Page 13 - Tom Steyer Issue

that I see; whether it’s weal or woe, mission or not, it’s an inevitability.” Xia wrote in her essay “Monologue”. Having been through all this, Ning believes that every essay and poem her younger sister has crafted is what she wanted to say herself. Xia is adept at turning her feelings into words. Writing is her destiny.
likens disabled people to the toad that has a human soul. This toad is destined for a lowly life even though it aspires to gain some value by killing pests. For people with disabilities, this reflects a cognitive misalignment between the self and the world. According to Xia, there are three ways to regard the body and the soul: one that admires the soul; one that adores the body; and one that equalizes body and soul. She put herself into the last category - a body-soul equalizer, who still tries to fight for her toad-like life despite many episodes of despair. “I can’t get out of it. I am no stranger to such struggle and pain.” Tugged between the negative and positive forces, Xia has managed to levitate the heavy burden of her body by freeing up her soul. Her personality, as well as her poetry, demonstrates the lethal hardships and strengths she has experienced.
Gradually Xia began to develop her own style. Her dis- abilities opened up her mind and provided an outlet through which she writes about the world and humanity.
In 2013, Xia got a cold again, which quickly escalated to pneumonia, leaving her in dire conditions. When she was rushed to the hospital, the doctor suggested tra- cheotomy to help her breathe, but he warned, “If we cut your wind pipe, you may not be able to breathe on your own given your conditions. Then we’ll need to put you on a ventilator in the I.C.U. Otherwise your life may be at risk.”
“Mother is taking us further down this road away from fears”
In no time Xia sensed despair from her parents, know- ing that “they could no longer make decisions and had no one but me to rely on.”
Before the advent of e-books and the kind of capacitive stylus pen that could be held by the mouth, Xia needed her mother’s help whenever she wanted a page turned. In the warm winter days, she was positioned by the win- dow to get more sun while reading. When it was time to turn pages, she would look up and take heed of every- thing in the room - the bed sheets flattened out, the warm milk ready to drink, and Mother scrubbing each and every piece of furniture, then mopping the floor, then washing the tea cups, then doing laundry, then refilling the hot-water bottles. All the while, she would walk over to turn the pages for Xia or to adjust Ning’s sitting posture.
For one minute, Xia imagined herself being sent to an I.C.U. by a group of people, tubes sticking out of her body from a machine. She wondered if life was worth living in that way. “No,” came her decision right after the moment. “My faith at that time was that there would be greater hope if I held myself together longer.”
“We need to see both sides of life. If there is only emphasis on the good side, that is self-deceit. It is nec- essary to be aware of the bad side, but we need to keep hope in the worst times.” Xia sees poetry as an alterna- tive reality she can visit. “There all is very beautiful, very quiet, very nice.” She says in one of her lines: “This blade of grass dreams big, or it wouldn’t have so painstakingly grown since it knew it was only grass.” She continued to write, “A fallen leaf on the street is swirling with the wind and is shaking even though it has a transient attachment. Unable to fly high, this leaf looks so light and little. Yet, when it traverses through the rays of sunset, car exhaust, neon lights, winds, and countless ongoing stories, the little leaf will grow into a golden season.” Grass, fallen leaves, and winds signify the reason for Xia to live her life to the fullest. With tenacity one will grow into a golden season, even if it is a leaf fallen.
At this time Mother was content, Xia thought, and that was the kind of contentment trickling out after many a sleepless night with her daughters and hundreds and thousands of exhausting hours tending to their needs.
About disability, humanity, and inner tensions and con- fusions, there is a lot Xia wishes to say that she would not normally. She uses herself as a test for her ideas, a case to analyze. Through herself, she writes about the loneliness of common people.
How her parents listened to the doctor’s advice in the first place, how they carried the babies and loads of stuff onto the train, how they begged for a bowl of plain noodle soup to feed the youngsters when they had spent all the food stamps, how they all crammed into one basement room with another family...Xia could only feel such segments of her early life by her mother’s accounts. For a long time she could not bring herself to writing a poem about her mother, “only because I could not see her clearly in mistaking her presence for the completion of daily trivia, for courage to go after my dreams, and for my woe.”
In 2018, Xia finished the Monologue, a collection of short prose, with which she hoped to go deep and take a step further after life’s trials. “It’s not your body that should not belong to you. Rather it’s your soul.” She
But when she began to set her mind to the task, she could not stop. About her mother she wrote, “My day dawns when Mother has cooked breakfast, dragged out the sun, and has pulled apart the curtains. My night falls when Mother has tidied the room, hung up the moon, and has switched on the light.” She went on, “When Mother stirs in her dream crying and cursing, I decide to wake her up. Once I do that, all her sorrows and fears
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