Ten Thousand Waves: Poems

by Wang Ping

Looking at a wide swath of Chinese history and literature, this collection examines various issues stemming from immigration to America. Wang Ping conveys the voices of centuries of farmers and factory laborers, revolutionaries, writers, artists, and craftsmen. She has a unique gift for telling small stories with powerful emotional effects. The titular poem, "Ten Thousand Waves," was inspired by a tragedy that occurred on February 5, 2004. More than 20 Chinese laborers drowned in Morecambe Bay, England, when they were caught by an incoming tide. They were collecting cockles late in the evening, having been misinformed about the tidal times. The victims were undocumented immigrants, mainly from Fujian Province, China. In 2006, English filmmaker Nick Broomfield directed and produced Ghosts , a dramatic film based on the tragedy at Morecambe Bay. Not long after that, another filmmaker, Isaac Julien, commissioned Ping to write a narrative script for his film on global immigration, Small Boats . When he saw the finished poem, Julien decided to make a film installation specifically on Chinese immigration, which he entitled Ten Thousand Waves , after Ping's poem. Ten Thousand Waves has been featured at the Pace Foundation galleries in San Antonio, Texas, and at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Genres: Poetry, China

112 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Born in Shanghai and grew up in the East China Sea. Love the body of water, its sound and smell, love the touch of the muddy beach and golden sand.

Reviews

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good, but quite sad.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Released in April 2014 was Ten Thousand Waves, a collection of prose poems by the award-winning Wang Ping in a volume crafted by Wings Press. An amazing portrait of the economic and physical hardship suffered by so many in modern China, the book lays bare the untenable relationship between the misery and oppression of millions and the luxury afforded a scant number of tourists and elite. Sometimes this relationship twists the sacred into the owned (“Young Monk at Debating Court”), other times it devalues human life and traditional spaces (“The Price of a Finger”), and always it transforms the Chinese identity in irreparable ways (“In Search of Chinese Poets”).

Ping effortlessly captures the multiple voices of rare earth miners to housewives to those emigrating in search of the better lives. Her images and language leave indelible marks on the soul, and the haunting sound of cold waves drowning the hopes of Chinese workers abroad will linger a long time in your ears.

[Charles Degelman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ten Thousand Waves
Ping Wang

Since childhood, the poet Wang Ping has been aware of her own restless spirit. “I want to play,” she writes in her recent poetry collection, Ten Thousand Waves, “See the world before I become too old.”

Wang Ping’s wayward-seeking energy has transported her from the China of Mao’s Cultural Revolution across a myriad of geographies, cultures, and fantasies. Like a shaman, Ping dances, seamlessly assembling a layered collage of portraits, stories and dreams. She blends personal experience with conjured people, places, events, and reflections so honestly that we trust her flight from storytelling to poetic reportage, from fiction to fact.

Advancing on Ping’s often-guileful but compassionate voice, Ten Thousand Waves embraces the contradictions of Mao’s Cultural Revolution and the enigma of Tibet. She gives voice to the microcosms of life in a new China. She celebrates the simple contentment of a snail merchant and mourns the hope, hardship, and cruelty of immigrant lives in New York, the Metal City of Yongkang and on the murderous tidal flats of Wales.

Content drives her diverse stylistic choices. “I consider reading poetry to be a social obligation,” Ping says in one interview. “The small people are speaking,” she writes. “...and no dam of bullets or machine guns or pepper spray tanks media smears can stop this tsunami of justice and peace…this is not violence.”

Ten Thousand Waves plants images and impressions in the reader’s memory where they gestate, waiting to surface in unpredictable forms. Wang Ping’s poetry is the work of a mirthful, gentle trickster with an urgent and intricate agenda. In Ten Thousand Waves, her restless spirit follows the poet’s heart while her pen delivers the world to us.

[World Literature Today]

This book was featured in the Nota Benes section of the March/April 2015 issue of World Literature Today Magazine.

http://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2...

[Jess · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wang Ping shares important stories about the people of China with power and intense sensitivity, revealing the humanity we have lost, warning us of the imminent, calling us to action.