The First Tide is a shimmering spiral of language, or a confused collection of bilingual (English/Chinese) experimental writings.
The book was typeset and designed by 煦 (Susie Zhu) under an Aquarius full moon at the end of August 2021 in Beijing, China—to where she escaped for a 10-month-healing and her first reincarnation.
is an extremely timid and intimate book. Yet it daringly attempts at assimilating obscure contemplations and traumatic emotions in a liminal literary space between genres: it is not a neat compilation of prose and poems in two languages, but a poetic organism consists of prose, poem, [pseudo-]manifesto, translation or [un]translation.
It is an introspective (sometimes hallucinatory) study and record of time, of the process of lost and found or death and rebirth; a delicate, dreamlike flow of consciousness ruminating over this endless quest, rather than the cause or the end.
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“The First Tide”, taken from the direct translation of 初潮 (Chu-Chao), the euphemism of menarche in Chinese, is a phrase seldom voiced, a phrase so oddly beautiful and evocative. is a poetic iteration of this undergoing of maturation, bleeding, and growth.
