Iron Moons

Smoky orbs

We teeter so quickly along the edge of drought conditions here in the west. Last winter’s snowpack, last spring’s rains are evaporated memories in September—the other August. How many 90 and over days have we had? When was the last substantial rain? Days of heat layered with the smoke of distant fires turned the sun red and easy to watch as it rose, the moon ochre as aged paper.

Careers paths

In the end of that smoky time, I heard Eleanor Goodman read. She is a poet and translator of Chinese poetry. Many poets become translators of poetry, but perhaps in her case the translator came first. At the age of five she had a Chinese playmate who knew little English and spoke to her in Chinese, so she began to learn it. When he told her stories of his memories of China, she told herself: one day I’ll go there.

At age five. Some are called to their careers irresistibly, and Goodman was obviously one of them. Currently a research associate in Chinese Studies at Harvard, she has won many translation awards and grants, had a Fulbright to Peking University, has published two books of poems translated from the Chinese and spends half the year in China.

At age five, I’m pretty sure I wanted to be a horse. My mother alleged that I galloped around the yard making whinnying noises. A few years later, although the love of horses remained, I decided to be an artist, because I liked to draw and adults admired my talent. Several years were devoted to the idea of becoming a veterinarian—until I visited one. The dog unconscious on the table, its guts exposed, glistening, is a memory I cannot shake. Only in adolescence did I begin to write and think perhaps I was a poet. Only years later would the desire to translate take root. For me, the road to any kind of career was always hazy with the smoke of distant fires.

Iron Moon: An Anthology of Chinese Migrant Worker Poetry

Chinese workers’ complicated moons

Eleanor Goodman read us bits of one poem in Chinese, so we could hear its musicality, the tones shushing into one another, the rhythm strong and unlike the rhythm of her translation, which was nevertheless an apt English replacement. The book she read from is Iron Moon: An Anthology of Chinese Migrant Worker Poetry. The anthology is a result of a documentary film by the same name. Much to my surprise, Goodman said the film was popular in China last year, that the problem of worker conditions is recognized.

Foxconn makes Apple components and the suicides there a few years ago did not convince me not to buy an iphone, but the poems might have.

I swallowed an iron moon
they called it a screw

I swallowed industrial wastewater and unemployment forms
bent over machines, our youth died young…

Xu Lizhi wrote those lines, worked at a Foxconn factory, tried and failed to find other work, after his 12-hour repetitive motion shifts wrote over 200 poems and jumped to his death at 24. And yet, Goodman hastened to add, young people travel to take these jobs voluntarily, make many times the money they could make in their rural homes. How would they live if we shut down Foxconn?

Alu did get out, worked as a docker, polisher, warehouse manager, newspaper reporter and is now editor of a company magazine, wrote: “Each full moon looked like a chunk of homesick iron.”

Hubei Qingwa has a poem about the moon’s position in the factory, and suggests that “the moon has its own comprehensive service orbit.”

Zheng Xiaoqiong: “…the moonlight leaves a line of footprints on the iron vines of the security wall…”

Everyone sometimes works night shift. The poems are full of moons that do little to relieve darkness, moons covered in iron and rust, chemicals and fatigue.

Here, our moon became a dark disk covering the sun and we raised our phones to catch the historic moment. Here, the fires in the west were so numerous that hundreds of miles away we breathed their smoke and saw the moon turn tangerine. Even so, we don’t feel connected to fires in Oregon or Montana. These Chinese worker poets, though, know exactly how they are connected to us.

Wu Xia began working at 14, works in a clothing factory and these lines are from her poem called “Sundress:”

I want to press the straps flat
so they won’t dig into your shoulders…

last I’ll smooth the dress out
to iron the pleats to equal widths
so you can sit by a lake or on a grassy lawn
and wait for a breeze
like a flower

Soon when I get off work
I’ll wash my sweaty uniform
and the sundress will be packed and shipped
to a fashionable store
it will wait just for you
unknown girl
I love you