Snapshots from the Canon

Liu Shahe 流沙河, Scars of the Sawtooth 鋸齒嚙痕錄

"I was born November 11, in a small courtyard off Zhonglie Sinan Road, in Sichuan. Our family's house was 88 Chinese leagues from Chengdu, the provincial capitol, in Jinchang County, in a little village called Chengxiang (today's Baijiang district of greater Chengdu). My family lived in a traditional courtyard home on a lane lined with locust trees. Back then, we were rich landlords. 1931年11月11日我生在四川省成都市忠烈祠南街一個小院裏。我的老家在距離成都市八十八華裏的金堂縣城廂鎮（該鎮今屬成都市青白江區了）槐樹街余家大院內，原是一個大地主家庭."

The following is a poem I found on the internet about Liu, by Robert Rees:

His speech makes measured
music in the old Sichuan dialect.
He quotes Confucius, Walt
Whitman and Li Po then
tells the American writer
her name sounds like pearls
dropping in a dish—
Hong-ting-ting.

During the long darkness Liu
shaped hard wood with plane and saw,
fashioned cabinets tight as tombs.
As witness to his children,
he wrote poems in the night.
When the Red Guards came he
burned the scraps of paper,
then threw the ashes on the wind.
These days he stays home,
writes old style poems—
“traces of the saw tooth’s edge—
cipher of awl and auger”—
and complains about young poets
writing crazy verse.
“My children no longer read my
poems,” he says, “They just
rock and roll . . .
Rolling Stones.”
--Robert Rees (Sunstone Magazine [PDF])