One wonders whether poetry and food delivery gel . The doubt is deepened as the poet, Wang Jibing races into lanes and thoroughfares on his two-wheeler to deliver the food parcels while rhyme and reason are buzzing within his head and heart.
Yet Wang Jibing’s collection of poems, Low Flight has won him Lu Xun literary award, one of China’s leading literary awards. Scribbled on slips paper between food deliveries it did not reduce the literary worth of the poems a tad.
Jibing does not draw inspiration for his poems from a rainbow or a rising sun. Nor do tumultuous sea waves or pattering drizzle trigger his writing skills.
It is something much more mundane. It is the down to earth daily challenges a delivery boy faces which inspires Jibing’s poems.
His poems emerge out of labyrinthine lanes, irate phone calls and of course the constant hum of uncertainty. This is what his prize winning book of poems titled Low Flight is all about.
It is a heartening recognition of Wang’s resilence. The prize given to him is also an acknowledgement of literature’s capacity to celebrate imaginative expansiveness, no matter where it emerges from.
Wang has tried to make sense of a hardscrabble life. And the blue-collar worker has been eminently successful.
The award winning Chinese poet has distinguished company. Maxim Gorky waded through poverty and odd jobs before his writing for the dispossessed made him Russia’s foremost chronicler.
Raymond Carver was a janitor and mill hand before his stories reshaped American fiction.In India Samaresh Bose wrote from the margins forcing mainstream literature to welcome him.
Fame seems to have taken its time in knocking at the door of the 56-year old poet. But food delivery man doubling as a poet has bagged a prize
named after an author considered to be the father of modern Chinese literature.
Wang did not come to the limelight after his works were carried in a top notch magazine or a literary tome. His works first saw the light of the day after they came out in social media.
This makes him a typical poet of the 21st century.He became a delivery man in 2019, becoming more familiar with labour of life than the creature comforts one usually associates with the surroundings of a poet.
Wang is part of an army of blue collar workers. He has to face the pressure of a huge gig economy.
The award has come after a quite a few decades of being an odd-job worker. It is welcome.
Apart from much yearned for recognition as a poet, the award brings Wang more than financial breathing space. The monetary award of Lu Xun Literary Prize is undeclared but it stood at $ 14,800 in 2014.
It has been a long and hard journey for Wang. He left school as a teenager because of financial hardship at home.
The jobs be took on to make ends meet ranged from working in construction sites to scavenging for waste. The upcoming poet sold goods at a streetside stall.
Then he became a food delivery man.
But he clung to his love for reading.while posting his poems in the social media.
. One of his poems, Man in a Hurry went viral in 2022. Its source can be traced to a frustrating delivery after a customer entered a wrong address
. It had occured in 2019 but stayed at the back of his mind. Small wonder, it is a part and parcel of Wang’s life
The year 2024 witnessed the publication of Low Flight. It is a collection of poems inspired by interviews and surveys Wang conducted with 200 delivery men.
Low Flight is not a bird’s eye view of the world. It is a sharper picture of what it is to live close to the ground.
It is a moving validation of the courage of the ordinary. It is all all about holding onto what gives life, labour and dreams meaning.
He has refused to give up his work even after winning the award. Wang Jibing is China’s poet of precarity
