Rural woman's poems go viral online
china.org.cn / chinagate.cn, January 23, 2015 Adjust font size:
Yu Xiuhua [File Photo]
Because Yin has to find jobs in other cities and towns, Yu has become a left-behind housewife who lives with her parents. She usually spends an entire day in the courtyard, reading, cleaning and feeding her rabbits. But every day, when she sees the dandelion seeds, the serene sky and the drifting clouds, a line or two would come into her mind. Every time, inspired by the sudden idea, she would totter to her computer, and knock out the ethereal sentences using her trembling hands.
"When I touch on something, it must move, warm, sadden or worry me," she said.
With the habit of chatting on QQ (an online chat platform for instant messages in China) and other online forums, Yu saw her recent work "Crossing half the country to sleep with you" go viral online.
"I never thought this poem was well written and I don't know why it has been so popular," Yu said. "I didn't describe a real person in this poem as the characters are fictionalized. They could either be one person or several people. We usually write teasingly on QQ in this way," she added.
With Yu's increasing popularity, several publishers have contacted her in the hope of getting her poems published into books. She agreed with two of them to publish a number of her volumes, more than 2,000 poems in total.
"Overnight fame can disappear very quickly, and it is just a matter of time. In only a short period of time I will go back to my normal life again," said Yu.
"The number of fans following my Weibo (China's equivalent to Twitter) account surged from 200 to 12,000, but there are very few people who really understand me and my poems in the world. It might not be a very good thing to draw too much attention like that."
