余秀华: The Only Thing I Ever Fought Was Marriage, Not Fate

Summary

• 卫诗婕 launches the women-focused strand with this special episode on an explicit commercial premise: women make up half of society’s voices but are heard less often, pointing to “underserved needs and markets” across consumption, health, education and family life. The debut guest, 余秀华—the rural poet with cerebral palsy who went viral in late 2014 with Crossing Half of China to Sleep with You—is exactly the kind of subject she has in mind: “Guests who try to break through the gender ceiling—their experiences, the obstacles they overcome and the way they view risk are themselves rare, high-value business cases.”
• 余秀华 redefines the target of her struggle: she says she was fighting marriage, not fate. The pain was not domestic violence but living with “someone who was completely incapable of empathizing with you,” someone who was “not even a friend, not even a neighbor”; “being cursed by the whole world couldn’t compare with the happiness of getting divorced.” She rejects reports that she wanted out to avoid splitting half her income: “That was something the media made up… I say plenty of boastful things, but that wasn’t what I really thought. I had to leave this marriage, even if I ended up with no income.”
• Her biggest knot over the past 2 years was undone by a reversal in attribution: “It’s not my fault that I can’t get love.” Her only insecurity was in relationships; she now sees that the body “protects you in its own way—every loss comes with a gain,” and sums it up with a line of self-mocking irony: “I kept reflecting, and eventually found that everyone else was wrong.” She insists this is not self-protection but “the self-awareness a person should naturally have”; it is “a completely different level” from her ex-boyfriend’s belief that “every mistake is someone else’s.”
• She advances a theory of love: it is a trap set by God when creating humans, designed to delay humanity’s destruction. At the level of human nature, “without love, everything is an exchange”; real love can only be “an unconditional meeting of souls.” She also sees love as “not a fact, but a belief.” Without obstacles, humanity would “expand without limit, develop at high speed, and then be destroyed.” Once she worked this out, “there was no anxiety left”: love as a life assignment was “basically solved,” and the remaining task was “to write one good book, after which I can go to heaven.” She concedes that this may be a somewhat fanciful view of relations between men and women.
• Her sharpest diagnosis of both creativity and life is that this generation’s central problem is “not a lack of pain, but a lack of life.” Responding to the narrative of 陈年喜’s creative crisis after leaving the mines—when healing seemed to lose its direction—she rejects the diagnosis and refuses to worship suffering: “If writing out your own pain is the standard, I think that’s very narrow.” Her early poetry came from “the need to express yourself, not the need to suffer.” She also relays the argument that pain drives deeper thought and therefore makes work more likely; today, “many people are just curled up at home scrolling on their phones,” missing life itself.
• On gender, she clashes head-on with the host: East Asian women’s excessive self-examination is “not a gender issue, but a matter of personality.” Feminism’s concepts “simply don’t exist in my world,” yet her agency is “definitely innate, 100%”: she initiated things with every boy she liked, with her ex-husband the exception. On one occasion, her mother berated her for going to see him first and “having no sense of shame”; she could not understand it then, and says she has only figured out many of these questions over the past few years.
• Her bodily determinism on creative output is blunt: “Vitality really follows the body.” When told that directors hit their prime around 40, she fires back: “Wait until he’s past 55 and see whether he’s still got it.” She sees her own creative bottleneck in equally concrete terms: poetry is “catching one firework and you’re done,” while a novel requires “catching every firework”; she has “no method, no system,” and still thinks like a poet.

Deep dive

1. Opening frame: women’s voices are an undervalued business sample

• 卫诗婕’s framing is straightforward: the business world is still more heavily shaped by men, while “half of society’s voices are made up of women, yet are heard less often.” Those voices point to “underserved needs and markets” in consumption, health, education and family life. For guests who break through the gender ceiling, their experiences, the barriers they overcome and their approach to risk are “rare, high-value business cases” in their own right.
• The choice of 余秀华 follows that logic. When Crossing Half of China to Sleep with You went viral in late 2014, the internet discovered that its “intense, direct and primal vitality” came from a middle-aged woman born in the countryside with cerebral palsy. In 2015, 卫诗婕 interviewed documentary director 范俭 for People magazine; 10 years later, the 2 returned to the conversation at the Publishing Friends Festival jointly held by 新世相 and 阿那亚.

2. Self-knowledge: loving yourself and having wisdom are separate questions

• 余秀华 gives herself an unsparing review: “I have a bad personality, and my mindset isn’t good either.” She is highly prone to rumination; her emotions are triggered by “very small things” and flare up instantly. She also rejects the idea that they can simply be controlled: “If emotions could all be controlled, the world would be a pretty peaceful place.”
• But she refuses to tie self-acceptance to self-assessment: “I may lack wisdom, but I still love myself… I like myself and admire myself, and that has nothing to do with whether I think I’m wise. You can’t say I like myself because I’m a very wise person. That’s someone else, not me.”

3. “It’s not my fault that I can’t get love”: insecurity in one place, healing through specific people

• She says she is not insecure about anything else, including her appearance, “but I become insecure when I’m facing a relationship.” Over the past 2 years, she has come to believe that the physical condition that limits her “protects you in its own way—every loss comes with a gain.” When the host asks what beauty or obtaining love would really change, she responds: “Exactly. So what?” She also overturns an earlier belief: “Sleeping with a man doesn’t mean it’s love. I think that’s not very sophisticated”—while admitting that she herself “definitely used to think that way.”
• She turns the reversal into a piece of irony: “The result of reflection is that you have to push the mistake onto someone else… I kept reflecting, and eventually found that everyone else was wrong, not me. Then I felt completely calm.” Asked whether this is self-protection, she corrects the premise: it is “the self-awareness a person should naturally have,” while believing “every mistake is someone else’s” is simply a case of having thicker skin—“two completely different levels.”
• The sources of her healing are concrete: the gentleness of her manager 涛哥 and a photographer’s assistant—“In many interviews, I’ve said he was a watershed moment in my life”—along with the warmth she received from her son after he grew up. In the preceding 30-40 years, she says she had essentially never been treated gently. Her ex-boyfriend, meanwhile, gave her the impetus to think and helped her identify a “PUA personality.” Before that, “I had no category of bad people. I thought everyone in the world was good.”

4. 100% innate agency: a clash over gender attribution

• 卫诗婕’s framework is that girls raised under traditional East Asian education are “particularly good at examining themselves and always looking for the mistake in themselves”—a gender issue produced by society and education. 余秀华 pushes back immediately: “This isn’t a gender issue, it’s a matter of personality. You’re making too much of it by attributing it to gender.” She concedes only that, statistically, “women may do more self-reflection than men.”
• She has no theoretical vocabulary for the concepts being discussed: “None of these concepts you’re talking about exist in my world.” Turning passivity in relationships between men and women into agency is “definitely innate, 100%.” Every boy she liked was approached by her first; her ex-husband was the exception. She recalls once going to see him on her own and being scolded by her mother for “having no sense of shame”: “I didn’t understand it then. I was too young.” Many of these questions, she says, only became clear to her over the past few years.

5. The only thing she fought was marriage: divorce was bliss, and at the wedding she wanted to set off firecrackers

• The mechanism of the marriage’s pain was not domestic violence but living “with someone who was completely incapable of empathizing with you… someone who wasn’t even a friend, not even a neighbor.” She had wanted a divorce since her son was born—“leave the father, keep the child”—but could not act on it before becoming famous because he refused to leave. She says he stayed because “he was also a drifting person, and needed a home,” and because he had no money to make a new life. “Give him money and the problem is solved.”
• She explicitly rejects reports that she wanted to divorce quickly to avoid giving him half her income: “That was something the media made up… I say plenty of boastful things, but that wasn’t what I really thought. I had to leave this marriage, even if I ended up with no income.”
• At the end of the documentary, her ex-husband takes her hand; “now when I think about it, I find it disgusting.” Yet both of them were happy that day. She also makes a rare admission that the marriage had once contained something good—the host notes that this is the first time she has said so in all her interviews: “It wasn’t bad all the way through. The good at the beginning was simply the novelty.” Asked what “all my struggles came to nothing” means in her poem, she explains that the struggle was against marriage, not fate. When the host follows up by asking whether that means the struggle did not come to nothing, she does not answer directly, saying only that she is “the one who understands it best.”

6. Writers have no privacy, but there was one scene that made her cry

• 范俭 was once surprised by how willing she was to let the film expose her private life. She rejects the premise outright: “What privacy does a writer have? If something is private, you can’t write it.” She is grateful that the film recorded her mother, who died soon afterward. When she once said that “everything in the film except me was especially beautiful,” it was because “I thought I was too ugly.” Today, “I have no anxiety about my appearance. I processed that issue myself.”
• The only scene she could not bear was her ex-husband and his coworkers discussing her trembling hands: “I was still very sad when I watched it. I even cried… How can you still look down on me like that after being married for decades?” She believes he never accepted her and was “looking for a marriage simply for the sake of finding a marriage.” “I really don’t think it was my fault. On the contrary, I think it was his.”

7. Love is a trap set by God—to delay humanity’s destruction

• In a discussion with her son, he asks why she still wants love when she is “not beautiful, disabled and not very wealthy.” She responds by asking whether beauty is simply an exchange cost, then reaches her conclusion: “At the root of human nature, without love, everything is an exchange. Real love is an unconditional meeting of souls.” In her view, love “is not a fact, but a belief.” Once she understood that, “there was no anxiety left.”
• Her more startling cosmology is that “love is a trap… a trap God set when he created human beings.” If love had no obstacles, humanity would “expand without limit, develop at high speed, and then be destroyed.” The trap is “a checkpoint set up to delay humanity’s destruction.” She keeps a qualification in place: “This may be a somewhat fanciful view of relations between men and women, but love is fanciful to begin with.”

8. Her rebuttal to 陈年喜’s proposition: the problem is a lack of life, not a lack of pain

• 卫诗婕 recounts 陈年喜’s experience from the period of his GQ feature: as a miner, writing had a clear therapeutic direction and inspiration flowed; after he was hired for an administrative job at a scenic site in Guizhou, he entered a period of creative pain, seemingly because life contained less suffering than before and the therapy had lost its target. 余秀华 corrects the diagnosis on the spot: “He expressed it inaccurately—it’s a lack of life, not a lack of pain. The most critical problem facing our generation is that we have no life. Many people are just curled up at home scrolling on their phones.”
• She rejects the worship of suffering at the same time: “If writing out your own pain is the standard, I think that’s very narrow.” Her early poems were “very unconscious”; when you are in intense pain, “you need to express it, not need to suffer.” On the claim that pain makes it easier to produce work, the explanation she relays is: “When you’re in pain, you think more deeply.”
• The subject of her writing has since shifted. She now connects emotion to life and the question of life and death, writing after physical desire has receded: “I mainly write thought, not emotion.” Love, once seen as the problem she would never solve in her lifetime, is “basically resolved.” The remaining task is “to write one good book, after which I can go to heaven.” Even living out a life without fame or gain is a task: “Isn’t getting through this life without fame and money also one of his tasks?”

9. Poetry is catching one firework; a novel requires catching every firework—and vitality follows the body

• “I’m most narcissistic only when I’m creating.” But she admits she has not reached the novelist’s level at which “the characters decide their own fates”: “I really can’t get there.” Poetry is a single point—“like fireworks, you catch one firework and you’re done”; a novel requires “catching every firework.” That is her biggest problem now: “I have no method, no system. My way of thinking is still the way a poet thinks.” Her favorite writer over the past 2 years has been Nabokov, whose short fiction she admires for its detail and force; she also favors epic-scale books such as Les Misérables and One Hundred Years of Solitude.
• Looking back at her first 2 poetry collections, A Wobbling Human World and Moonlight Falling on the Left Hand, she says those were the 2 years when she wrote the most and barely edited what she produced. Her hormones were running high. “I’ve never thought that my boy-crazy years were something to be ashamed of.” On the contrary, they were “an era of tremendous vitality and meaning.”
• From there she makes her claim: “Vitality really follows the body. Many male writers can’t write anything later in life simply because they’re no good.” When the host points to directors’ golden period around 40, she shoots back: “40 is the best age, when hormones are at their peak. Wait until he’s past 55 and see whether he’s still got it.”
• She explains that the “struggle” in “all my struggles came to nothing” referred to marriage, not fate. “There isn’t a clean spot left after being contaminated by society” becomes, in her interpretation, “I contaminated myself”—she had dramatized and embellished her own longing for love. She never worked in a formal institution and never went to college, so she did not have to endure that kind of institutional conditioning. “There’s no such thing as having only your thoughts polluted and not your body”; someone without an independent mind “can’t be called a human being.” Cursing is also a form of vitality. “I don’t even feel like cursing anymore. That’s a sign of growing old.” Her energy has shifted from love to creation, “and that is definitely fortunate.”