Kuan Sun, well known for her remarkable essays about personal growth and self-healing—most of them have been posted on Chinese social media, and later appeared in her first collection The Best Is Meeting You (Chinese edition)— is a poet with extraordinary talent and amazing resources. One of the more unusual aspects of her talent is that her poems reflect her expectations and actions on how to overcome depression in her life. She writes in a vibrant way, and deconstructs the melancholy that hangs over the real mood like a shadow in her "private language", such matters recoding them rather than making them darker.
She once said that the 26 years of living in Singapore was her everlasting youth. Born in Heilongjiang Province, China, and her family centred in Beijing, she worked in Beijing, Hong Kong, Singapore, the United States and New Zealand after finishing her university life in mainland China. Her thoughts are related to the ups and downs of her childhood, but also to the later life experiences in many places. She is an original poet; she hasn't written what is so common in mediocre poems today: short pieces of exposition or the affectation of sentiment, or an assembling of clichés that are popular on Chinese social media. Instead, Kuan explores a fragmentary moment and scene in her life—in Beijing, in Singapore, in the UK and New Zealand, in the Forbidden City, in the Indian community, in Orchard Road, and even with the story of a Filipino hourly worker hired for housekeeping. On the contrary, in a larger and related sense, she presents a highly aesthetic occasion belonging to her in a combination of unspeaking language and construction of thought. What I just want to say is that her poems, no matter what their "subjects" are, often have her own expressions, which are well integrated with her own thinking about worldly life and her inference.
She does not say much in her poems, she knows a lot to start and form a poem. A few years ago, she wrote a lot of poems to therapy her depression. By writing poems, she contacts the Her who she is, it discontinued for a long time. Now she has overcome with the dark area of depression, freed herself from the "city" so ill-informed. Most of a poet's salvation is self-salvation, and most of what you learn, you will save yourself by reading and writing poems.
Kuan wrote this poem:
More anxious than them in spring，your flowers
A tree around the corner, feeling suffocated
bends over downwards casually in the haze
The land of Singapore is waiting for autumn rains
and you step over like a wind. Falling flowers
are mad with joy, a romantic short video but sad
pell-mell, emotionally. They'll die afterwards
I felt that its great anxieties are generalizations: the joys, the cares, greatest of services, gentleness, and so on. She might hope to touch some sentimental heartstrings. Whether we like this poem or not, in fact, the sentimentality is completely in the eyes of the beholder. Those who hide their emotions under their coats think that almost any expression of emotions reeks of sentimentality. Those who weep easily think that any expression of emotion, no matter how exaggerated, is pretty good.
Kuan appears to be concerned to avoid the way to set up and relates superficial concepts of subject and object, experience and image, in an unexplored region of thought. A Pine Tree Snowed Something is a fine meditation on coming to terms with her own metaphors—conceptions are like a mirror- images, but which, having been lived with and worked through, allowed her to write like this:
A pine tree went through too many things in its mind
never for a moment did its stories flower
All the time it was piled up too much
it causes snow to multiply
A pine tree snowed something, and it has
the option to reflect it voicelessly
The 51 poems in the English part of this book explore some of the places she has lived and travelled before, where the weather, landscapes and human activities, where there are always different kinds of thought rhythms, different kinds of emotions arranged, but in the end in some way towards the metaphor of the control consciousness itself and the final language.
The first time I met Kuan Sun was also on social media. More than three years ago, we discussed essays and fictions of her, and we continued to talk about poetry. The year before last, she and her British husband came to see me in Chengdu. When I asked her last fall what it was she worked at, she replied that she was preparing her second book, a collection of poems, and she invited me to be an English translator for the book. Then she sent me a few poems, and she was too intelligent and mannerly to impose them upon me. I found that they had established a profound connection between form and content that all real poetry had to show, which made an unusual impression on me, and of course, I suggested some modifications to her. I finally selected 51 of her Chinese poems. She is a thoughtful Singaporean female poet, and most of her poems express both the wisdom of the reader and the emotions of the reader.
Finally, I want to conclude with the last words of the autobiography of Karamo Brown:
"I guess we both lived up to our names. Flaws and all . . . we are all designed perfectly."
Zihong Chen, Chengdu, China
January 2020