Chinese Writer Yu Xiuhua: The Art of Not Fixing Herself

If you sit with Yu Xiuhua long enough, you’ll realize she isn’t trying to convince you of anything.

She isn’t asking to be understood. She isn’t asking to be admired. She certainly isn’t asking for sympathy. She is simply living—clearly, stubbornly, and with an honesty that feels almost disarming.

Yu Xiuhua is one of the most distinctive contemporary Chinese poets. For over twenty years, she has written poems that move freely between tenderness and bluntness, desire and resignation, humor and despair. Her work has reached millions of readers not because it is polished, but because it is unmistakably alive.

What draws us to her—and why she feels so aligned with what we believe at OSUGA—is her refusal to beautify women’s lives into something acceptable. She speaks about the body, aging, sex, love, and disability not as concepts, but as daily realities. Not elevated. Not hidden. Just lived.

If there is one thread that ties her story together, it is this:
learning to stop fighting herself—and discovering freedom there.

When the Body Stops Being the Enemy

For a long time, Yu Xiuhua believed her biggest mistake was resenting her own disability.

As a child, she wanted to run, jump rope, play hopscotch—ordinary desires that her body did not allow. Disability felt like a wall, something that prevented her from living the life she imagined.

That belief began to loosen while she was working on the dance production Ten Thousand Tons of Moonlight. Watching dancers move changed something fundamental. Dance showed her that limitation does not cancel possibility—that within a finite body, there can be infinite extension. She began to see movement not as speed or agility, but as expression.

She loves watching people dance. Half her time scrolling through social media is spent watching bodies in motion. Once, she even asked a blogger if she could learn Latin dance someday. “When my foot gets better,” she said, “I’ll come to Suzhou and learn.”

She does not often resent her body anymore. Only once in a while—when she loves someone deeply and cannot have them. Even then, the resentment passes.

“I was born like this,” she says. “It’s natural.”

She jokes about God being careless sometimes. Some people are shaped carefully, others less so. “I’m the one God pinched a little crooked,” she laughs. “That’s God’s problem.”

What she knows now is this: the greatest harm she ever suffered was not from others, but from turning against herself. The body and the soul, she believes, choose each other. This body is simply the shell her soul needed for this lifetime.

She didn’t become sensitive because she wrote poetry. She wrote poetry because she was already sensitive.

Poetry didn’t decorate her life—it saved it. Writing is not a hobby for her. It is necessity. It is destiny. She once tried to make money raising rabbits. Instead, poetry made her famous.

Some say she doesn’t live like a “proper poet.” She thinks people misunderstand poetry. Poetry isn’t compensation for suffering. It’s part of living itself.

Aging Is Not a Loss of Fire

Yu Xiuhua is approaching fifty, and she talks about it the way most people talk about the weather.

Her body has changed. Her tastes have softened. Her skin carries marks it didn’t before. She drinks less salt, notices her strength shifting. None of this alarms her. She has no real anxiety about appearance. She once believed beauty attracted people. Now she finds that idea shallow. Youth attracts—it always has. That’s biology. But charm, she says, is when someone can still love you when you are old, even when you are no longer beautiful.

That is something else entirely.

Earlier this year, she injured her foot while drunk and spent four months recovering. People told her to quit drinking. She laughed. “Is quitting drinking that easy?” Sometimes she drinks because she’s happy. Sometimes because she’s bored. Sometimes for no reason at all. During recovery, she read more than ever. She wrote. She trusted she would heal. And she did.

She talks openly about menopause. Her libido has faded, and she feels no grief about it. “No desire is great,” she says. “No trouble.” She no longer confuses sexual desire with vitality. The body changes—that’s all. It doesn’t mean life is shrinking.

She thinks about death often, calmly. Once, she believed that as people around her died, her own life diminished. Now she feels the opposite: with each loss, a burden lifts. She feels lighter.

This isn’t cruelty. It’s clarity.

Love Without Possession

There was a time when love unsettled her completely.

A man pulled her into cycles of longing and despair. When she finally climbed out, she realized something simple and devastating: she didn’t need him to live well. She knows herself too well. If they had stayed together, she would have run anyway. She is someone who loves intensely—but fears staying.

She no longer believes love must involve physical closeness. She no longer believes desire must be acted upon. She draws a clean line between the body’s needs and the spirit’s needs—and refuses to confuse them.

To love someone, she believes, can simply mean wishing them well. Without merging lives. Without repayment.

She doesn’t plan the future carefully. She stays where she is, in Hengdian, Hubei. She doesn’t chase cultural centers or literary circles. She doesn’t need dinners, salons, or performances.

She has books she loves. Clothes she likes. A garden she tends. That is enough.

“I’m satisfied,” she says. And she means it.