In commemoration of the 100th anniversary of World War I, Penguin China has released a seven-book series on China-focused Great War history. It tabbed Paul French, author of the popular and award-winning Midnight in Peking: The Murder That Haunted the Last Days of Old China, to contribute Betrayal in Paris: How the Treaty of Versailles Led to China’s Long Revolution. The book “explores China’s betrayal by the West, the charismatic advocates it sent to the conference and the hugely significant May Fourth Movement that resulted from the treaty [of Versailles].” I sat down with the author (over Skype) to talk about the “betrayal,” Japan’s role in it, and how it might have been tipped by — of all things — America’s Jim Crow laws.

Let’s start off with a broad question. Your book is titled Betrayal in Paris; who was betrayed and by whom?

Well, if you look at the series that Penguin is doing on World War I, the series of e-books, the first one they published was by Jonathan Fenby on the siege of Qingdao. That’s an interesting story. Of course, Qingdao was a German colony — if you’ve been to Qingdao you’ve seen the German churches and the German architecture, and of course the Tsingtao Brewery –but the thing about Qingdao is that the Germans used it as a base. The Kaiser always wanted to have an empire like Britain and France, always wanted to put “its toe in warm water,” as they used to say. But they also had a few little odd colonies out in the Pacific islands, most of which are now independent countries or are American trustees like Samoa. And the Germans had a lot of those but they needed somewhere closer to Germany to put their fleet. The German fleet has to leave Qingdao and go to Europe to fight in the North Sea against the Royal Navy. So Qingdao was only defended by one division of German troops. The Japanese took advantage, went in, kicked the Germans out and took over Qingdao and most of the Shandong Peninsula for themselves. China was of course pissed off about this. But China was too weak to do anything about it militarily, and the government was too divided to stop them.

During the war they complained. They complained to people like the British. People always forget that it’s not until after World War II that America really counts. It’s not a great power until after World War II, and people sort of forget that. At that time Britain is definitely the biggest power in the world. They were not going to do anything about Japan because Japan was technically an ally. Like the Chinese, they didn’t fight [in WWI] but they did provide escort ships to the Royal Navy. And also, kicking the Germans out of China was actually a good thing because it was like a thumb in the eye of the Kaiser, and it meant that Britain didn’t have to worry about its bases in the Far East, because the Germans had been kicked out of the Far East. So the Royal Navy could concentrate all its ships in the North Sea, between Europe and Britain, and also in the Dardanelles, in the famous Gallipoli Campaign in Turkey. So the British didn’t want to do anything about it. The French were invaded, basically, so they weren’t going to do anything about it. And the Chinese went to Washington.

They thought that Washington was a place they should go. Remember, this is 1914, the Chinese Republic is only a few years old. And they appeal to the Americans and say, “Look, we’re a republic, you’re a republic; you should help us. We are a fledgling Republican system along the lines of yourself.”

Woodrow Wilson was very encouraging to the Chinese and said, “Look, you know we will sort this out, but it will have to wait until the end of the war. The war is going to consume everything and until the war in Europe is finished, we’re not going to be able to do anything.”

In 1917, German submarines start sinking ships in the Mediterranean and elsewhere and they sink a couple of American ships — which is one of the reasons Woodrow Wilson used to get America into the war in 1917. And what he said to the Chinese was, you should declare war on Germany as well. So the Chinese did everything that Woodrow Wilson asked. They also condemned the use of submarines in warfare — it’s hard to remember this now, but submarines were seen as a very sneaky way of fighting a war — it was almost illegal. Of course, then everyone else got submarines. But everyone [at the time] thought that it was cheating to sink a ship with a submarine rather than by a classic naval battle. So the Chinese said, “We oppose all submarine warfare,” and then the Chinese declared war on Germany. It didn’t send soldiers, but as you will know from one of the other books in the series, Mark O’ Neill’s book, they send 100,000 of what was called the Chinese Labor Corp, or the “Coolie Corp” — this is very little known, even in Europe. These are the guys who cleaned the battlefields, who helped in logistics and loading ships and stuff like that.

So China sent men, China declared war when they were told to by Washington and they opposed submarine warfare when they were told to. They had every reason to believe that at the end of the war, when the Paris Peace Treaty meeting took place, that Woodrow Wilson would argue their case against Japan. This is clearly sovereign territory that has been snatched. Shandong was a land grab. There was every reason for them to get it back. And Wilson was supposed to be the champion of the smaller, weaker nations. There were other groups that had arguments [for territory]. But China had a very, very good case. China had been a formal ally in the war. So when everyone sat down in Paris in 1919 to discuss what was going to be the peace treaty from the war, they had every reason to believe that Wilson would defend them.

They hoped that the British and the French, the other two big powers that were there, would support them as well, but you couldn’t be sure about that because they knew that the British and French were old-school Europeans and would only really do what was in the interest of their own empires. But there was no reason why the Americans shouldn’t have supported them, and ultimately the betrayal — which was by everyone of China, but most of all, and certainly the Chinese felt this, the betrayal was most keen from the United States.

You write that Japan originally took Shandong for “influence, empire and profit.” How had the Japanese been governing Shandong? And what did Shandong mean to the Chinese?

Fairly liberally, actually. They wanted it for trade, they wanted it for a base in China. They were looking at it from a 19th-century imperialist point of view. They were looking at how the Europeans had carved up Africa; they had looked at how the Europeans had carved up the treaty ports in China; the British in Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaya; the Portuguese in Macau; the French in Vietnam (Indochina); they wanted their own empire. They felt that China was naturally theirs. Of course, in 1911 they had annexed Korea and kept Korea until the end of the Second World War. So they had already started empire-building.

But they were sneaky: while the rest of the world was concentrating on Europe, they tried to force greater concessions out of China, some of which they got, some of which they didn’t. But this loss of territory in Shandong was a very deep hurt to the Chinese government. It was a stability issue; if the government didn’t oppose Japan on Qingdao and Shandong, it looked weak, in the way that today if the Chinese government looked weak on Xinjiang or Tibet, it could be accused by its people of being weak overall; and they were worried about that. But this was something that they really wanted — add to that that it is one of the great heartlands of China; it is the birthplace of Confucius and Mencius, the great belief systems of China. In Paris everyone else had a lot of issues that they wanted to discuss; China really only wanted to talk about Shandong.

You praise Wellington Koo’s defense of Chinese sovereignty as “robust.” The response from many other delegations, the international diplomacy crowd in Paris, as well as the Chinese students there, was exuberant. From a debating standpoint, the Japanese were quite plainly defeated. With such a strong case then, and a well-argued one at that, how was it that Japan was eventually able to coerce Wilson into siding with them against China?

There are a number of ways they did it, but one was very clever. You see, Wilson didn’t really want territory like the Europeans — the French wanted Alsace and Lorraine; the Belgians wanted a little bit up by Luxembourg; the British just wanted to keep their empire intact (British foreign policy is quite simple: keep France and Germany apart and we win; divide and conquer).

But Wilson’s one great aim was not land, it was not territory, it was nothing like that. What he wanted was this great international organization: the League of Nations, which of course morphs into the United Nations. The League of Nations, from the First World War to the Second World War, really tried to act in the way that the United Nations does now, over territorial disputes and big multilateral issues. He really, really wanted the League of Nations and he wanted America to be a power in the League of Nations. Wilson felt that America had fought in the war; America was a rising power, New York had all the money, Chicago the manufacturing — this was America’s moment, this was America’s century, and it had to be launched from somewhere, and he felt that it should be done that way. Wilson was a democrat — he wasn’t like Teddy Roosevelt, who almost gave America an empire with the Philippines and Cuba. The Americans were never any good at running an empire, but they sort of had one for a while (not forgetting, of course, staging a coup in Hawaii).

What Wilson wanted was the League of Nations. The Japanese said, very cleverly, and knowing exactly what they were saying, “If we’re going to have a League of Nations, and adjudicate fairness around the world between groups of people — races, tribes, countries — no one should be allowed to be a member of the League of Nations if they have discriminatory policies in their own country. And by that the Japanese knew that the one thing that Wilson could not do was overturn segregation in the United States. There was of course also the Chinese Exclusion Act, and there were restrictions on the number of Japanese that could come into the country, but they knew that it was a fair argument that you could make with the Europeans: how could you adjudicate fairness when you have segregation between black and white in America? Wilson did not have the power to overturn segregation, certainly not in 1919. So Japan threatened to veto, with a lot of other countries as well, who were not supporting Japan but thought that this was a genuinely good idea, particularly emerging black nations. How could you adjudicate fairness when you won’t even let black people into the same theater as white people in America? So the Japanese knew that this would force Wilson to comply.

With America they said, “We will wreck your dream of a League of Nations if you don’t give in on Shandong.” I think it was a very hard thing for Wilson to do. He’s still the president who went away for the longest duration while he was president: six months in Paris. That’s a long time for a president to be away from Washington. Remember, Lloyd George could always just pop home back to London for the weekend, and Clemenceau was in his hometown anyway. But Wilson was really stuck there. And in the end he caved. With secret agreements with the Europeans who supported Japan, Wilson caved and China was betrayed.

So after this betrayal, news gets back to China. What happens on May 4th?

May 4th is a seminal date in China. Word got back that despite the fact that everyone could see — everyone could see! American academics could see it, journalists could see it — that China had a great case, it was an obvious win for China, but they were defeated by the Great Powers and America. Young Chinese students, intellectuals first of all, started to protest around Tiananmen. And they called for many things — one of their primary calls was for the return of Shandong — but they called for other things: for the government to start representing the people; they called for elections; they called for all sorts of things. The point being, not what they were calling for necessary, but that this was really the first time in China — even the 1911 Revolution had been done by a relatively small group of people — that there was was broad-based, participatory and democratic demonstrations.

Shops refused to stock Japanese goods and there was a boycott of anything Japanese. Workers came out on strike, proto-socialists, not-yet Communist movements, left-wing anarchist groups joined in as well; ordinary people. Things spread to other cities; there were boycotts in Shanghai, Canton (Guangzhou) and elsewhere. And this is really when Chinese politics does one of these 180s and people say we want something more, “We’ve made a revolution, we’ve made a republic, now what do we do?” And one of those things is that what they want — a lot of the stuff that you’ll hear now — is, “We want China to be strong; we’re patriotic; we’re nationalistic; we’re not going to be bossed around by Japan; we’re not going to be told what to do by the Europeans, the Americans”; all of that goes on.

And really, if you look at the sort of people who a couple years later start becoming prominent left-wing activists in the trade union movement and the labor movement, and also of course in the formation of the Communist party in the French concession of Shanghai in 1922 and all of that, these people all really get their political education and launch their political careers around the May 4th Movement.

But the May 4th Movement is something bigger as well. It’s unlike actually what goes on in China now — which is rather sad — but it is a lot like what was going on in June of 1989; it was also about being a part of the world. A lot of the Chinese stuff now, to me, is about ultra-nationalism: “close the doors, we’re going to be number one.” It’s almost like American isolationism but with Chinese characteristics.

This was also a cultural movement. That period involved translating lots of writers; H.G. Wells, Virginia Woolf. People had started to go abroad to study. [You saw] the growth of Chinese, technology, research and development. People started to embrace the ideas of psychiatry, sociology — things that are not traditionally seen as really worthy of study in China — things like that. That’s why I call it the “long revolution” in China, which is really on the May 4th Movement — really on 1911, but May 4th accelerates the process of 1911; it democratizes it; it massifies it (capacity-building, I guess we call it now). From that point China goes into the 1920s and of course the bloodbaths in Shanghai between left and right, the pull to the left of Guomindang, the continuing anti-Japanese activity around the annexation of Manchuria in 1932 and 1937, the Second World War. Right through to 1949 and the Communist victory. And you could argue that that process is still continuing. And you can’t deny it now. If you just look at Sino-Japanese relations right now, they’re still in the toilet. This stuff goes all the way back.

Let’s shift gears if we may, and talk about the making of the book. Why this topic?

Amazingly to me, just about every book on Versailles misses the China bit, or plays down that negotiation. If you go back to the newspapers at the time, it’s a massive story! It was one of the big fundamental questions to be sorted out at Versailles in Paris and now it’s kind of played down. It’s not really thought about because I think if you say to the average man or woman on the street — “Shandong, Qingdao” — well, people don’t have much idea about these places. It’s sort of been a bit forgotten, so I wanted to sort of recover it a little bit, and also to make it interesting. It’s a courtroom battle really.

You have two great debaters here, particularly Wellington Koo, the great Chinese diplomat, who was a champion debater at Columbia, very Americanized, very Anglophile. He had been Chinese ambassador to America, very young, was to become during the Second World War Chinese ambassador to Britain, was to be China’s first lead delegate at the League of Nations, and so on. He really was a great debater, and he fought this cause, and it was a passionate cause.

Baron Makino, who was lead negotiator for Japan, was a much more traditional, older character. But he was a great debater as well and a great player of go, Chinese chess. So he knew his strategy very well.

So these two come together in a clash. And of course, like any great courtroom drama, everyone is trying to make sure that the press reports it the way they want it to be reported. All the backchannel stuff is going on and everything; [I thought] you might be able to turn this into a decent sort of courtroom piece. I’m not saying it’s To Kill a Mockingbird or something, but it must have been a classic clash to see it. And they’re doing all this in front of a table at which is sitting Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George, and Clemenceau; the Prime Minister of Britain, the President of France, and the President of the United States. This is a pretty serious judging panel that you’ve got in front of you.

It must have been a very tense atmosphere to have witnessed. Harold Nicolson, the great british diplomat, saw some of it and he said that it was a fantastic clash of debating techniques.

Brent Crane is a freelance journalist based in Beijing. Follow him on Twitter @bcamcrane, or shoot him an email at bcamcrane@gmail.com.

In a recent discussion held as part of the inaugural Lean In Beijing Mentorship Event, a college student in my circle noted, “In China, it’s so difficult to stand out sometimes. We all pursue the same goals, we all do the same things, we all study hard and we all have similar experiences and ideas. In order for us to stand out and be unique, I really think we have to be unafraid to be different.”

It’s true, especially in a country of 1.4 billion people. But it’s not common to see young Chinese doing what’s necessary to stand out: pushing themselves to their limits and going beyond their comfort zone. Which is why Ivan Xu’s project, the Ultimate Ride, is interesting: because it is different.

Ivan plans to bike alone across Europe in 100 days to visit 10 elite Ultimate Frisbee teams, then take another 100 days to bike across China to visit 14 cities and teach Ultimate players on nearly two dozen teams. He started an Indiegogo page, linked above, to help fund his trip. An excerpt:

Confucius once said, “While one’s parents are alive, one should not travel to distant places.” Growing up in a small town in China, I, like many friends around me, was brought up with fewer opportunities and approval to explore beyond. Unlike what is customary for many students and those in their 20s in the West, the Chinese education system and society is more conservative and does not actively encourage adventure, travel and participation in sports and outdoor activities. I hope my tour will inspire a new generation of jet-setting Chinese youth and help everyone appreciate the outdoors.

The journey is so ambitious and different that Ivan has already garnered media interest, even convincing a publishing house to let him write a book about it. If you know anything about China and its youth, there’s nothing more important than encouraging love for adventure, sports, and the outdoors, as well as the ability to take risks and tackle challenges.

We asked Ivan a few questions about his project.

Assuming you’ve told friends and family about this trip, what’s been their reactions? I wonder specifically if there’s a difference between how friends and family have reacted?

My friends are mostly my age. Most of them say things like, “You are so brave,” ”Be safe,” “Chase your dream,” “You’re doing the things we want to do, but dare not to do,” “Money problems can be solved, but you have the courage, perseverance and determination that most of us lack.” The most flattering comment has been, “If Ivan was born in the US, he will probably run for US president.” My sister and cousins have had similar reactions to my friends and they are quite supportive.

My parents, on the other hand, have lived in my small hometown in Hubei province their whole lives, and don’t really have an idea of what the outside world is like. They don’t really interfere with what I want to do; they have always trusted my decisions. However, I can feel the pressure they feel, as the people around them are just like other Chinese parents, comparing me with others my age who are married, have babies and are earning larger salaries. Every time I go home with a tanned face and arms after Ultimate Frisbee tournaments or long-distance bike rides, I hear comments like, “A college graduate like Ivan still works as a construction worker? Even our son who didn’t finish high school has a more decent job.” I don’t really care about what others say, but I feel bad knowing how my parents feel and react. Most from my parent’s generation don’t understand why the tour is important to me, nor do they approve of it. I am lucky in that I have never received much pressure from my parents to stop doing the things I like.

I think many people in my generation face such conflicts: to live a life we want, or to live a life that makes our parents happy. I have to make this tough choice as well. But I have chosen to live my own life and write my own story. I do feel guilty for not supporting them this year, but since I have made the decision to do this tour, I will do it with my full effort and passion.

What was your inspiration for the Ultimate Ride?

There are two main reasons I want to do this.

First of all, I really love Ultimate Frisbee and cycling; combining these two sports for 200 days in Europe and China is a dream that’s almost too good to be true. I don’t want to feel regretful in the future, I don’t want to think, “What if I could have done that biking-Ultimate tour?” I want to have the opportunity to tell my children and grandchildren that I accomplished something amazing when I was younger.

But if I only do this tour for myself, it will not be meaningful; there would be no soul or essence. I want to be able to benefit society and help others while chasing my dream. That’s why I decided to also help publicize two charities:

I care about the Mentor project for orphan kids in Belarus because I lived [in Belarus] for two and a half years, and I am grateful for what I have learned there. I want to leave behind something nice, a feeling that I have contributed and given back to their society.

I have played Ultimate Frisbee for seven years, and I have learned so much from the sport. It has changed my lifestyle and how I sometimes approach life. It would be my honor to do something to give back to the Ultimate community by furthering the sport everywhere, and I can help do that through a charity called Youth Ultimate Project (YUP), and by raising more awareness of this sport in my homeland of China.

What would be an ideal outcome from the Ultimate Ride? 

I would like to see more people in China recognize Ultimate Frisbee as a sport and play it, and more teams to be founded. I hope more people can support the charities I represent. The kids I met at the Belarusian orphanage are cute and smart. YUP is doing a good job helping kids in Cambodia learn Ultimate Frisbee; it deserves more attention, the kind that Ultimate Peace has gotten (an NGO that promotes peace in the Middle East through Ultimate Frisbee).

Ivan Xu (far right), sitting with the Ultimate Frisbee team he created in Wuhan, CUG, after it won its first-ever tournament, China Open 2014

You mention in the Indiegogo that you hope to inspire a generation of jet-setting Chinese youth to appreciate the outdoors. Why is that important to you?

Some of the best moments in my life have been cycling through birch forests and icy lakes, swimming in an ice hole in a freezing Minsk January, building an igloo that I slept in for a night, and traveling alone to different cities in Belarus without understanding much Russian. I really believe an interesting life begins when you are out of your comfort zone, and I think others can benefit if they are just willing to try and challenge themselves.

As China is quickly urbanizing and modernizing, more Chinese youth are getting used to daily comforts, but participate in fewer adventurous and outdoor activities. But if we’re not able to appreciate the beauty of Mother Nature, we will never be complete.

We are lucky today to be Chinese. There are fewer visa restrictions for travel, and China’s economy is strong so more people have money to travel. What I plan to do now would have been impossible for my parent’s generation to even think about.

What advice would you give China’s younger generation?

I actually wrote this on my Couchsurfing page: If you risk nothing, you will achieve nothing. Our world is so vast and amazing, yet I have seen very little of it. We should use our time fully and wisely to go out explore or explore inwardly, to engage our minds – not doing this is a crime. You have to understand and recognize that we will never be as young, strong, and trustful of our body as at this very moment. Learn, share, and grow as much as you can.

Support Ivan Xu’s the Ultimate Ride via his Indiegogo campaign, which ends June 25. You can contact him at ibikeworld@gmail.com.

Alicia is founder and executive director of the academic prep center Prep Beijing. 

The event is live! Tickets for Poetry Night in Beijing on March 16 at the Bookworm Literary Festival are officially being sold at the Bookworm. Please let this be a reminder that we are still seeking submissions for those interested in participating in the event, i.e. reading in front of an audience. Along with Pathlight, our lovely event partners, we are accepting poems until March 1. Please see here for guidelines.

Submissions will be anonymized and sent to our three readers, Canaan Morse, Eleanor Goodman, and Helen Wing.

We recently caught up with Helen to ask about poetry, including her own. She is the author of the collection Archangel, currently available at the Bookworm and on Kindle via Amazon. The following interview was done via email.

There’s a certain way of looking at poetry that I particularly like. Some people ask poets, “When did you want to be a poet?” But the question should really be posed to everyone else: “When did you stop wanting to be a poet?” Because growing up, aren’t all of our experiences, particularly the new ones, the intense, best experiences, “poetic”? It’s a shame that, as children, we probably lacked the ear, or training, to express our feelings. So let me ask you: when did you not stop wanting to become a poet?

HW: This is simple for me. The short answer is that I was always too scared to be a poet. I had been accused of being too poetic throughout my life as an academic and also later as a prose writer. I had images that were “too tight” imputed to me and was constantly being exhorted to unravel and extrapolate whilst I always felt that the things I wanted to say would be dissipated and become less resonant if I conceded in my style. Then of course there is the money thing… it was obvious to me that one could not make a living as a poet. But then gradually that changed as I got older. I realized also that one cannot make a living as a mother or a lover or a volunteer but that did not stop me from being those things. In the end poetry was an unstoppable urge in me that broke down my fears and prejudices. Now I realize I am only fully alive as a poet. I know that sounds extreme but truly this has been my experience.

What’s your experience in poetry been like?

HW: I finally gave in to poetry when I was living in Dubai. I heard about an underground poetry group and joined it expecting little in what I considered to be a cultural as well as physical desert. What I found was a group of people performing in English and Arabic who hailed from all over the globe and who spoke eloquently and passionately about the heart and politics and who grasped at beauty in language in full vulnerability and trust. It was amazing. I submitted my poems and read them and after the second time I was told I need not submit but could just read each time. At a time of deep personal alienation this group saved me.

What compelled you to write Archangel? How did that process start?

HW: Archangel is unusual for me. The daemon came upon me unbidden and blindingly. For three months poetry came pouring out of me. It forced me to get up in the night and stop cooking or doing what I was supposed to be doing. I wrote in a trance at these times and then edited the poems that came to me. I absolutely believe that I was a vessel for these poems. I wrote them, yes, with a history in the study of angels for my academic poetics and with a great passion for LOVE but I also feel that I was writing about things of which I, even at my age, have little experience. I feel that because I had been holding back on poetry for so long that these poems were bursting out of me, that they were, if you like, a type of bloodletting. Perhaps you will see in my forthcoming Savage Torpor (poems which pre-date Archangel) the extent to which that outpouring was needed!

How would you describe poetry in Beijing? Or China?

HW: Personally, Beijing lends itself to poetry because as a foreigner I am surrounded by the strangeness and commonality of existence in a very intense way. One of the aims of a poet I feel is to be able communicate small and large truths in an arresting and fresh way, to evoke that strangeness and recognition simultaneously and to capture it for the reader.

Chinese poets are incredibly humble, and China is a place which respects poetry and the poet’s task as real work. People say that there is a great divide between the East and the West in poetic stance. I am fascinated by the idea that somehow the different sensibilities might move in opposite directions into and out of the poetic identity if you like. However I have been amazed, truly amazed to discover that the poetic cannon and life-reading history of the Chinese poets I have read are so very similar to my own reading history, except of course for an in0depth knowledge of Chinese poetry itself. I am dependent on translation. Other than this I would say that Chinese poets are very literary and that they still distance themselves from performance poetry… but then in the West we do the same, we separate out spoken word poetry from “writerly” work. I was very gratified to see Kate Tempest win the Ted Hughes prize this year. A young woman and a performance poet who rightly aligns herself with the bard with her name.

Who are your favorite poets?

HW: Tsvetayeva, Ezra Pound, Celan, Christopher Reid, W.B Yeats, Margaret Atwood, William Carlos Williams, Ahkmatova, Cernuda, Aleixandre, Lorca, Cesar Vallejo… at the moment… but that changes!

What do you read for when you’re reading a poem?

HW: I look to be taken somewhere else through language. I am a firm believer in the “right word” in the “right place,” a rendering of the heart that can only be made in the way it is being made. I am very instinctual about this but I find that when I feel moved by a poem, if I then subject it to higher literary analysis, it always survives that more critical gaze. In sum I look for the plangent image and I listen to the distinctiveness of voice.

What’s one bit of advice you can impart on any poet or writer?

HW: Truth. Your writing will only move another if you speak with utter and trenchant truth.

Edit. Refine, refine, refine your words and stay in the rhythm… no fakery will stay if you listen to the rhythm of your words so read out loud to yourself. Often if you abide by the sounds you will find yourself saying new, unexpected things, some of which will be searingly beautiful!

Helen has very graciously allowed us to republish the following two poems from Archangel:

All art is absence

Because all art is absence
I want to watch you
touch yourself,
I want to see your curling
as you come.

This gift
I hope you save for me.

Only then will I feel
I have witnessed you
as you have witnessed me
in the exquisite abjection
of my poem.

Which of these two
most human activities
constitutes
the most lonely,
fruitless
intimacy?

Perhaps they are the same?

When you read my poem
you already watch me
touch myself
as I breach the walls
of my most
shameful
incomplete.

All art is absence.

This gift, then,
in recompense,
the curling of your toes,
I hope, Archangel,
you save for me.

~

Truth

It’s true
I barely know you
and yet
it’s also true
I know you as the lightning bolt
is known
by the stricken tree.

Helen Wing is currently Artist-in-Residence at the Harrow International School Beijing.