Writers from China's diaspora
Imagine a woman living the first 30 years of her life in China, then migrating to the US and writing a book of English poetry. It was, perhaps, the sheer audacity of her life so far that prompted Shao Wei, now 39, to name her poetry collection Pulling a Dragon's Teeth - a little tougher even than the Chinese proverb 'pulling teeth from a tiger's mouth'.
The book (Shao's third, after two Chinese-language books published in China) won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and was published in 2002 by Pittsburgh University Press. She says she drew her inspirations from life in New York City and a lonely childhood in Wanxian City.
'I'm an only child,' she says. 'When I was young, my parents divorced and I had to live with my grandfather, who was a strict, hard-working man and a follower of Confucius. I read a lot of books and watched Peking opera frequently, and in the process learned to appreciate stories about life and death, good and evil.'
The books that Shao enjoyed included fairy tales and folk- lore, which inspired her book's opening poem, A Fairy Tale, in which she depicts a lonely six-year-old girl who 'still loves the world, with or without her'.
'When I was a child, life was poor and there wasn't much to enjoy,' she says. 'Legends are a permanent fire that comforted me and provided me with a hope for the future.'
Wanxian was a beautiful, mountainous city by the Yangtze River, Shao says. 'I would see peasants travelling downstream or upstream as they carried their goods to other cities to sell. I often admired them for having that freedom to travel.'