The Chinese poets grouped together as the “Nine Leaves” school were once considered the country’s most avant-garde, a marked contrast to the propagandistic writing that became common during Mao’s reign.
Nine Leaves’ last living member, Zheng Min, stopped writing along with the other poets in the 1950s after she returned from a sojourn in the U.S. to study literature at Brown University and voice at Juilliard. She picked the pen back up in 1979, a period she calls her “second childhood,” when she began to explore poetry as well as philosophy and translation.