Geliao Street

Translated from the Chinese

A little lane, 220 meters long, 6.3 meters wide.

Twenty-six years ago, I biked past the west side of Xilituzhao,

Then again, thirteen years later, at the Lantern Festival.

The ruins of “Geliao” Street, a three-room house,

With a tile roof and collapsing mud walls,

In the middle of the tar road, weeds grow.

Through tiles, sprouting grass on walls,

Time bends here, unable to go straight,

And locals at Hohhot call it: Geliao.

A voice blasts at twilight when I get close to the wall:

Warning: please leave this guarded area.

A street with one passerby, or two.

Is there a difference?

Under the weight of tiles, the window bends

And twists, still holding up time. From the roof

I can see “Big Prosperous Champion,”

Built by a Shanxi merchant, at the end of Qing Dynasty.

Then it was turned into a housing complex for rent,

Water dripping from the tiles.

Can’t make an icicle on the collapsing window.

My family moved here from the middle kingdom twenty-six years ago,

Rented one of the nine rooms here.

The northern wall is too fragile to be touched or knocked.

Father and Mother followed the Shanxi merchants in the 1990s,

Rented a small stand in the market.

Now Father wears a fur coat,

Eating dumplings with the flavor of De Shun Yuan,

Mother still sells her handmade insoles at the Five Towers market,

She kept her stand open till noon on New Year’s Eve.

Geliao Street is surrounded by the last standing houses,

I go out in my pink snow boots, though it’s only 41°F.

The Year of the Ox and its spring surrounded my past

On the merchant street of an old city.

The well that quenched the Qing Emperor’s thirst.

—Flowing Jade of Soul Spring

The wind blows from the northeast.

Twenty-six years ago, a fourteen-year-old teen

In the warm twilight walked past the stands:

For weddings and funerals, fabric, antiques,

Old furniture, wolf skin, cloths, deer heads,

Rattles, rocks from Alxa Desert, dumpling diner,

Tea house, odds and ends store, uneven stone slabs.

He was throat humming ...

The old path is geliao—twisted and bent,

Like time, like a sword entering the sheath.

Notes:

This poem is part of the portfolio “Wind Crossing Grasses: Poems from Poems from China’s Dragon Rivers.” The folio is an excerpt from the forthcoming anthology of the same name, translated and edited by Wang Ping, with a co-introduction from Gary Snyder (Kinship Poetry Press, 2026). You can read the rest of the folio in the July/August 2025 issue.

Source: Poetry (July/August 2025)