this is the string tied around my waist.
You remember.
When the satellites are done with work,
this is the epilogue of the day.
Drowsiness ushers in the dawn
our nourishment.
新泽西
大地随微光颤动，
色彩出壳前
天宇的巨卵里蓄养着一天的色度。
仅仅在拂晓，钢筋水泥相挽成山谷
在我们眼前
站定成一幅黑白山水画。
光的笔刷尚未触发斑斓色相
无论是五星级还是商务楼，
喜街还是游泳池，
都因稀疏的人欲而谦卑。
我们的巢穴也变得空阔
一天轮回的疲惫
垫满我们的敬亭山。
真好，这样的时候
虽然因推迟下一天的到来而愧疚
光阴像堤坝处上涨的水
安稳地觊觎着我。
也为一些细小的浪花而欢欣。
在十七楼，铺满摩洛哥地毯的阳台
我们攒下一些遥远的香，把它们重新锻有。
“I fell in love with you watching Casablanca…”
那么多事情同时发生着，一只鹰隼掠过
意识深处的纸张，当我的呼吸
落在你的停机坪。
光的音调爬升，
阴影无声地增加着密度
一天的停落总是心惊。
我们像通明的河
哆嗦着融为一体。
你爱我，
在一天的末尾，这是拴在我腰上的绳子。
你记着。
人造卫星完成了作业，
这是一天的结束语
睡意推来清晨
我们的粮草。
Originally published in ding-ding-fing! (Issue 13, page 43, June 2023).
Translator’s Note:
The pen name of the poet Geng Yao 更杳 (b.1992, they/them) refers to the echoing drums of ancient Chinese timekeepers as they call out the late-night hour—“Geng Yao” is thus a name where both characters ought to be read as one combined unit. When I first read Geng Yao’s works, I was struck by their distinct voice. Composed in simplified Mandarin, the most common language used in mainland China, Geng Yao’s poetic language is, nonetheless, quite different from everyday speech or the speech-like pace one may find in many contemporary Chinese lyrical poems. In these intensely hybrid poems, dense neologisms are deftly tuned to the cadence of popular catchphrases, mystical symbols emanate from the detailed descriptions of concrete objects. While these poems are often complex and compact, they also ring with a visceral earnestness. As I read more, I discovered that Geng Yao frequently writes in response to political and cultural crises: from the #MeToo movement’s introduction into the Sinophone literary world, to the impact of the brutal, exam-driven education system on young people, to the traumatic reverberations of the COVID-19 pandemic—important topics that I thought were too taboo, sensitive or complex to be wrestled with in publicly circulated poetry in China. I realize now that part of why Geng Yao’s voice is so striking to me is because they strive to write about things and feelings for which ready language rarely exists. The Chinese Geng Yao weaves together is, through necessity and through their own refusal to be insincere, an invention of their own. In my translations, then, I also tried my best to resurrect in English that exhilarating strangeness and intimacy that I felt when reading the Chinese. I cherished the jagged, alien density of the originals and did not want to obscure the fact that my works are translations grasping constantly towards something outside themselves; I hope that the tenderness in these poems will nonetheless breathe through.
“Year 8012” was one such work. The poem responds to the mass arrests of Chinese student and labor organizers in the aftermath of the 2018 Jasic labor dispute, a seminal moment in the contemporary Chinese labor movement. The quote “raise a toast to liberty” is originally from “A Song to Encourage Feminism” by late 19th century Chinese feminist revolutionary Qiu Jin; the line became popular among contemporary Chinese feminists, including a key organizer in the Jasic incident who adopted it as her social media tagline. The poem’s title, which rearranges the year “2018” to the number “8012,” refers to a popular gesture on Chinese social media for netizens to comment on the absurdity of real-life occurrences. Incidentally, 2018 was when the #MeToo movement entered mainstream discourse in mainland China; this was also the year Geng Yao committed to being an activist for LGBTQ+ rights despite mounting social pressure against such issues.
I met Geng Yao in person for the first time roughly eight months after I first read their poems on my phone in Chicago; they handed me the spare keys to their apartment in Guangzhou on that same night. Their lovingly decorated studio apartment was a narrow cell in a 40-floor, beehive-like complex located in Panyu District, an industrial area on the outskirts of glamorous, metropolitan Guangzhou. I discovered only after I left Guangzhou that this apartment was the basis for the poem “New Jersey”. That apartment and this poem are both incredibly dear to me.
During my stay, Geng Yao and I met up in the many burgeoning alternative spaces and artist studios across the city, and I was folded into a community of artists and activists that I had previously only glimpsed through their work. My tentative hope as a reader proved to be true: Geng Yao’s craft and aesthetics as an artist are part of and develop with their practice and politics as a member of these ongoing networks. Many of Geng Yao’s poems were written for and about their friends and comrades—those who passed away, those who disappeared, and those who are still staying despite it all.
I struggled to write this translator’s note, mostly because these two poems—which, to me at least, represent so much of the vivid and precious feelings of being part of the Guangzhou communities—had taken up bittersweet new meanings since I first sent my translations to ANMLY. Geng Yao moved out of the apartment that inspired “New Jersey” last year. An important online public account for organizing was suddenly and permanently banned due to “irresistible force” in February. A cherished underground gathering space in Guangzhou had to abruptly cease operations just this weekend in March. Numerous queer-friendly spaces and sympathetic bookstores in the region have also been relentlessly targeted in the past weeks. Geng Yao and I marveled at the strangeness of seeing “Year 8012”, a poem that seems so grounded in a specific Chinese historical context, find a new home in an English language magazine and make its way to a broader readership at this particular moment. As I listen to the news in America, Geng Yao’s phrase “always raining, always pouring” often comes to mind. In the introduction to a fellow Guangzhou artist’s work, Geng Yao writes: “in these turbulent times, we should not be ashamed to admit that we are trembling.”
We perk up our cold ears in this thunderstorm, listening for those urgent, scattering cries.
Geng Yao 更杳 (they/them) is a Chinese poet, artist, activist, and researcher based in Guangzhou. Working across poetry, installation, and performance, they trace fragile entanglements between bodies, materials, and environments, attending to what persists, leaks, and resists containment. Informed by queer ways of sensing and committed to social and ecological justice, their works gesture towards not-yet-fully-realized modes of living and relating. They are the founder of the art collectives Pukou Factory and Lava Lake. Their first poetry collection is forthcoming with Showwe Press (Taiwan, 2026). Recent works appear in Ground Sea (te editions, 2025) and Ming Pao (Hong Kong).
Ban Yan 斑焰 (she/her) is a translator and poet currently based in Chicago. Her languages are Cantonese, Mandarin, and English. Her works and translations are featured or forthcoming in Mouse Magazine, Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and elsewhere.