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You're tuned in to Roundtable.
I'm Steve Hatherly today with Yushan and Yushan.
Coming up, we usually search for great art in hallowed halls, but the literary world just got upended by a man who spends his days navigating Rush Hour.
At 56 years old, a food delivery rider won a prestigious award, not despite his job, but because of it.
Coming up in China Finds, we venture into the alleys to discover how urban life is birthing a new chapter in Chinese poetry.
Perhaps you won't see your city the same way again.
Don't forget, you can find us at Roundtable China on Apple Podcasts, and we love hearing from you, so send your voice notes our way or your emails our way as well.
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Think history is behind us?
Think again.
Timeless discoveries.
Modern meanings.
This is China Finds.
It is time for the next edition of China Finds.
It's the part of Roundtable where we hand the reins over to Yushan because we love her beautiful artistic brain and where it likes to take her.
And it's often to artistic places and it is happening again today.
I thought that was not the point of this segment.
Well, it was.
Thank you very much.
Maybe I didn't express that out loud when we talked about it in the meetings.
But anyway, what a great story you have for us today.
We do continue on today with our topics on art, but this time we switch over to poetry and finding it in unexpected places.
Yeah, the story I'm telling you today belongs to 56-year-old Wang Jibing.
By day, he races through city streets delivering takeout meals.
By night, however...
Or more accurately, during the tiny gaps between his deliveries, he writes poetry.
So today's artist is a delivery writer who became famous very recently, and I'll explain why later.
So
At the very beginning, let's just introduce his becoming.
So he was born in Eastern China's Jiangsu Province, and he left school early and took various jobs from a construction worker, street vendor to sand dredger and scrape collector before becoming a food delivery man in 2019.
Yet throughout all of these years, what surprised me at the very beginning when I was learning about Wang Ziming's story was that he never stopped reading.
He would browse like secondhand bookstores and even search through discarded newspaper just looking for something to read.
His love of words started from an early age.
Yeah, despite what occupation he's taking at that time.
I think that's something that we can all learn from.
Because as we grow up, reading seems to be an ancient habit.
Now that we are perceiving messages in a much faster way.
And also, yes.
And I kind of can't imagine that while so he started to get ideas and maybe stories from his daily life, because of the all of the experience that you just mentioned.
And then it kind of makes sense to me that why he can make maybe good poems when and in these areas.
Yeah, he first started off becoming famous on social media.
That's when he started to release his own poems on social media.
And all of those works of his that got most highly rated actually come from his everyday life.
For example, on one frustrating day, one of his customers actually put down the wrong address for his or her delivery.
Sounds like me.
Maybe it was you.
You come from Telsun, too.
No, you were probably at a movie at the time.
Anyway, that forced Wang Zibing to travel multiple times in order to correct the order.
And while sitting at a red light, eventually after that's all done, he was exhausted and irritated, of course.
But all of a sudden, a few poetic lines suddenly came to him.
And those lines became Man in a Hurry, a poem that later went viral online in 2022.
And one year later, he published his first poetry collection, Man in a Hurry, Poems of a Food Delivery Writer.
And that's when more and more people started to notice him.
And start to follow him on social media.
So it's not like he is brand new on the scene.
He's been writing for a while.
He's been posting and publishing for a while as well.
But it was this year that a collection of poetry from him
That earned him this very, very prestigious Chinese literature prize.
Yeah, I think a lot of us started noticing works from him since a few years ago, and he was actually leading up
A whole internet trend of people from all walks of life.
For example, a construction worker, he's wearing the orange vest and the yellow helmet.
While playing Guzheng, which is one of the traditional Chinese musical instrument in front of a live streaming camera.
So that kind of trend kind of started after Wang Zibin became famous.
And also this year, his name got very well known, like you said, Steve, after his poetry collection, Di Chu Fei Xing.
Which literally translates into low flight, won the prestigious Lu Xun Literature Prize.
This is a big deal in China, right?
This is a big deal in China because it's one of China's highest literary honors.
And it's also named after a writer who has been referred to as the father of modern Chinese literature.
That's amazing.
And interestingly, Lu Xun himself, back in his time, used to write about very folk detail of the commoners and use...
The normal people's daily life to reflect a deeper lesson of what's going on in our society.
I think that kind of hits, well, how do you say it?
Hits the boomerang right back to your hand.
Full circle.
So many full circles.
So many years later.
So yeah, one of Wang Zibing's lines in that collection that won the award this year goes, who says spreading your wings means flying high?
Flying low is also flying.
So that's one simple line, but it speaks to millions of us ordinary people whose work may not seem glamorous, yet quietly keeps society moving.
So we are all part of the society in pulling this off.
And that reflects...
Well, he said back in, I think it was in the 2025 Spring Festival Gala too.
He was invited there after he got famous.
And he was there to introduce one of the songs throughout the gala.
And the announcer asked him why he loves poetry so much amid his fast-paced life as a delivery writer.
And this is what he said.
I feel that with poetry, delivering food doesn't seem so hard anymore.
With poetry, I'm not just delivering orders.
I'm experiencing life.
I'm traveling through it.
Poetry is a piece of candy in my life.
I think this world is incredibly beautiful.
Life brought us into this world so that we could love.
I believe that no matter how many storms life brings me, I'll find just as many springs waiting on the other side.
Many thanks to Shen Ting from More to Read.
And yes, exactly.
That is why people connect with his work so much.
Yeah, I love what he said there about how he's something like he's not just living life, he's experiencing it.
And that's what he's doing with his line of work.
He's a delivery writer.
And that's where he draws his motivation and his inspiration from.
When he's writing his poems, and I agree with what you said before, I forget which one of you said it, about how it resonates with people, because he's speaking for everyone, almost, because not everyone, of course, is a delivery writer, but at the same time, everyone has those feelings.
Similar feelings, but he must see the world in a way that a lot of people can't.
Yeah, and a lot of people and professionals have already explained and get into details of his work, and I understand that.
Of course, that is the meaningful part.
But what I can find out is that, yeah, these kind of things, no matter it's the poetry or the movie, it is kind of reflecting one thing is that the things or the work that is down to earth is real.
One of the very attractive things that nowadays people want.
Why just nowadays, though?
Or why has it become attractive again?
Because I think art, not for the commoners, not for the common people, but art that resonates with people like you and I, you think that's a sudden comeback?
Yeah.
I feel that it is this way, because while one thing is that before we don't have these kind of fancy poems that can use only five words to just describe a very magnificent view of the mountain and the river.
But the thing is that now we have them.
That is something that can be the foundation of one person's cultural aesthetics.
Of course, nowadays, it's even kind of impossible for people to beat that kind of literature.
But now it is the time for people to have another maybe angle and perspective.
I think I see what you mean.
It's a great point because, you know, you can have a beautiful poem that says, I was at the top of the mountain and peering over the clouds and blah, blah,
Which is beautiful, and it paints its own picture.
But when you know that the source of a poem...
Is from a person who works 12 to 14 hours a day at a relatively low-paying job.
So you can assume the struggles.
You can assume the sources of stress and the hardships.
I think you're right.
I think it adds a layer of humility.
To the art that people find very attractive.
And maybe the, sorry, the contrast that you can feel when, of course, we know that that is a delivery driver writing very good poems.
And that kind of contrast that you just mentioned, maybe people in construction uniforms dancing or maybe play a musical instrument is something nowadays people may
That just I have to say can be naturally popular on social media.
I think to answer Steve's question earlier, why now?
It has to give a quick look back on what we've done in the past 10, if not 15 to 20 years and how fast our society has been changing within this period of time.
And I believe it's a both sides kind of effort.
Like we're working towards each other in the sense that art is becoming more accessible to us people.
And people are becoming more aware of how we can become part of art, if not creating art.
Yeah, it doesn't have to come from a scholar perspective.
Yeah, exactly.
And I remember I used to write about how the performing art here in China developed so fast in the past few decades.
Like 20 years ago, going to a movie was common, but going to a musical or an opera is considered to be...
In Chinese, we call it 阳春白雪, like it's up there.
Bougie.
Yeah.
Oh, there's a perfect word for it.
For the upper.
Yeah, it's for the upper ones.
It's not for me.
But these days...
Theaters, governments, local authorities are trying to give incentives on one, lowering the price tickets,
Two, showing people how this can be connected with each and every one of us because it's sharing something that all people can resonate about, love, family bonds, and values that's treasured universally.
I interviewed someone a few years ago by the name of Adam Hyde, and he became famous in Australia.
He was a part of an electronic music duo called Peking Duck, by the way.
No connection, but it's just a nice coincidence.
But then he had his own solo career where he went under the name Kelly Holiday.
And I interviewed him and
I wanted to share this clip from, this interview was from maybe six years ago or so, but I wanted to share it with you because I think it kind of reminded me of what we're talking about today.
I asked him, he's a musician and a singer, I asked him if there was any connection between art and pain or suffering.
Do you think art can be created without pain or suffering, art being music or film or whatever the case may be?
It's funny, I was having this conversation with my friend the other day.
I think, I mean, look, to be honest with you, in my experience,
All of the best stuff i've ever written personally has come from being in a strange place and that's been caused by pain
Also a lot of the artists that i uh am heavily inspired by and the artists whose work i love whether that be you know a visual artist a musician
A sculptor, whoever it might be, even just human beings who I love talking to because they seem to have such a deep insight.
It's because they've kind of been through hell.
You know what I mean?
And once you walk through hell, you have more stories to tell than if you don't.
And the reason I was reminded of that conversation when I knew we were going to talk about this today is because I was thinking about our prize winner, the man who delivers food for many hours a day.
Could he have written these beautiful poems about his perspective on life and the world while sitting at a stoplight or being in an elevator on the way up to drop off the food?
Could he have written that poetry without going through those perhaps difficult experiences?
I don't think we have to praise the value of suffering and maybe sometimes torture.
Well, suffering is a relative term, too.
It doesn't mean bottoming out in life necessarily.
It could just mean going through a difficult time.
But it is just, you mentioned it and I found it really interesting that especially it is quite true in China, even back in history, a lot of
Very, very well-known Chinese poets, many of their classic poems that have been passed down for centuries were written after their authors had been maybe exiled or suffered political setbacks or found themselves at the lowest points in their lives.
And, yeah, they were writing poems at this period of time in their lives, and they were successful.
So you agree with the clip we just heard, what Adam said about beautiful art...
May need to come from some source of suffering.
I kind of have to.
But at the end of the day, it comes down to the people.
Like, for example, there's only one Adam, and he becomes the musician after he'd been through hell, according to him.
And there's only one Wang Jibing out of tens of millions of delivery riders.
He'd been through that awkward incident of almost failing to do a delivery order.
And then he digest that experience into a poem.
Not every other delivery writers.
I think it comes down to how you perceive suffering and what's going on with you and how you manage to portrait it into something artistically related.
And that's also something we're aiming for right now.
It's a trend called new popular literature and art.
It's something encouraging common people, ordinary people, grassroots to pursue art in their own way.
Oh, that's really cool.
So that gives hope to anyone who has perhaps a pen in their hand and a piece of paper or, dare I say, a keyboard and a screen in front of them.
Anyone.
You never know.
You might be the next great poet wherever you're sitting and listening to this show right now.
All right, that'll do it for today's roundtable.
Thank you very much for hanging out with us today.
For Yushan and Yushan, I'm Steve.
See you next time.
