There is a particular kind of light that falls on a man waiting at a red signal, engine idling, food growing cold in the box behind him, and somewhere in that light a line of verse arrives uninvited. This is how Wang Jibing has written most of his poems. Not at a desk. Not in the hush of a study lined with books. But between orders, between elevators, between the small immovable delays that make up the working day of a delivery rider in Jiangsu province.
Wang was born in 1969 into a poor household in a village in Pizhou. He left school after junior high, and the years that followed him were the years that follow so many in that part of the world who are given labour instead of leisure. He dredged sand from riverbeds. He worked construction. He collected waste. He carried, in whatever sense a body can carry, the weight of a life that had no obvious place in it for poetry. And yet in the evenings, after the sand had been dredged and the day accounted for, he would find some scrap of a table, in some shed barely large enough for it, and there he continued to write. Not because anyone was waiting to read him. Because something in him needed to set the day down in words before it disappeared.
In 2019, at fifty, Wang became a food delivery rider. It was, on the surface, simply another manual trade, one more uniform to wear in a life that had already worn several. But something in that particular work, the waiting, the traffic lights, the elevators that rise and fall without hurry while a rider stands inside them thinking of nothing and everything, gave his writing a new register. He began to compose poems in these intervals, on his phone, between the ordinary tasks of delivering someone else’s dinner. In 2022, one of these poems, “People in a Hurry,” was shared by a fellow admirer of poetry and found its way to millions of readers. A man on a scooter had, without meaning to, become a voice for a generation of workers who move through cities unseen.
This month, that voice reached the country’s highest literary threshold. Wang Jibing’s poetry collection, translated as Low Flight, has been named among the winners of the ninth Lu Xun Literature Prize, one of the most prestigious honours in Chinese letters, awarded once every four years by the China Writers Association. The prize carries the name of Lu Xun, a writer remembered for looking without flinching at the century he lived through. It has, for decades, been understood as an arena for professional writers, for those whose lives were arranged around literature rather than around survival. This year, that arrangement loosened. Alongside Wang, a market vendor who has tended a general goods stall for eighteen years was nominated for a collection of essays. A shift, quiet but unmistakable, has entered the way a nation decides whose life is permitted to become literature.
What makes Low Flight more than a curiosity, more than the story of an unlikely man in an unlikely place, is the labour behind it. To complete the collection, Wang did not simply mine his own days for material. He sought out some hundred and forty fellow delivery riders, paying small sums from his own pocket so that they might answer his questions, so that their days too might be set down somewhere permanent. He wanted the book to hold not one man’s exhaustion but the shared and largely invisible exhaustion of an entire trade, the small griefs and endurances of the more than ten million riders who move through Chinese cities each day carrying other people’s meals while their own lives go mostly unrecorded. “I am one of them,” he has said. “I face pressure, and I have moments when I break down.” The poems do not ask to be admired for overcoming this. They simply ask to be read as true.
Asked what winning meant to him, Wang did not reach for triumph. He said that on the day of the announcement, what he wanted most was to return to his scooter and continue his rounds, because it is only in staying grounded, in remaining close to the actual weight of the actual day, that a clear mind for writing can be found. There is something here worth sitting with quietly. He did not treat the prize as an arrival, a door through which he might now pass into some other life. He treated it as confirmation of a discipline he had already been practising in silence for years, the discipline of noticing.
He has described the honour as something closer to a signpost than a summit. Not proof that ordinary people must now become poets, but proof that any life, however plain its surface, carries within it the possibility of being expressed and understood. This is, perhaps, the quiet argument his whole body of work has been making without raising its voice. That literature does not begin where hardship ends. That it often begins exactly there, in the gap between one delivery and the next, in the pause at a red light, in the tiredness that a man carries home and somehow transforms, before sleep, into a line worth keeping.
An English edition of Low Flight is expected to reach American readers by the end of this year. Wang is already at work on a collection of essays. Whatever comes of it, something has already shifted. A door that literature kept narrow for a long time has, for one delivery rider from Jiangsu, opened. And through it, perhaps, others will begin to see that the ordinary hours of their own lives, the waiting, the weariness, the small unremarked persistence, were never as far from poetry as they seemed.
Writers Capital International Foundation www.writerscapital.org | care@writerscapital.org
