Preface: On Writing and Living

(The preface wrote for the Shanyou Langqin Chinese Poetry Collective's 2025 Annual Magazine)

Why write? Shi Tiesheng said: "I write in order to live." But then, why live? This question suddenly becomes too vast, too large for writing to seemingly answer.

From any perspective, life is profoundly unreasonable. We are thrown into elementary school, thrown into high school, thrown into university, thrown into the workplace. We sit at a desk for thirty or forty years, only to be thrown towards death. This is the version of life we are told. The more closely we examine it, the harder it is not to question every detail: Why? No one is born with a purpose, yet everyone takes it for granted that they should be doing things. We take it for granted that we sit in classrooms, under fluorescent lights and amidst blindingly white walls (Has anyone ever thought that classrooms resemble delivery rooms? We enter society from here yet know nothing about it, like a second birth). We live, taken for granted.

Nothing is more taken for granted than living, and nothing is more baffling than living. Although its baffling nature doesn't mean we refrain from doing it, no one can blame the person who suddenly asks, "What am I doing?" The light of day illuminates everything; looking up, the sky is a boundless white; looking down, everything on the ground is starkly real. When you bury your head in work and suddenly look up, it's hard not to notice this fact: everything around you has no connection to yourself, and every good show must eventually come to an end. It's as if standing alone on an endless grassland—no people, no paths, nowhere to hide. We are so helpless, so at a loss.

Even if you make it through the day by luck, night is unavoidable. Even if you spend the day busy, when night falls, it's hard not to ask yourself what your dreams are, to ask if what you're doing now is truly what you want to do. Even if you numb yourself with alcohol, one still dreams. So then, what should we do? If the daytime self is the "everyday," then the nighttime self is the "deviant." As cogs in the social machine, we are already disqualified at this point.

This is why we write. Writing isn't for answering questions, but because we have things we must say. There is always a part of us that doesn't belong to society, a part that doesn't belong to life. We all have a part that simply cannot integrate into the everyday, cannot accept the everyday. It might be a hurdle in the heart that we can't overcome, or questions entrenched within. These remnants, this "deviance," are the parts that make us who we are. So we write. This is the dialogue we, as ourselves, engage in with the "everyday," with life.

Opening this collection of poems, each poem is a soul's deviation, a person's melancholy on a certain night. We had something to say, so we wrote poems. Read them carefully; this is the most sincere form of relation in this world.

Azlan Zhang

March 13, 2025