At the age of two she impressed everyone by being able to recognise complex words and speak complex sentences. At three, her father engaged special teachers so that her talents would not be wasted. At five she wrote her first poem, and at seven she composed a cycle of vignettes that was highly regarded by the friends of her parents. At eleven she was presented to the Academy, and at thirteen she was already famous for her writing.
The grandiose Poem Written upon the Inscription of a Jade Statue, which she wrote when she was seventeen, is based on a cryptic text found on the back of a royal portrait. At nineteen she wrote, A Graffiti Laid Carefully on Top of the Writing of a Granite Master, four years later The Cold Fire of Porphyry and A Sgraffito from a Note on Marble.
One day when she was walking by the sea, she found a flintstone. It was covered in chalk, and she crushed it against a large granite boulder. Inside it she saw a poem.
When she returned home that day, she put the stone on the kitchen table and immediately went to her library to prepare her writing tools. When she came back for the stone, it had disappeared. In tears, she asked her slave where it was, and the slave pointed towards a large heap of oyster shells outside the house.
She looked for the stone the whole afternoon, but it was nowhere to be found. She suffered a depression. For years she didn’t write. She became poor – people forgot about her.
She did write again. With her husband she made a simple living as a calligrapher. The last and most famous of her poems is called, The writing in gravel.
