After reading Yang Biwei’s poem "Family Background," published in Poetry Monthly in 2021, I kept returning to its brutal, feverish portrait of kinship:
My father is absurd.
In his youth he killed and robbed,
and in old age achieved nothing.
After I grew up, the way he looked at me
reminded me of how he once looked
at the woman he first loved.
My mother wears a gardenia in her hair,
and is forever unsure whether she has clothes on
when she goes wandering through the market.
If someone touches her left breast,
she turns the right one toward him as well.
My brothers and sisters are each hungrier than the last.
On holidays and festival days,
they fight over the offerings beneath the ancestral tablets,
fruit smeared with pesticide.
My older brother joined the army.
To overthrow my father,
he died gloriously on the battlefield.
My older sister loved only qin, chess, calligraphy, and painting,
and long ago ran away with a hermit.
My younger brother, a rapist,
later broke out of prison and fled, becoming a bandit,
buying a third-rate starlet as his mountain-wife.
My younger sister finally died of AIDS,
her body dotted with ladybugs.
Only I am kind and exceptional.
That day I threw half a Hongtashan cigarette at the doorway,
and everything they were went up in flames.
Many readers would probably say this kind of poem lacks refinement, that it is neither uplifting nor “healthy,” and hardly belongs in respectable literary space. But the father who kills and steals, the mother drifting in mental confusion, the siblings marked by hunger and moral ruin, and the succession of grotesque, absurd images do something more than shock. They summon a world I recognize from other works steeped in violence, deprivation, and psychic damage.
Reading it, I thought of the violent clashes and survival anxiety in Su Tong’s Boy Blood. I also thought of Zhang Chu’s song "Sister," and of the story that seems to echo behind it. What emerges in all these associations is a time of material scarcity and spiritual emptiness, when life can slide, step by step, into something both ridiculous and desolate.
What we casually label absurd is often much closer to reality than we want to admit. What we dismiss as fabrication may in fact have been going on for years. The people in this poem, and the things they do, may once have been hidden away in remote mountain corners; they may just as easily still exist behind surfaces that look polished and respectable.
No one would willingly endure that kind of suffering. No one would willingly inherit that burden of sin. So the "I" in the poem uses half a Hongtashan cigarette to blow away all the ugliness and guilt. Yet that same act also destroys the speaker’s own claim to being "kind and exceptional." What remains is a complete family portrait at last—whole, unmistakable, and almost suffocating.
I like to imagine that at the moment of turning away, the speaker can hear Zhang Chu calling from far off: “Oh, sister, take me home, hold my hand, don’t be afraid.” Once that inherited weight is finally set down, perhaps a different tomorrow can begin.