Road to East Asia

Whether they are elegiac in tone or speculative in content, our readers' responses suggest a universal struggle to understand the human condition. Some of them might have joined the exiles in their quest for meaning in a seemingly alien universe. One may ask if the writers should have taken a stand on "the nascent Chinese labor movement" and what they are "doing to educate the world" about China's current crackdowns. According to Oliver Kramer, "literature has moved on with its obsession of social mores and political positions and is more aesthetically oriented. This is a movement we can witness both in China as well as abroad." By and large, it appears that the appeal of exilic literature lies beyond the aura that has been evoked by the Tiananmen Tragedy. The interest in the quality of the literary output itself also transcends the ongoing controversy among sinologists over the "Chineseness" or lack of it in the poems by Bei Dao and his associates. A sampling:

Gail Ogilvie, municipal government staff, Edmonton, Alberta: I do not agree with Angus Cleghorn that the "landscape" in Bei Dao's poem "Landscape over Zero" refers to an individual poem. "Landscape" is the inevitable interpretation that each reader must make in a potentially meaningless world. A poem can be seen as a path. It is a static entity, but when read and interpreted by many readers, a greater awareness of the universe is realized even if it is only a limited, bounded awareness.

However, I enjoyed reading the interview, "Bei Dao struggles to unfold 'ethical landscape.'" It is very intellectual. The interview with Bei Dao is fruitful and interesting. I can understand the interviewer's attempt to bring out the cultural traits in his poetry, but I am in agreement with Bei Dao that one doesn't need to understand the cultural elements to relate to some of his poems. At first I found them painfully baffling, yet somehow compelling. Now I find them enrapturing.

The "lone fisherman" in Bei Dao's poem "This Day" is the lone soul looking for true meaning in the world. All men must ultimately stand alone in their scrutiny of the world and its "wound." He sees man as having a capacity for the release of a storehouse of potential creative energy (i.e. "an oil tank" and "the tenor's song"). As the fisherman takes on a passive role, surveying the wounded world, the "struck bell" calls idle people to "join the year's implications." It is a call to come out of a passive state and has perhaps political implications. In the two lines "someone bends toward a piano" and "someone carries a ladder past," I interpret that people have been awakened from their passivity and are beginning to search for truth and for beauty in the world. The poet nourishes himself with the moment's illumination and finds a reflection of his true self in "a bright mirror." He sees how he has betrayed himself. It is his past passivity that he is glimpsing. Here the first line comes into play again. Love is like "wind," which touches and then moves on. Those in passivity seldom feel it, which is a force from an unknown source. If it is contained (as in "a tin can"), it loses its essence. In Bei Dao's poetry, love is a creative force that can forge meanings from feelings of emptiness ("love's gleam waking to light up landscape over zero").

Benjamin Bacola, Road to East Asia: Bei Dao's poem "The Bell" (Old Snow, 1991) commemorates the parades of student demonstrators along Peking's Changan Avenue in June, 1989. The sheep that "stares in the distance" resembles a powerless martyr, whose gaze before death (beyond our world) may be peaceful. The "silent bell ringer" could be a death angel. As time's curtain --or life itself-- pulls back, the people step forward into eternity. Following the idea that there is a river separating the living and the dead, "boats land" to take new souls across from the cold, snowy river bank where the living dwell. The "dangerous balance," maintained by "the ears of this mortal world," may be between a desire to push forward and a desire to turn back. It is a "dangerous balance," for it involves a grave decision. Have I stepped too far? I may have protested against evil in the past and lived, but the next step forward may be a step closer to death. There is a sense that death is looming, and the bell is ringing a death knell.

Gary Stevenson, New Zealand: I'm hoping that you can help, or at least point me in the right direction. A deceased friend gave me an excerpt from a poem some time ago, and I am having difficulty tracking down the full version of this poem. I have attempted searching various sources for more information, but so far I have drawn a blank. Below is the information I have so far. It is possibly translated into English from a Chinese poem, and may have first been published in a magazine called Jintian ("Today") around 1978 in Beijing. It is titled "The Whole," by Bei Dao. The excerpt I have is:

The whole is destiny
The whole is smoke or clouds
The whole is the beginning without completion and
The whole is the groping in the dark which vanished to the last

I would be very grateful if you could assist me in tracking down the full version of this poem, or even suggesting someone to contact.

(This poem appears on page 35 in The August Sleepwalker, by Bei Dao, and translated by Bonnie S. McDougall, New York: New Directions, 1990. The title is rendered into English as "All," and the first line reads "All is fate"--editors' note.)

Chris Volpe, U.S.: I am delighted to find this site. I will no doubt end up printing out a large part of it and thereby wasting paper. I had the pleasure of meeting Bei Dao this weekend (September, 1998) at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in Waterloo, New Jersey. It is the largest poetry festival in the U.S. I hold a master's degree in writing poetry. I have admired Bei Dao in solitude for years.

Norma Tucker, Wichita, Kansas: Bei Dao's poem "Corridor" begins fast-paced, first defined by the mundane beer-bottle caps in the street. Then, like the corridor in a movie house, a long hallway leads through and out of the present.

It is a way through, a way out. The fast pace slows abruptly--halted by an "enlarged" image of self--with a new awareness, a falling away of the extraneous and a magnification of the changes the day's events have incurred. But the corridor ends, not at a door but a broken window with a cold, bleak view of complexities rather than clarity.

A student of social services, University of Toronto: As a corridor serves as a place of passage from one location to another, my perception of Bei Dao's poem "Corridor" is that the author is referring to the rites of passage he has experienced, beginning with his student days and ending with his voice challenging the bureaucratic environment he is up against.

Throughout the poem, I was struck by the contrasting and unexpected images, such as large movie screens enlarging rather than diminishing the viewer, a wheelchair as a vehicle for distant travel and agents of freedom in control of a giant computer.

Mabel Lee, Associate Professor, Sydney University: The interview with me is beautifully presented: it looks great!

Brian Holton, United Kingdom: I enjoyed your interview with Mabel Lee, and would like to add a couple of notes for your readers. I have translated Yang Lian's work too, and the following books are currently available from WellSweep Press, London: Non-Person Singular (1994), and Where the Sea Stands Still (1995). The latter is available in a hypertext version at: http://www.illumin.co.uk/ica/wsss/ (This site also contains contact details for WellSweep.)

Yang Lian is very well received in Scotland. There is a vein of black surrealist humor in Scottish literature which seems to have prepared Scottish audiences to like his work. The poetic grandeur of it appeals to Scottish audiences too, and Yang himself cites Hugh McDiarmid as an influence (another vast poetic imagination). My Scots versions of Where the Sea Stands Still: New Poems by Yang Lian (in the 1999 Bloodaxe Books edition) have gone down very well indeed. (He regards this as his most important collection in English to date.)

Michael Ross, Professor Emeritus, McMaster University: Although I'm unfortunately not familiar with Bei Dao's work, the interview with Angus Cleghorn conducted by Isabella Wai seemed to me most interesting and searching. The connections with Wilbur, Stevens, etc. certainly are suggestive.

I think I agree with Cleghorn about the issue of nationality. Why should people bother themselves about Bei Dao's supposed "Chineseness," or lack of it? Does anyone make a big issue about Stevens's "Americanness"? Maybe they do, but it seems silly!

The idea of posting poems in subway trains goes back some years in the London, England Underground--in fact there's a collection of such poems, which I own. So some smart Torontonian official must have borrowed the idea.

Vivian Casper, Associate Professor of English, Texas Woman’s University: The interview with Angus Cleghorn was conducted on a very high level.

Richard Wilbur, Pulitzer prizewinning poet: I'm honored to have been mentioned by you (Isabella Wai) and Mr. Cleghorn in the course of an interview concerned with Bei Dao. Since I know Bei Dao only by his large reputation, I can't judge how well my quoted words are applicable to him, but I must say that you use them in what seems a pertinent fashion.

Gregory Lee, professor, Universite Jean Moulin III, France: The interview with Angus Cleghorn is very interesting. I hope that next year when my translated volume of Duoduo's recent poetry comes out from University of California Press, you can get Cleghorn to do an interview on that volume too. I'd be interested to see what he makes of Duoduo's exilic poems.

Wan Zhi, University of Stockholm, a Jintian editor : I think that to seek a personal or individual cultural identity is important for a writer, much more important than to seek a national cultural identity. Shakespeare, Goethe, Kafka, or Li Po, Tu Fu, Tang Xianzu, for example, are all great because of the individuality of their works rather than the nationality they reflect. Yang Lian is generally seeking his personal roots more than national roots.

To seek a nationality or national identity (or Chineseness) is a recent phenomenon, as a result of the development of nationalism. It is understandable. In a world where different cultures often meet and even collide, to seek a personal identity is to some degree connected with a national identity, especially when a writer writes in his/her own national language. Please refer to Kenzaburo Oe's Nobel Prize lecture, "Japan and Ambiguity."

In my opinion, for many Chinese writers, one big problem in their efforts to seek Chineseness is that these writers confuse the difference between identification and evaluation of cultural products. Apparently, not all typical Chinese things are valuable, and not all Western cultural products are valueless. I myself feel that I am in my element even if I am outside China, as long as I am writing in the Chinese language. This feeling is shared by many of Today writers. Language is our home, as Heideger says. . . .

Generally speaking, the authorities in China do have eyes on the writers inside China who publish in Jintian. Some writers, particularly poets, do have political troubles, but usually they may not be put in jail.

Kevin Perkins, York University: I like what you have done with the writers-in-exile theme. It may be helpful to include some up-to-date information on the current situation in China. While Tiananmen was a turning point that provided the backlash to Deng Xiaoping's liberal reforms in the 1980s, strife continues. There is massive labor unrest in China today--unrest which is still put down violently by the CCP. Oppression has not been allayed. I think this is especially salient to your discussions. As well, what are the exiles doing to educate the world about the current situation, or are they? Have they simply accepted safe and financially gratifying positions in the West? Do they support the nascent Chinese labor movement, which seems to be the last bastion of popular dissent in the PRC? After all, the student movement at Tiananmen refused to cooperate with these groups--the spotlight was simply not big enough.

Oliver Kramer, United Kingdom: (excerpt from a 1996 interview with Road to East Asia, quoted here in response to Kevin Perkins’ comment) Chinese exile writers toward Chinese audiences are very reluctant to model themselves as exiles and even more reluctant to criticize China's politics. Do they lose authority if they do so? Are they contributing to a collective "loss of face" if they maintain a too-critical stance toward China whilst living abroad? They are much more outspoken toward Western audiences and Western media, even proclaiming their exile status. Maybe they are most outspoken, however, when together with their own: those meetings, which happened about three times in the last five years, were off-limits for outsiders.

Another likely explanation for the unpolitical nature of their works may lay within Bei Dao's statement: resignation. ("You can't change society with poetry," Bei Dao said in an interview with Siobhan La Piana, The Journal of the International Institute.) Literature seemed to change society from 1978 onwards, but the battles against Spiritual Pollution in the mid-1980s took their toll, disillusioning writers, and the last straw came on June 4, 1989. There is certainly much to back up this explanation.

A third reason, the most idealistic one, is that literature has moved on with its obsession of social mores and political positions and is more aesthetically oriented. This is a movement we can witness both in China as well as abroad . . . The questions triggered by this one sentence of resignation (by Bei Dao) are multiple, and so are the answers.





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Editors and Writers: Jessica Martin, Brenda Lo, Kevin Hodgson,
Julie Shim, Shelly-Ann Gunness, Derrick Choy, Daniel Sun,
Hilaneh Mahmoudi, Megan Donnelly, Benjamin Bacola, Neena Gill
Founding editor: Isabella Wai
Copyright © 1998, 1999 by individual respondent Introduction Copyright © 1999 by Isabella Wai

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