The New Yorker:

One night in September, 1986, Yi Lei, then a thirty-five-year-old student at Peking University, sat down at her desk to write a poem. Her subject was a solitary woman in a room of her own, with her belongings strewn about: “Socks and slips scattered on a table. / A spray of winter jasmine wilts.” She ponders existentialism and Dadaism; she thinks over her regrets and failures; she dreams of a wild horse galloping in space. Each of the poem’s fourteen sections ends with her chiding an absent lover: “You didn’t come to live with me.” By the end of the night, the poet had two hundred and forty lines on grid paper.

The next day, Yi Lei showed the poem to a few friends—fellow mid-career writers whose youths were interrupted by the Cultural Revolution, and who became classmates when Peking University convened its writers’ workshop, in 1986. After a decade of compulsory readings of Mao’s collected works, Yi Lei’s peers were now reading Nietzsche, Freud, and Sartre, and debating nihilism and sexual liberation. Members of Yi Lei’s coterie were struck by the boldness and freedom of her poem. A friend volunteered to submit the poem for her, and, “if the editor rejects it, I will tell him that he doesn’t know a thing about poetry,” he said. She called the poem “A Single Woman’s Bedroom.”

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