La Piana & Bei Dao

La Piana: In 1989 you were exiled from China and you have been barred from returning since then. How has the experience of exile changed your relation to China and to the Chinese language?


Bei Dao: At first I thought I was being exiled only for a short time. But it got longer and longer. As a writer, the most important thing for me is to continue to write, no matter where I am. The last five years have in some sense been the most difficult of my life, although materially I am okay. But the sense of solitude is very difficult, so I feel that I have to continue to write. Writing is the thing that sustains me and keeps me going. It is a form of self-preservation for me. People have asked about my being cut off from the Chinese language. But writing is always a challenge anyway, whether you are writing in China or outside. The question is how are you going to respond to that challenge.

Of the Misty Poets: Bei Dao

From roughly 1979 to 1989, a group of poets called the Misty Poets (Ménglóng Shi Rén) arose in post-Maoist China.

Disillusioned by the Maoist regime, its propaganda, and its political subjugation of both art and ideology, many Chinese poets and writers gathered secretly together to read literature that was condemned by the government, to write and exchange their works, and to promote ideas of freedom and individual expression- for which many were arrested and sentenced to long durations in prison. Others didn't fare so well.

Zhao Zhengkai- better known by his nom de plume, Bei Dao- was one such poet.

It was in 1969, after having served as a member of the paramilitary RedGuard during the Cultural Revolution, that Bei Dao's political views radically changed as he was sent to do labor work in the squalid, impoverished countryside of his homeland. The conditions were so deplorable that he lost all enthusiasm for the revolution. This is when he began, in secret, to study and read and write poetry.

Over a period of time many small underground groups that shared Bei Dao's sentiments, and his artistic means of expressing those sentiments, began to form. By 1978 Bei Dao- along with fellow poet and friend, Mang Ke- founded an underground literary journal called Jintian (Today). After two years of intense surveillance, harassment, and arrests, the Chinese government had the underground journal shut down.

Over the years Bei Dao traveled abroad and connected with literary groups in several countries. He happened to be in Germany when the massacre of Tiananmen Square occurred in 1989. Thought to have had a hand in those protests, or to have influenced them somehow, the Chinese government forced exile on our poet by denying his reentry into the country. Bei Dao, along with several other Misty Poets, have not been allowed back since. 
 

*****

I first learned about these poets in 2010 and immediately fell in love with the works of Bei Dao, Shu Ting, and Gu Cheng. It was on this particular day in 1949 that Bei Dao was born, and so I thought I'd take it upon myself to honor our poet by posting on him briefly. That said, I'd like to share a poem written by him, called The Boundary.

The Boundary

I want to go to the other bank

The river water alters the sky's colour

and alters me

I am in the current

my shadow stands by the river bank

like a tree struck by lightning

I want to go to the other bank

In the trees on the other bank

a solitary startled wood pigeon

flies towards me

Beautiful, right? The poem was published in Bei Dao's TheAugust Sleepwalker (1990), and translated by Bonnie S. McDougall. The poems in that collection are said to be “all of the poems Bei Dao published between 1970 and 1986”, works that were therefore prior to his being exiled. Strangely, though, when I first read the poem the imagery therein lead me to believe that the poem was, in fact, about exile. Allow me to explain, and please let me know what you think.

The 'boundary' is obviously the river water that's dividing two river banks. The poet desires to be on the other river bank, but his desires are painfully thwarted by the river and its current- the river water (or boundary) representing his exile; the other bank the poet's homeland, China.

That the river water alters the colour of the sky, which in turn alters our poet, signifies that this exile is an imposition on our poet's freedom (represented by the sky), and that this imposition deeply pains (or alters) our poet, as we'll soon see.

The narrator desperately desires to reach the other bank, so much so that he stands there at the river's edge and sees his shadow 'like a tree struck by lightning', indicating the poet's depth of pain. He again, and almost mournfully, reiterates his desire: I want to go to the other bank … but the river and its current (his exile) prevents him.

Finally, in the last stanza, the poet sees the trees on the other river bank. Just as the tree struck by lightning (line 6) represented the poet and his depth of pain, so too the trees on the other bank represent people- and because the other bank represents China, the trees represent his countrymen from whom he's exiled.

But what of the wood pigeon? Note that it's startled, indicating a state of trepidation, and that it's in the trees (plural). I take this to indicate a general trepidation that still persists in the heart of his countrymen, just as it did in Tiananmen Square in 1989. That the wood pigeon flies toward our beloved poet can only indicate for me a sympathetic reaching out of his countrymen.

And there you have it, my interpretation of Bei Dao's poem, The Boundary. That this is what the poet intend I am highly doubtful- as I mentioned, the poem is said to have been written between 1970 and 1986, prior to him being exiled in '89. Nevertheless, this was the first impression I derived from it, and so I remain faithful to it. I would so love to know your interpretation of it.

Thank you for stopping by. And Bei Dao, happy birthday, my friend ...

Bei Dao*

Zhao Zhenkai (1949 to date)

On August 2, 1949 Zhao Zhenkai was in Beijing. His pseudonym Bei Dao literally means "North Island," and was suggested by a friend as a reference to the poet's provenance from Northern China as well as his typical solitude.

Dao was one of the foremost poets of the Misty School, and his early poems were a source of inspiration during the April Fifth Democracy Movement of 1976, a peaceful demonstration in Tiananmen Square. He has been in exile from his native China since the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989.

His books of poetry include The Rose of Time: New and Selected Poems(New Directions, 2010); Unlock (2000); At the Sky's Edge: Poems 1991-1996 (1996), for which David Hinton won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from The Academy of American Poets; Landscape Over Zero (1995); Forms of Distance (1994); Old Snow (1991); and The August Sleepwalker (1990). His work has been translated into over 25 languages.

He is also the author of short stories and essays. In 1978, he and colleague Mang Ke founded the underground literary magazine Jintian (Today), which ceased publication under police order. In 1990, the magazine was revived and Bei Dao serves as the Editor-in-Chief.

In his foreword to At the Sky's Edge, Michael Palmer writes: "Anointed as an icon on the Democracy Wall and as the voice of a generation by the events of Tiananmen Square in 1989, and thereby also fated to exile, Bei Dao has followed a path of resistance that abjures overt political rhetoric while simultaneously keeping faith with his passionate belief in social reform and freedom of the creative imagination."

His awards and honors include the Aragana Poetry Prize from the International Festival of Poetry in Casablanca, Morocco, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has been a candidate several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and was elected an honorary member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters. At the request of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, he traveled to Palestine as part of a delegation for the International Parliament of Writers.

Bei Dao was a Stanford Presidential lecturer and has taught at the University of California at Davis, the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, and Beloit College in Wisconsin. In 2006, Bei Dao was allowed to move back to China.

*Biography from Poets.org