Ya Hsien: After Writing Abyss, He Stopped Writing; in the United Daily News Supplement, His Later Life Became a Page in Poetry History

30-second overview: Born on August 29, 1932, in Nanyang County, Henan Province, with the given name Wang Qinglin. In 1949, he crossed the sea to Taiwan with the Nationalist Army. In 1953, while studying in the film and theater division of the Political Cadres School, he co-founded the Genesis Poetry Society in Zuoying, Kaohsiung, with Zhang Mo and Luo Fu, launching the poetry journal Genesis. The three were known as the “iron triangle” of postwar Taiwan modern poetry¹. His poems were concentrated between 1953 and 1965. After publishing the collection Abyss in 1968, he almost entirely stopped writing; at 36, he ceased writing poetry and published no new poetry collection for the next 56 years. Beginning in 1977, he served as director of the United Daily News literary supplement, editing United Daily News Supplement for 21 years, before retiring in 1998 and moving to Vancouver, Canada. In 2012, he received the contribution award at the second Global Chinese Literature Nebula Awards². On October 11, 2024, he died in Vancouver at the venerable age of 92; in December of the same year, the Ministry of Culture, on behalf of President Lai Ching-te, posthumously conferred a citation of commendation³. Abyss contains fewer than one hundred poems, yet it is enough to place him among the top five figures in Taiwan poetry history⁴.

The Last Poem of 1968, and 56 Years Without Writing Again

Ya Hsien’s place in poetry history has an unusual shape: in 1953, when he was only twenty-one, he and Luo Fu and Zhang Mo started the poetry journal Genesis beside the barracks of an artillery unit in Zuoying, Kaohsiung¹. By 1968, at thirty-six, he had finished compiling the collection Abyss, gathering the roughly ninety poems he had written over the previous fifteen years into a single book. Then he stopped, and never wrote new poetry again⁴.

From 1968 to 2024: fifty-six years of silence.

This is extraordinarily rare in the history of modern poetry in Taiwan. Luo Fu and Zhang Mo, of the same generation, both continued writing into their eighties; Yang Mu wrote until his death in 2020; Zhou Mengdie was still running a bookstall on Wuchang Street in Taipei in his eighties⁵. Only Ya Hsien chose to stop at the height of his creative powers and devote the energy of the latter half of his life entirely to the editor’s desk.

📝 Curator’s note: Taiwan’s literary world has a concept called “one volume, then no more,” almost used specifically for Ya Hsien: a poet publishes only one poetry collection and stops, yet that book is enough to make him immortal. For readers, this is harder to understand than “he wrote fifty books”: why not keep writing? Ya Hsien himself never gave a complete answer. But when one opens Abyss and sees the density of its roughly ninety poems, then looks at how he later turned the United Daily News literary supplement into postwar Taiwan’s most important public literary space, “not writing again” comes to seem less like subtraction than the fulfillment of a choice.

“Hallelujah, I am still alive”: this is the refrain that recurs throughout the poem “Abyss,” and it is also the most recognizable line Ya Hsien left to Taiwan poetry history⁶. Under the martial-law system, the line was both a resistance to nothingness and a cipher addressed to the censorship regime. That Abyss could be published smoothly in 1968 depended precisely on this obscurity, which Taiwan Garrison Command censors could not understand.

After he stopped writing, Ya Hsien did not choose diminution. He changed from someone who wrote poetry into someone who made it possible for others to write poetry.

From Nanyang, Henan, to the Iron Triangle of the Genesis Poetry Society

On August 29, 1932, Ya Hsien was born in Nanyang County, Henan Province. His original name was Wang Qinglin². In 1949, the year the Chinese Civil War ended, he was seventeen; he joined the Republic of China armed forces, retreated south with the troops from Hunan, and finally crossed the sea to Taiwan⁷.

After arriving in Taiwan, he first served in the military. In 1953, he entered the film and theater division of the Political Cadres School. That same year, in Zuoying, Kaohsiung, he co-founded the Genesis Poetry Society with Zhang Mo and Luo Fu¹.

The origin story begins in August 1954, slightly later than the 1953 date generally given in the literature. While browsing Zhang Xiuya’s essay collection Pansy at Daye Bookstore in Kaohsiung, Zhang Mo saw the three characters “Genesis” and liked them immensely. The next day, he contacted Luo Fu, then with the Marine Corps in Fengshan, and the two agreed to launch the journal in October. Ya Hsien joined soon after, and the three were collectively called the “iron triangle”¹.

💡 Did you know? The founding years of Taiwan’s first postwar poetry societies were exceptionally compressed. In 1953, Ji Xian founded the quarterly Modern Poetry in Taipei; in 1954, Qin Zihao, Yu Kwang-chung, Xia Jing, and others established the Blue Star Poetry Society; in October of the same year, Luo Fu, Zhang Mo, and Ya Hsien founded the Genesis Poetry Society in Zuoying, Kaohsiung¹. The three societies represented three poetic lines: Ji Xian’s modernist school emphasized intellectuality and “horizontal transplantation”; Blue Star leaned toward lyricism and the classical tradition; Genesis moved toward a fusion of surrealism and existentialism, marked by a postwar sense of nothingness. The map of Taiwan modern poetry was drawn in just two years; the poetry debates, generational confrontations, and nativist movements of the following three decades all unfolded within this framework.

Luo Fu (1928-2018), one member of the Genesis Poetry Society’s “iron triangle”; his representative work Death of a Stone Cell and Ya Hsien’s Abyss stand as the two peaks of Taiwan surrealist poetics in the 1960s. Photo: 目宿媒體股份有限公司, 2012-09-13, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Ya Hsien’s poetics belonged to the core of Genesis surrealism. He, Luo Fu, and Shang Qin are often named together as the “three major representatives of Taiwan surrealist poetics”⁸. But unlike the long-poem epic form of Luo Fu’s Death of a Stone Cell, Ya Hsien’s poems are short, rhythmically strong, colloquial, and often use repeated refrains. This made his poetry easier for ordinary readers to memorize than much of his peers’ work: in “Andante Cantabile,” the lines “the necessity of tenderness / the necessity of affirmation / the necessity of a little wine and osmanthus blossoms” are among the most frequently quoted lines in postwar Taiwan poetry⁹.

His military career continued until 1966, when Ya Hsien retired with the rank of major². He was thirty-four that year, only two years away from ceasing to write poetry. After leaving the military, he taught in Taipei while also editing Youth Literary. This magazine was one of Taiwan’s most important literary readings for young people from the 1950s to the 1970s. There Ya Hsien accumulated his first period of editorial experience and met colleagues who would later enter United Daily News. From major to editor-in-chief, Ya Hsien’s career transition left almost no gap: military discipline, editorial care, and a poet’s eye were rolled together in one person. They later became the ground tone of his twenty-one years at United Daily News Supplement.

“Abyss” and “Hallelujah, I Am Still Alive”: Obscurity as Political Protest

Abyss, published in 1968, was the culmination of Ya Hsien’s poetics, and also its full stop.

The long title poem “Abyss” threads the whole work together through the repeated refrain “Hallelujah, I am still alive.” After the refrain come different scenes: “the two shoulders carry the head, carry existence and nonexistence, carry a face wearing pants”; “working, walking, saluting bad people, smiling and immortality. Living in order to live, looking at clouds in order to look at clouds, brazenly occupying a part of the earth”¹⁰.

On the surface, these lines seem like existentialist nothingness: “living in order to live,” “looking at clouds in order to look at clouds,” “brazenly.” But placed back in martial-law Taiwan in 1968, the political implications of the poem become clear: images such as “saluting bad people,” “immortality,” and “a face wearing pants” are oblique satires of the authorities.

Ya Hsien later stated clearly in his autobiography that they “adopted symbolic forms, hiding protest and grievance within misty artistic forms, allowing the critical spirit to evade censorship and circulate”¹¹. He discussed Abyss together with Luo Fu’s “Death of a Stone Cell” and Shang Qin’s “Night Song on Odd-Numbered Days,” which alluded to conditions in the military on Kinmen: “all of them got through by taking advantage of the fact that the censorship agencies could not understand them; there was no other way”¹¹.

⚠️ Contested view: Reading Ya Hsien as a purely surrealist poet has been the mainstream interpretation in literary criticism since the 1990s. Yet Ya Hsien’s own late-life account placed this generation of poets back within the “left in a broad sense.” His original words were that “poets should be leftists in the broad sense,” and should act like “crows crying out against injustice”¹¹. This self-positioning differs sharply from the postwar literary stereotype of Genesis as “escaping reality and turning toward obscurity.” When reading “Abyss,” readers must decide which Ya Hsien to believe: the pure-art poet in the writings of literary critics, or the political poet whom he himself revealed late in life, using obscurity to evade censorship.

In “Abyss,” the line “when some faces change color like lizards, how can the torrent make images for reflections? When their eyeballs are stuck to the darkest pages of history”¹¹ becomes, when read from this angle, a concrete accusation: a precise identification of Taiwan’s political atmosphere in the 1960s.

The refrain “Hallelujah, I am still alive,” proclaimed amid the deadly chill of martial law, was itself a small act of disobedience. Ya Hsien wrote the sentence in the tone of a hymn, but placed it in a context of nothingness and absurdity, so that each time readers encounter the refrain, they move a little closer to the truth.

“Andante Cantabile,” “Salt,” and “Red Corn”: The Small Universe of Ninety Poems

Although Abyss contains fewer than one hundred poems, each one forms a world of its own⁴.

“Andante Cantabile” is Ya Hsien’s most widely circulated work. The whole poem uses the three-character phrase “the necessity of” as a metronome, juxtaposing the everyday with the absurd[^9]:

溫柔之必要
肯定之必要
一點點酒和木樨花之必要
正正經經看一名女子走過之必要
君非海明威此一起碼認識之必要
歐戰，雨，加農砲，天氣與紅十字會之必要
散步之必要
溜狗之必要
薄荷茶之必要

When one reaches the final stanza, “and since it is regarded as a river it must keep flowing on / the world is always like this, always like this: -- / Guanyin is on the distant mountain / poppies are in the poppy fields”⁹, the trivial earlier “necessities” suddenly gain weight. This is what life is: tenderness and assassination, mint tea and cannons, Guanyin and poppies set side by side. All are necessary.

A recitation of “Andante Cantabile.” The metronomic structure created by the phrase “the necessity of” has made this one of Taiwan’s most frequently quoted modern poems nearly sixty years after its publication.

“Salt” uses another mode. The poem has only three sections and tells of a blind old woman called “Second Granny,” who repeatedly cries in spring, “Salt, salt, give me a handful of salt”¹². The poem ends this way:

一九一一年黨人們到了武昌。而二嬤嬤卻從吊在榆樹上的裹腳帶上，走進了野狗的呼吸之中，禿鷹的翅膀裡；且很多聲音傷逝在風中：鹽呀，鹽呀，給我一把鹽呀！那年豌豆差不多完全開了白花。退斯妥也夫斯基壓根兒也沒見過二嬤嬤。

Second Granny is a figure from the lower strata forgotten by history. In 1911, when the Wuchang Uprising founded the Republic of China, she hanged herself in another world with foot-binding cloth suspended from an elm tree; even Dostoevsky, the Russian writer most skilled at writing the poor, never knew her¹³. Ya Hsien has “the angels laughing as they shake snow down upon her” and “the angels singing in the elm tree”¹². Transcendent beings respond to human suffering with mockery and indifference. This is sharper than direct accusation.

A recitation of three poems: “Red Corn,” “Salt,” and “The Colonel.” “Salt” uses three sections to write of a blind old woman forgotten by history; its refrain, “Salt, salt,” is one of the most affecting cries for help in Taiwan modern poetry.

“Red Corn” writes the childhood memories of his home in Henan. Ya Hsien himself said that after coming to Taiwan, he never returned to mainland China, but the red corn, events from the Xuantong era, and northern snow that recur in his poems are motifs of homesickness among poets of this mainlander generation. “The Colonel” uses the story of an old soldier whose leg was cut off by an artillery shell and who later sold breakfast in Taiwan to condense war and livelihood into a single short poem¹⁴.

Ninety poems, none repeating another. Ya Hsien’s syntax is extremely spare, but the density of his scenes is very high. This is the small universe he completed before he laid down the pen.

Editing United Daily News Supplement for 21 Years: Continuing to Write Poetry at the Editor’s Desk

In 1976, ten years after leaving the military, Ya Hsien went to the United States for further study. In 1977, he returned to Taiwan and became director of the United Daily News literary supplement². From that year until his retirement in 1998, he remained in the position for a full twenty-one years.

United Daily News Supplement was the most important literary page in Taiwan during the 1980s and 1990s. It did not only publish fiction, prose, and poetry; it also ran literary awards, produced special features, and placed the youngest writers of the time in the newspaper for readers across Taiwan to see. Ya Hsien’s editorial eye was widely recognized as that of a major figure in the literary world. The younger writers he fostered while presiding over United Daily News Supplement included Li Yuan, pen name Xiao Ye, who later became minister of culture, along with many others¹⁵.

📝 Curator’s note: The 1980s and 1990s were the golden age of Taiwan’s newspaper supplement culture. At the time, the literary supplement editors of the two major newspapers, United Daily News and China Times, were the literary world’s two “chief editors”: Ya Hsien presided over United Daily News Supplement, while Kao Hsin-chiang led Human Realm Supplement. Writers launched on their supplement pages immediately became topics across Taiwan. The fee for one short story could equal half a month’s salary for an office worker. After the internet era, this power structure was completely dispersed, and literary supplements became dispensable sections inside newspapers. But the writers who rose to fame in the 1980s, including Chu T’ien-wen, Chu T’ien-hsin, Luo Yijun, Chang Ta-chun, and Wu He, were all brought before the public through the literary supplements of that era. Ya Hsien stayed within this structure for twenty-one years.

In 1984, Ya Hsien concurrently became publisher and editor-in-chief of the newly founded magazine Unitas². The magazine complemented United Daily News Supplement: the supplement was the daily newspaper’s literary page, while the magazine was a monthly platform for in-depth features. Ya Hsien operated both pages at once, which was like writing two poems simultaneously from the editor’s desk.

Poet Lin Wanyu recalled meeting Ya Hsien for the first time in 2014: “Mr. Ya Hsien, eighty-two years old, had a full head of silver hair and was full of vigor, wearing a long plaid scarf”; “he was a spirit of poetry standing there”¹⁶. She asked Ya Hsien to write a recommendation preface for her poetry collection, and “he sent me a letter posing fifteen questions.” In the end, he “faxed over an eight- or nine-thousand-character recommendation preface”¹⁶. An editor who could write eight or nine thousand characters just to recommend a younger writer’s book now seems to belong to another era, after the decline of literary supplement culture.

And this was not a one-time occurrence. Lin Wanyu recalled: “Every two or three months, I would receive a call from Mr. Ya Hsien in Canada.” Ya Hsien would ask about her recent life and her family, and “at the end of short letters or cards sent from Canada, he would very comprehensively write: greetings to you, Taicheng, and Zhilin”¹⁶.

Ya Hsien no longer wrote new poems. But at the editor’s desk, through the fax machine, and on cards sent from Canada, he continued writing in another way.

Retirement in 1998 and the Final Farewell in Vancouver

In 1998, Ya Hsien retired from United Daily News Supplement and moved to Vancouver, Canada². He had circled through Taiwan’s literary world for more than forty years: founding Genesis in 1953, finishing Abyss in 1968, taking charge of United Daily News Supplement in 1977, and leaving the newspaper in 1998. By then, he was sixty-six.

After retirement, he did not leave literature entirely. In 1999, he accepted an invitation from National Dong Hwa University and spent a year in Hualien as writer-in-residence². In 2012, he received the contribution award at the second Global Chinese Literature Nebula Awards, the most important official recognition of his lifetime².

But in Vancouver, Ya Hsien’s primary identity was as a reader and an elder. He wrote prose memoirs, but no new poetry.

✦

On October 11, 2024, Ya Hsien died in Vancouver at the venerable age of 92³. Before his death, he bid farewell on social media with a line from his first formal poem: “I am a ladleful of quiet and beautiful little flowers”¹¹. It gathered the beginning and end of an entire poetic career into a single image.

The legend of “one volume, then no more” was thus completed.

In December of the same year, the Ministry of Culture, on behalf of President Lai Ching-te, posthumously conferred a citation of commendation³. A poet who had stopped writing poetry at thirty-six received the state’s highest literary posthumous honor at his death. The meaning of this commendation lies not in political endorsement, but in institutional confirmation: Taiwan’s official literary history had finally placed Ya Hsien in the rare position of someone who did not need to write for an entire lifetime in order to enter the canon.

It had been exactly fifty-six years since the 1968 publication of Abyss, nearly four times longer than the fifteen years during which Ya Hsien wrote poetry. But those fifty-six years were not blank: he edited United Daily News Supplement for twenty-one years and Unitas for fourteen, influencing several generations of Taiwanese writers.

Zheng Chouyu (1933-2025), a first-generation postwar poet, whose representative work “Mistake” includes the lines “my clattering horse hooves are a beautiful mistake / I am not a returning man, but a passerby.” He died in June 2025, only eight months after Ya Hsien’s farewell in October 2024. Photo: 目宿媒體股份有限公司, 2017-11-16, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

我打江南走過
那等在季節裡的容顏如蓮花的開落

These lines come from “Mistake,” by Zheng Chouyu, a poet of the same generation. Zheng Chouyu also died, in June 2025¹⁷. Luo Fu of the Genesis iron triangle had already departed in 2018; Zheng Chouyu left in 2025; together with Ya Hsien’s farewell in 2024, the bodies of the first postwar generation of poets have almost all been returned to time.

Only Zhang Mo is still living, born in 1931 and ninety-five this year[^18]: one of the three members of the iron triangle still stands, a solitary witness to the departure of this generation of poets. Taiwan modern poetry has passed through seventy years. The first generation’s motifs of homesickness, for the Yangtze River, for Nanyang in Henan, for Beijing hutongs, have entered history along with their bodies. The next generation of poets no longer carries the same homesickness, but the poetic tools left by Ya Hsien’s generation, including repeated refrains, obscurity as political protest, and the fusion of surrealism with existentialism, remain visible in the work of young contemporary poets.

Ya Hsien left behind ninety poems. In the preface to Abyss, he cited Yu Kwang-chung’s assessment of him: “to establish an immortal poetic name on the strength of a single poetry collection”¹¹. Looking back from 2024, the sentence has become even more accurate: after fifty-six years of silence, his place among the top five figures in Taiwan poetry history remains firmly reserved for him.

“Hallelujah, I am still alive.” In Vancouver in 2024, this sentence gained its final meaning: after a poet wrote ninety poems and chose silence, that silence too was a way of continuing to write.

Further Reading:

• Zheng Chouyu: The Wanderer Who Wrote “Mistake,” Finally Registered in Kinmen — a peer of the Genesis Poetry Society, died in June 2025
• Martial Law Period — the historical context of literary censorship, the Taiwan Garrison Command, and obscurity as political protest
• Taiwanese Media and Press Freedom — the historical context in which the literary supplements of United Daily News and China Times dominated Taiwan’s literary world from the 1950s to the 1990s

References

Image Sources

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