I recently read some of Luo Yufeng’s poems, and both their mood and language are rather interesting – pieces like “Drifting Clouds” and “The Sorrow of Thought.” And yet, people online still find it hard to give her poetry any credit, picking apart everything from professional poetics to internet vernacular to find what’s “off” about it. This is a common phenomenon – when people perceive things, they tend to “generalize from a part,” what psychology calls the “halo effect”. Everyone tends toward the same notion: that beautiful poetry should come from the hand of a beautiful, captivating talented woman.

Appearance is supposed to be the vessel of wisdom. Yet plenty of evidence warns us that, without a positive exterior to set it off, the glow of wisdom and virtue dims considerably. In the era when red dominated everything, how many Chinese people were tormented by the concept of “inner beauty” – educated on one hand to believe in it, while on the other hand tempted by beautiful female spies whose hearts were supposedly not so beautiful. Who knows how many people cursed them aloud while secretly fantasizing about them in private. Suppose, hypothetically, that their stunning looks vanished and ugliness took their place – would people hate them even more?

On the other hand, how exactly are we supposed to judge Luo Yufeng? Who has the right to judge in the first place? By our usual way of thinking, the people qualified to offer judgment tend to be the learned, the authoritative, the highly skilled professionals. Take Luo Yufeng’s poetry: those who judge it good or bad tend to be people who “really understand” poetry (from various angles), while everyone else is expected to step aside, unqualified. But the starting point of poetic criticism rests on one’s own individual aesthetic sense – is even aesthetic sense itself something held only in the hands of those “superior” people?

And yet, even when we examine things sincerely, on our own terms, bias is still hard to avoid. When we say Luo Yufeng is too self-confident, have we ever asked whether we ourselves are never overconfident? When we say someone isn’t good-looking, is that judgment built on the assumption that we ourselves are good-looking? We should understand that very few people, when judging another person or thing, ever weigh their own qualifications first before offering an opinion suited to their own standing. Of course, exactly how few “very few” really is, I have no idea, nor do I know how many people have seized or castrated the right to speak.

In short, judgment is complicated. The mechanisms that trigger our reactions to beauty and ugliness, good and bad, superior and inferior, leave people with a tangled, ever-shifting perception – even our view of the same thing can change at different times, which is both maddening and amusing. Be careful when you pass judgment. As for what Luo Yufeng is really like, I can’t say for sure – but if you choose to believe entirely what’s said online, that Luo Yufeng is a fool, then living by the spirit of “better to feign ignorance” is, after all, the easier way to go.