❀ Main Page
❀ Three Generations
❀ Fan Yusu Decided to Live Off a Rich Man
❀ Chinese Migrant Workers: Staging 1965’s Shanghai in 2017’s Picun
❀ Chinese Queer Feminist Poetic Intimacies: A Translation Play
❀ Daybreak

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_{“Three Generations” is a response to Hui Faye Xiao’s “‘I Am Fan Yusu’: Baomu Writing and Grassroots Feminism against the Postsocialist Patriarchy” (Chapter 10) from Feminisms with Chinese Characteristics, co-edited by Ping Zhu and Hui Faye Xiao.}

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i. Hammer

This is my 76-year-old grandmother holding a hammer
cracking a misplaced rock
for a yet-to-come winter
when children driving back home via this road
Cracked rocks will sustain the bottom
Rainy chilly dirt will not entrap the tire
if only children often come back

It was heavy
when I tried to hold the same hammer
crack the same rock
I had to give up

But I didn’t give up when I was eight
holding a hammer-heavy axe
chopping the firewood for cooking
cousins tending veggies waiting
grandparents coming back from the fields

Only the axe was still too heavy
Falling
impinged upon the back of my tiny hand
I did not feel the pain until this day
When my mother wondered: Where did you get that 1 cm scar on your knuckle?

Unremovable

Once a year
children drive back home
on this road to see their mother

Her second daughter, my mother, learned to drive at the age of 36
bought the second car of the village
after going out to work for years

It had to be her husband who first drove the car back home though

The car window is not to be crushed this time by her husband
as if the cabinet mirror crushed by his fist
at the corner of the stairs, I stared
holding a candle
a mountain away my grandmother prayed

My mother’s body crushed
in a room surrounded by familiar faces
though first cracked by my school principal
Stunning beauty reflected by any mirror too long
seen by other men
It had to be destroyed

Women do not let you go
Wives murmuring your disgrace
The car window is as hard as a rock this time
It shall not belong to him or them

Let me have grandmother’s hammer

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ii. Unfound

The same rock was thrown towards the back of grandfather’s head,
by his sister
who uses a bamboo shoulder pole to crack grandmother’s protruding belly
with my mother inside

Dear mother, whose justice is this
Executed by a woman who has finally given birth to a son after two daughters

It is not a crime to give birth to an elder daughter
but a punishment to warn that the second cannot be the same

My mother was born
A rock inside of her head cracking
unwanted

Grandfather’s sister kept him home so that he cannot go back to fetch water for grandmother
Somehow he listened
Grandmother took the bamboo shoulder pole to fetch water from the well
the same well by which side a rock from his sister was thrown
left a bruise inside of grandpa’s skull
that now hinders his speech and mobility

It is a scratch of darkness lying on the X-ray
I saw it
said grandmother

Hammers were not found at the time of conflict
All the steel was lost in the furnace
Saluting Chairman Mao

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iii. Unity

I cannot be me
in this village
My mother cannot be her
a void speaks to our jarring existence

an unmarried overly-educated left-over-educated woman
an unmarriable overly attractive woman  

You should not marry a foreigner
betray your country
you should not marry afar
not be able to serve your relatives

A capable daughter
borns here
grows here
serves here

Do not cry
Do not cry

This is your home
Hammered into grandmother’s smile
A woman who has never left

How to cite: Hu, Tingting. “Three Generations.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 18 Jul. 2023, chajournal.blog/2023/07/18/tingting-hu.

Tingting Hu is a cultural critic and a creative writer. She recently obtained a PhD in comparative literature at the University of South Carolina and will soon join a university in Beijing as an assistant professor. Her research focuses on women’s narratives, media studies, subaltern studies, and contemporary literature, film, and culture in and beyond China. Her dissertation Form and Voice: Representing Contemporary Women’s Subaltern Experience in and Beyond China investigates transnational women authors’ multi-media narratives. Tingting has published academic pieces, essays, stories, and poetry in International Comparative Literature, Sino-US Comparative Literature, Rocky Mountain Review, Meiwen, ibookreview, iFeng Youth, Literary Dog, and New Poem Frontline. Email: writeriddle@163.com

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