Why are these poems called ‘Echoes?” Are you referencing echoes of themes throughout history, or the myth of Echo and Narcissus, or something else?
“The title ‘Echoes’ operates on multiple resonances. In Mandarin, we have a proverb from the Buddhist poet-monk Li Shutong (李叔同) of the late Qing dynasty: ‘A thought that’s constantly in mind comes with an echo in its might.’ This captures how persistent thoughts reverberate through time and consciousness.
For me, poetry exists as a trifecta—history’s weight, mythic truth, and individual experience. These three elements form an indivisible triangle; remove one, and the structure collapses. When this hybrid translates through memory into verse, it becomes an echo—not unlike the relationship between sound and its aftersound, between experience and its poetic afterlife.
The myth of Echo and Narcissus haunts these poems too, particularly in how exile creates a doubling: we speak, but hear our words return transformed by distance. Every poem here is both utterance and return, original cry and its distortion through time.
We make the echo first, in our bodies and memories, before we ever write it down. The page merely catches what’s already reverberating.”
How and why have Lermontov and Akhmatova become your inspirations? What do you see in their works that you admire, and how have you brought that into your own pieces?
I knew this question would come, and even arranging these words brings me to tears—because Lermontov and Akhmatova represent the two chambers of my heart, the systole and diastole of my poetic existence.
Akhmatova embodies the terrible arithmetic of staying. Her choice to remain in Soviet Russia while others fled mirrors my own negotiations with homeland and exile. In ‘Requiem,’ she transforms personal grief—lamenting her imprisoned son—into an indictment of state terror. What strikes me most is her austere precision: barely a league of emotion, yet each line cuts like winter glass. Her contemporaries in the Silver Age either genuflected to power or dissolved into their own despair. She alone maintained that devastating clarity. The Swedish Academy recoiled from giving her the Nobel precisely because her truth was too graphic, too unadorned.
Her sacrifice illuminates my own: the mother tongue I’ve had to half-forfeit (in China, to write freely means surveillance; in the West, to be heard means English); the treasures left behind; the solitude required to build an inner world strong enough for creation. This ‘elegant restraint’ you detect in my work is learned stoicism—a necessary armor. Yet beneath it pulses radical empathy for all exiles, geographic or internal. Though we’ve never met, I hear their scream: ‘I want to live!’
If Akhmatova is my yin—witnessing, enduring, distilling—then Lermontov is pure yang: the romantic who transmutes oppression into fury. Where she documents, he detonates. His ‘The Poet’s dead’ and ‘The Cloud’ demonstrate how anger can become incandescent art. Those unsettling, haunting images in my work? They’re Lermontov’s ghost teaching me that sometimes the only response to injustice is to set the page on fire, even at the cost of forfeiting one’s own homeland to uphold one’s self amidst divisive currents.
Together, they’ve taught me that poetry can be both scalpel and flame, both witness and warrior. In my work, Akhmatova’s ice meets Lermontov’s fire, creating steam—that vapor between staying and leaving, between silence and scream, where my own poems breathe.”
Interesting that you identify Western and traditional Chinese poetic styles and take elements of each into your poems. What has it been like to craft poetry as a bilingual person? Do you compose in English or Mandarin, do you think in both languages as you write? Do you find that languages themselves, and their rhythms, shape the content or structure of your poems?
The chasm between Chinese and English poetic traditions has shaped me profoundly. Chinese poetry luxuriates in indirection—every plum blossom speaks volumes, each bamboo bend carries philosophy. The poet becomes a humble conduit between nature and reader, never presuming to explain what moonlight on water means. We trust the image to carry its own enlightenment. A closing line merely ‘dots the dragon’s eyes’—essential, yes, but the dragon was already alive in the preceding verses.
English poetry, particularly contemporary Western verse, demands the opposite: clarity as virtue, economy as craft. The poet must architect meaning, not merely channel it. During my first three years writing in English, feedback was consistent: ‘Powerful images, moving emotions, but requires multiple readings.’ Even my lightest lines carried what readers called ‘fatalistic gravity’—that ancient Chinese sense that every gesture contains the universe’s weight.
I spent years trying to reconcile these approaches: the Western praise for accessibility versus the Chinese understanding that ‘nature and human are one’ (天人合一). Only through accumulated life experience—exile, loss, resistance—did I find my synthesis. Now I can achieve ‘readability’ without sacrificing depth, can make a vestment ‘smile’ without explaining why, can connect continents through a seagull’s flight rather than abrupt temporal markers.
I compose primarily in English now, partly due to my Western-focused studies, but mostly because writing in my non-native language offers productive estrangement. It forces me to reinvent rather than inherit, to forge new synaptic connections between sound and meaning. When I write, what emerges isn’t English or Mandarin but something pre-linguistic—an unmodified rumble from my core that chooses its own linguistic vessel. In those moments, we touch the pure pulse of living through sound alone.
Language itself has never been my architect—at most, a carpenter smoothing edges or filling gaps. Emotion, urgency, and message determine form. A protest poem might emerge as experimental fragments (like Echo IV’s compact brutality) or as prose poetry (Echo III’s voice flowing like water from one throat to thousands). The content births its own container, not the reverse. This is perhaps my deepest inheritance from both traditions: the Chinese faith that form follows spirit, married to the English insistence that spirit must find communicable form.”
I notice a theme of human suffering at the hands of others: a violent husband and refugees who flee violence and find themselves still marginalized in their new lands. What draws you to those themes?
It’s a delicate and profound question. I’m drawn to these themes because I’m deeply intrigued by how systems can deform individuals, transforming ordinary or even decent human beings into figures capable of profound cruelty. Often, an individual’s personal agency is eroded or contested when societal structures thrive upon their trauma or tacitly condone violence. To explore this phenomenon further, one must investigate educational, cultural, and economic factors that silently breed violence and perpetuate suffering.
Crime and tragedy serve as the quietest yet deepest reflections of a society’s wounds—visible only to those who dare look closely. Similarly, the experiences of refugees reveal another dimension of these wounds. Throughout seven years living in the UK, I’ve formed friendships with individuals from diverse global backgrounds. Their narratives of familial histories in London, wars in their homelands, and the existential struggles of reconciling dreams with harsh realities have profoundly impacted me. I’ve realized that we all inhabit a liminal space between war and peace, where understanding and empathy are always possible if we actively listen, both to ourselves and to the voices around us.
Ultimately, my poetry aspires to provide solace, however fleeting, to those who feel exiled or alienated, offering a momentary sense of belonging or home within the shared recognition of our collective struggle.
You mention in your author’s note that “nature is also a teacher.” How do the natural motifs and the natural world function in your poems?
Nature serves as both messenger and medium. Whenever I encounter emotions too visceral for straightforward speech, I invite the natural world to translate. Trees, flowers, and coastlines vibrate on the same frequency as those gut‑level feelings, bridging the space between stanzas—and between reader and poet.
Nature also acts as a critical mirror: it reveals that the so-called “survival codes” running through our societies did not blossom from some higher ethical soil but from the stark physics of scarcity and fear. By foregrounding that origin, I aim to question whether these codes are immutable or merely inherited habits we’ve yet to dismantle. When I return to the image of a red beacon strobing across a storm-dark shoreline, I’m less interested in its drama than in its dual function—how a safeguard doubles as a boundary, how protection can slip into quiet temptation to what’s beyond. In that uneasy glow, I probe the complicity between safety and sanguine, asking what the comfort of eternity cost and how the sense aliveness ultimately pays toll of solitude without regret.
Do you think your writing has changed over time? How would you describe your style, and how you’ve developed it?
Absolutely. Writing evolves like any living organism. My first English poems were dense with elusive imagery, and my abandoned early novel—steeped in Woolfian stream-of-consciousness—never balanced character and plot in a way that felt authentic to me at nineteen.
Since then, I’ve forged a dialogue between poetry and prose. Poetry lends my novels an unshakable moral backbone, distilling complex ideas into crystalline sentences that anchor entire volumes. Novel-writing, in turn, lets me dissect psychology in slow motion, testing poetic abstractions inside fully realized narrative worlds. The result is a style that marries lyrical precision with narrative clarity, allowing abstraction and realism to coexist on the page.
What are you writing now, and where do you hope writing will take you in the future?
I’m currently developing a work of literary fiction that grows directly out of the remnants of my earlier, shelved Woolf‑inspired experiment. Rooted in Eastern European culture, literature, and the region’s stark natural landscapes, the novel filters wider Eurasian geopolitics through the intimate lens of a single life. At the center lies a decent man whose unhealed trauma becomes the very fuel a rigid system uses to reshape him, asking: When the machinery of power profits from pain, how much freedom of choice truly remains?
Alongside his story runs that of a woman determined to carve and protect a private sanctuary—“a room of her own”—in a world where every pane of glass has been forged by the system that would surveil her. Their intertwined narratives let me probe two core questions: What inner resources does it take for a person to resist the constant pull of manipulation, and what must be sacrificed to guard even a sliver of autonomy?
I hope this project—and whatever follows—will lead me toward sharper, more honest inquiries rather than easy conclusions, using language to expose the complex textures of lived experience and to keep testing the fragile boundaries of individual freedom.
