‘Happiness Always Comes at Twilight’

The Chinese poet Ye Hui does not belong to any school, clique, or scene, nor does he teach writing or organize literary festivals. Entirely independent, he occupies a liminal space where the poet Fernando Pessoa meets the painter Agnes Martin. Ye Hui lives in the same countryside where he was born and raised, and his writing keeps growing from the same rain and clouds. He has built his own house—a communal space for his neighbors and passing strangers—and a museum for his village. He collects old and discarded stuff, preserves examples of the local bricks and woods, and keeps the ancient Yangtze Delta culture and landscape from fading into oblivion. It would be easy to compare him to Fernando Pessoa as Ye Hui clerks in a taxation bureau, daydreaming of the contemporaneousness of all ages and countries. Unlike Pessoa, his alter egos exist in the real world. An architect bred of poetry, he builds houses in the countryside that draw in large city crowds and inspire young people’s interest in coming back to serve the land, instead of climbing the capitalistic ladders in overpopulated and polluted megacities; as a taxation specialist, he understands the numbers and how to make these architectural visions financially viable and user-friendly to people from all backgrounds. Unlike Agnes Martin, he does not shun the public eye but continues to sit out his free hours in a tiny office room, “rioting through the wild,” and takes his time in putting out a book of poetry every ten years, each an event. Awarded numerous prizes in recent years, he has a following that is committed and increases with time. He complains he cannot go on writing but moves forward to absorb every influence, foreign or local, from a young writer in obscurity to a little wildflower on his porch in the glory of the morning dew. Everything goes into his poems, into his commitment to a life breathing poetry.

Perhaps the only metaphysical poet among contemporary Chinese poets, as well as the only intimate knower of the I-Ching, Ye Hui weaves Chinese metaphysics into real-life snapshots and creates compelling collages of myths and mysteries. A local candy shop becomes a “warm flow” of seething imagination. The terror of “our two hands” on the butcher’s table shifts to a mirror image of the self “[u]nfurling by the window” as snow falls. Anything can happen and happens in a Ye Hui poem. Even deadwood can point out “every direction.” His poetry “falls like showers,” the tug and release of energy that gives everything a new rinse and shine. No wonder he named his house “the villa of showers.” However, these showers of myths and mysteries are not meant to mystify and confuse; instead, they are often prophetic (“For a moment, pandemics and slaughters”) or metaphorical (“The fireflies, now bright, now dim / Just as we live but use up all the wisdom / That lights up what’s behind us”) or bracingly upfront (“A house mustn’t be built in a land of scorpions and snakes”). In his poems, the natural world and the human sphere blend into each other, but they do not turn into surreal kitsch. His restrained poems predate the recent rise of ecopoetics in China and closely resemble the classical Chinese awareness of our ecosphere while remaining entirely readable and contemporary.

Not trying to impress with grand philosophical arguments or linguistic gymnastics, Ye Hui’s quiet poems draw us in, slowly, and make us see how his mind drifts into new realities. In the poem “The Prophecy,” “two birds perch in the tree,” predicting first snow and then death that comes with an unknown flower and its “blinding blue.” In a hotel “[t]hat was converted from an old building,” a dispirited face appears in “a fog and a fine scent,” and as a terrifying past is about to be unveiled, everything is again obscured among “[t]he world of grasses and trees.” On a highspeed train, death is both humiliation and humility, revealing its “inborn wildness.” Rather than fleshing out his thoughts, Ye Hui’s poems make us think and stretch our minds into unseen territories. Not unlike the classical Chinese masters, whose brushstrokes leap from one image to another, Ye Hui’s thoughts spring from one context to another in concentric circles, orbiting a poetic quest for the contemporaneousness of all things. Is Ye Hui a metaphysical poet who restrains himself from abstraction? Is he a meditative poet whose multifaceted realities merge into a dizzying radiance? Is he a transcendental poet who dismantles boundaries in a shift of thought? He seems to be all these things. Rarely do poetry and philosophy converge, but they do in Ye Hui’s questing poetics that reaches for the common source and the little freedoms that reside in our restless minds, overcoming “the cold and the night.” Despite the metaphysical tensions in his poems, their titles are mostly concrete nouns (“The House,” “The Moon,” “The Fallacy,” “The Waiting Room,” etc.), fully anchored in the real, as the naming of things creates worlds and bonds us. Inside his poems, we find ourselves in a strange place, strangely called the planet Earth, our home. This is an ancient Chinese sensibility, where things become more than themselves through poetic association and strike out new spaces for changes in the real world.

Ye Hui has never penned a political statement, nor does he have such ambitions, but a political reading of his poems is as tangible as it is prescient. Quiet resistance unfolds in the poetic ambiguities and extends beyond the poems. Ye Hui is not exiled abroad, nor does he write in a foreign language, but he seems to know all the languages of the heart. Here we have a witch poet of the metaphysical kind that walks backward into the future, an architect of poetic spaces that dispel illusions and invite us into communal living, a poetry that comes from an ancient wisdom that takes a stand against the quarrels of the marketplace and the terror of capitalism, one that keeps company under a leaky authoritarian roof and rubs off its burn, carving out its own freedom, a seeming impossibility in an impossible land. Ye Hui is a discovery and an exemplar of contemporary Chinese poetry, and at its best, his is a poetry full of revelations. After reading Ye Hui’s poems, you don’t know where you are, and you feel, for a moment, as if you were Chinese.

–Dong Li

The Long View

From afar, the roof of the monastery appears
To emerge in ancient twilight, its bell subdued

The brook continues to breed
The pristine breath of an ascetic

The farmhouse seems a bit too large
The potatoes remain unknotted prayer beads

All this has not changed

Except the blood on a bird’s wings in the shrubbery
That not long ago dropped on a leaf

At night, a dog in the barn barks
At its own echo, out of fear

A baby dies at birth, and others in a disaster
Are saved

The fog looks like the prophecy of a revolution
That flows into the city, and after it burns off

There aren’t unicorns or swords
But the void when the truth comes into view

Happiness Always Comes at Twilight

Happiness always comes
At twilight, and shadows lean too close

I remember a small town
The smell of May immediately fills the sidewalk
And the arch drips with tendrils

Inside my body
Hypnotic honey is being made
Faces from the deep
Of strange streets surface one by one as if asking: why
Are you standing here? I do not remember

I only know the countless days lost
The windows, suddenly closed
Names fade toward their own end
Like smoke

I walk on the street, a drop of rain falls
On my forehead, what does this say
Wait perhaps until evening to awake

Perhaps not too late
A temple finally attains
Its calm in silent prayers

Outside it
A few sheep graze grass, so slowly
As if darkness eats away light

The Witch

On the bridge
A village witch
Tells me

You see nothing
Clearly, since in all your eyes
A fog gathers generations

♦

From The Ruins by Ye Hui, translated by Dong Li. Translation © 2025 by Dong Li. Reprinted with permission from Deep Vellum Publishing.