BOOKS

Where Brightness Ends Bei Dao’s nostalgia for a pre-liberalisation / LITERATURE

RATIK ASOKAN

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on 28 may 1989, Lijia Zhang, a twenty-something “I—do—not—believe!” line was posted on many factory worker, addressed a political rally in the walls at the time. Chinese city of Nanjing. This was unusual for her. The authorities were frightened; they denounced A high-school dropout, Lijia had up until then Jintian as “menglong,” meaning “misty” or “ob- been largely apolitical. But the pro-democracy scure.” That rather unthreatening term of censure student demonstrations at Beijing’s Tiananmen is revealing. Unlike, say, the dissident poet and Square—going five weeks strong, and days away Nobel Laureate , the Misty Poets did not from massacre—had captured the public imagi- compose overtly political verse. Bei Dao himself nation. Like many workers, she had followed the wrote image-driven lyric poems that were often events on the radio for weeks. Learning of a oblique, even cryptic. This was precisely what at- nearby demonstration that day, she impulsively tracted young people to them. Bei Dao’s complex City Gate, Open Up decided to attend. lines, with their silences and torsions, seemed to A Memoir At the rally, Lijia somehow found herself on the chart the complexities of their own suppressed in- Bei Dao Translated by podium. Speaking without preparation, through ternality. “I write poems of life,” he declared in ‘An Jeffrey Yang tears, she began modestly enough, expressing soli- End or a Beginning,’: “This universal longing/ Has Carcanet Press darity with the students at Tiananmen. The crowd now become the whole cost of being a man.” 320 pages, £12.99 egged her on. Emboldened, she went on to de- The avant-garde aspect of his project is worth nounce the People’s Republic of as a “dicta- stressing. It reminds us that poetry is only useful, torship,” and even led a chant for democracy. She even politically useful, when it tills the open soil of then ended with these lines by the poet Bei Dao: language. Here it does not so much oppose received culture—one radio station can drown out a genera- Let me tell you, world tion of engagé poets—as entirely transform the I—do—not—believe! cultural imagination: transform not only its notions If a thousand challenges lie at your feet, of war and freedom, but also of love and memory, Count me as number one thousand and one. time and space. Wuer Kaixi, a Uighur student lead- er active at Tiananmen, has credited Bei Dao with The event, recounted in Lijia’s charming mem- enlightening, “tens, if not hundreds of millions of oir Socialism is Great!, is emblematic of the intense Chinese with his poems ... With his words Bei Dao and unlikely coming together of poetry and poli- truly showed us that concepts like integrity, hones- tics during the era of reforms that followed Mao’s ty, courage and, most of all, the longing for freedom death in 1976. It is made unlikelier still by the sort are so beautiful and worth living for.” of poet Bei Dao is. On 4 June 1989, Chinese troops opened fire on Born in 1949, Bei Dao, whose real name is Zhao Wuer and his nonviolent comrades at Tiananmen Zhenkhai, grew up in a middle-class neighbour- Square. Bei Dao was giving readings in Europe at hood in Beijing, and studied at an elite boarding the time. Becoming an exile overnight, he was not school. In 1967, a year into Mao’s Cultural Revolu- allowed back into China for nearly 13 years. This tion, he, like millions of other urban youth, was displacement is the subject he has charted in six sent to the countryside, where he worked at con- volumes of highly burnished verse—one recalls his struction sites and smithies for the next 11 years. description of a “match polished into light”—pro- By day he mixed cement and cast iron; in the eve- duced from various temporary residences across nings he read and wrote. the world. For a long time, he travelled without a Returning to Beijing after Mao’s death, Bei passport. During the first seven years of his exile, Dao fell in with a group of young poets who were his wife and daughter were not allowed to leave writing highly subjective, often surreal, verse in a China. opposite page: Daily life in the conscious rejection of state-approved folkloric and Now he has penned a prose memoir: City Gate, hutongs, or alleys, socialist-realist conventions. Published under his Open Up. An impressionistic account of his child- of 1980s Beijing editorship in the samizdat magazine Jintian, the hood and youth in Beijing, the book is unlike any was destroyed new poetry became a counterculture sensation. he has previously written. In fact, it seems entirely when many of Poets such as Gu Cheng, and Mang Ke opposed to his sensibility. Though attuned to the the hutongs were read at packed stadiums; their work was widely pain and disorientation of exile, Bei Dao has always bulldozed to make way for a glittering quoted on anti-government posters that appeared been a forward-looking, even grimly utopian poet. transformation of during the 1978 “Democracy Wall Movement,” a This is perhaps because he lacks a paradise to draw the city over the last vcg / getty images precursor to the 1989 demonstrations. Bei Dao’s upon: he came of age during the Cultural Revolu- three decades.

JUNE 2017 85 where brightness ends · books tion, and then witnessed two fledgling democracy movements collapse. “I would use the written word to rebuild another city, So, why does he now want to return to rebuild my Beijing, I would use my Beijing to refute to that painful time? His newfound the Beijing of today,” Bei Dao declares in City Gate’s nostalgia says much about contempo- rary China, particularly the wholesale foreword. What exactly happened in the 1990s that erasure that is underway there. so dismayed him? In the last three decades, China has been the site of a great—perhaps the great—economic transformation. Along three-watt bulb that hung from a 1962. Forced to do things such as using with spawning megacities, Deng Xiaop- small window between the kitchen dog-meat broth for irrigation, they had ing’s free-market reforms enforced, and bathroom. starved to death simply so that the Mao with great insistence, consumerist cult could roll on. lifestyles on a collectivist society. It was Literature is a form of freedom. In 1985, Deng turned to urban areas, as if the entire experiment of Chinese And here Bei Dao is rejecting Beijing’s converting state-owned enterprises socialism was bracketed away; its at- intense urban transformation. Lack- into small businesses by revoking or tendant forms of feeling, desiring and ing Marcel’s madeleine, he forces the revising central production dictates. He relating to community deemed obsolete Proustian recollection. Imagination simultaneously allowed entrepreneurs overnight. itself will bring back the past. to enter the industrial sector. Com- Against the state-sanctioned amne- That temporal U-turn nicely repre- bined, these changes transformed the sia, Bei Dao sets out to recreate the pre- sents City Gate’s general project. Over- country’s socio-economic landscape, reforms Beijing of the 1950s and 1960s. whelmed by a “completely changed” introducing, for the first time, a profit- Thrillingly, he evokes that time as he Beijing to which he returned, Bei Dao making bourgeoisie. knew it: through sights and smells, was inspired to write his memoir. “I It was also a profound assault on the impressions, and emotions, flickers would use the written word to rebuild Communist state’s metaphysical tenets. of thought. We might imagine City another city, to rebuild my Beijing, I From a country organised around col- Gate as a memory palace or history of would use my Beijing to refute the Bei- lectivist ideals, and the glories consciousness. His private life is exqui- jing of today,” he declares in City Gate’s of the proletarian revolution, China sitely rendered. But the external world foreword. became a cutthroat marketplace post- eventually interrupts Bei Dao’s account. What exactly happened in the 1990s ing double-digit growth rates. Relying that so dismayed him? It is difficult, on cold numbers, the Chinese state time periods clash in City Gate’s from a distance, to answer that ques- framed liberalisation as a triumph. opening scene. It is late 2001, and, in tion. China, it is often said, is a shining (Their “Chinese Miracle” is our “India a rare humane gesture, the Chinese example of capitalism’s inevitability Shining.”) But this is only half the story. state has allowed Bei Dao to briefly and glory. Its government introduced Along with alleviating poverty, Deng’s visit his seriously ill father in Beijing. market reforms, did away with social- urban reforms also created lurid lev- Landing in a city “cut off from me for ism, and look what happened—the els of inequality. “Let some people get nearly thirteen years,” he looks out his greatest economic boom since Europe’s rich!” he famously announced. What window to find it resembling “a glit- reconstruction after the Second World about the others? tering soccer stadium.” He lands; ap- War. From a narrowly wonkish per- They can be found in the extraordi- paratchiks greet him. They then drive spective, this is true enough. But the nary films of Jia Zhangke. Jia follows him away with “the lights rushing by social consequences of China’s explo- lower middle-class provincials who outside like a tide.” sive transformation have been far more try, and largely fail, to find a place for These brief impressions, comprising complex. themselves in their country’s post- a paragraph, are all we see of contem- Filling the power vacuum created liberalisation economic order. Their porary Beijing. Abruptly, the narrative by Mao’s death, —him- desolation is twofold. First, they are ap- moves backwards five decades as Bei self a victim of the Cultural Revolu- palled by towns and cities where money Dao remembers how: tion—pushed reforms to heal a country has subsumed all moral values. Then, hurting from two decades of shameful as a bitter consolation, they learn that When I was a child, nights in Beijing mismanagement. Deng first addressed the so-called free market has no place were dark, pitch-dark, a darkness a the countryside, introducing land re- for “backward” people such as them. hundredfold darker than today ... Un- distribution and structural reforms Caught between epochs, they end their cle Zheng Fanglong lived next door that, to his immense credit, worked. journeys in sprawling shanty towns, to my family in a two-room residence Success here was crucial since farmers cut off from their families, eking out a with only three fluorescent lights: had been the major victims of the Great living on the lowest rungs of the service eight watts in the sitting room, three Famine, a manmade disaster that killed industry. (The parallels with India are

watts in the bedroom, and a shared millions of people, between 1958 and unsettling; if Jia ever came to Bolly- ap photo

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wood, he would make films about maids, drivers, Their response towards his programme turned below: The line bar dancers.) from hope, to disappointment, and then to horror, “I—do—not— More apocalyptically, the novelist Yu Hua con- as China’s new economy charged ahead without believe!” from nects the spiritual and economic dimensions of any real political change. An active participant one of Bei Dao’s poems appeared China’s transformation. As he sees it, revolution- in Acts 1 and 2, Bei Dao had missed that story’s on many posters ary political energies, unleashed by Mao, have conclusion. In exile through the 1990s, he finally during the 1978-79 now finally been channelled into the marketplace. faced it in 2001, much like a time traveller would. anti-government In his essay collection China in Ten Words, Yu “Democracy Wall” wrote that he wanted to emphasise the “parallel in city gate, Beijing does not make Bei Dao. In- movement in between the sudden appearance of myriad rebel stead of placing his life story within the context of Beijing and other Chinese cities. headquarters at the beginning of the Cultural a city—like, say, Orhan Pamuk does in his memoir Revolution”—when rival factions of the commu- Istanbul—he treats the city as an extension of his nist cadre fought over competing interpretations life. Beijing is what he makes of it—or, rather, what of Mao’s dictates—“and the rapid emergence of he knows of it: which, for the boy who inhabits the the private economy: in the 1980s, Chinese people book, is both a lot and not very much. replaced their passion for revolution with a pas- On the one hand, he knows very little about Bei- sion for making money, and all at once there was jing’s history, its political or economic situation, an abundance of private businesses.” Futuristic his neighbours’ class backgrounds, even his par- cityscapes, five-star hotels: the rest is well known. ents’ jobs. In that sense, City Gate is an intensely For Yu, born in 1960, and Jia, born in 1970, personal account. On the other hand, the boy has Deng’s reform era was a watershed experience. astonishing powers of perception, and takes a

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above: Bei Dao loving interest in the sort of day-to-day sensual her bicycle, whistles a faint melody, ding-ding recreates the phenomena that most adults—and most memoir- rings her bell. Beijing of hutongs ists—entirely miss. by recalling That opening discussion of light bulbs is a case Darkness is an inconspicuously salient aspect of telling details of in point. Stunned by the ubiquity of electric light- life—the sort of thing you only recognise when it smells, sounds and moments that are ing, Bei Dao wheels away to a time when Beijing is gone, and perhaps not even then, though its loss ineffably sensual. was much darker, calmer. The point is not to criti- changes you. Most non-Westerners of a certain His memoir is like cise the present; Bei Dao is responding to some- age have walked through streets permanently a catalogue of thing more ineffably sensual. Electrification has patterned with darkness. But only a poet could forgotten pleasures. changed the experience of Beijing. Accordingly, he observe this diffuse sensation, retain it within immerses us in a lost experience: him, and express it precisely decades later. It is the sort of telling detail that saves a memoirist much Back then streetlamps in Beijing were scarce; storytelling and analysis. More importantly, it is many hutong alleys and lanes didn’t even have a phenomenology of a lost era. You are getting ob- a single one, and if there were any, each one ject and subject, world and poet. would be separated by thirty or fifty meters of City Gate is organised around loci of such sen- darkness and only illuminated the small area sation, with chapters such as ‘Light and Shadow,’ immediately below it ... For the night traveler, ‘Smells’, ‘Sounds,’ ‘Swimming,’ ‘Furniture’ and streetlamps are needed more for steeling nerves ‘Raising Rabbits’. This sort of non-linear struc-

than for illumination. The night traveler rides ture in a memoir is unfamiliar to Western and vcg / getty images

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practical level, it does so by bulldozing His memoir builds an imaginative city that readers neighbourhoods. Monstrous as they can actually inhabit, much like his early poetry are, these practices can be understood. created concepts worth living for. And the performance artist Ai Weiwei can legibly dramatise them by breaking fake Han dynasty vases on video. Indian readers, but it does have Chi- This fantastic passage, a prose poem In City Gate, Bei Dao makes a subtler, nese antecedents. “The most beautiful really, accomplishes pages of narrative quieter and more artistically effec- autobiography in Chinese,” Bei Dao’s work in a few lines. (It also shows how tive intervention. It is creative in two sometime translator Eliot Weinberger fleet-footed the New Directions trans- senses. First, City Gate speaks the lan- once wrote, “Shen Fu’s Six Records of lation, by Jeffrey Yang, is.) In the quirks guage of private imagination, not pub- a Floating Life (1809), is organised by of the boy’s perception, for example, we lic discourse. Where Ai addresses his emotion: the delights of travel, the sor- sense his precocious spiritual longings. censors, Bei Dao treats a loss few could rows of misfortune, the pleasures of Most children dream of escaping into a articulate—that of sensations. Second, leisure.” faraway place. But that strangely com- his memoir builds an imaginative city The form serves Bei Dao well. In- pelling image—the room turning into that readers can actually inhabit, much stead of parading a familiar sequence a train compartment—spatialises, and like his early poetry creates concepts of events, City Gate jumps forwards thus temporarily reveals, the continu- worth living for. and backwards, from one glittering im- ous journey we are all making towards pression to another. Though somewhat the beyond. With a light touch, Bei Dao the trouble is that Beijing in the 1950s dizzying at first, the associative logic then contrasts his cosmic dreams with and 1960s was not entirely habitable. comes to feel more true to memory rather more everyday habits: sleeping Bei Dao makes concessions to this truth than a conventional story. late, playing with snow. That contrast every now and then. His technique is For example, all characters, Bei Dao’s in turn represents how close, and often to represent historical traumas as brisk parents included, are introduced in me- indistinguishable, the sublime and the synecdoches. The Great Famine, for in- dias res—which makes sense, since par- silly can be in childhood. stance, becomes the lurid drama of his ents do not introduce themselves before Most importantly, this recollection pet rabbits being cooked by his parents floating into our reveries. Similarly, does not seem willed or constructed. (they cannot afford to feed the pet, and almost no social context is provided. In Rather, we have the sense of spontane- can barely afford to feed themselves). general, City Gate hews very close to ously reliving the past. In other words, The becomes “a the undulations of Bei Dao’s conscious- it is a perfectly Proustian recollection: small blast furnace... built in the vacant ness. In more intense moments, it even sensual, immersive, and all the more area in front of building no. 8.” The casts aside its narrator to fully inhabit impressive for not involving a cake. Chinese state’s surveillance system the perspective of childhood. The re- City Gate is an ocean of such recol- is a stash of “illegal” magazines and sults can be ravishing: lections. Not all of them are as sublime. novels found in his father’s hidden at- In fact, the book is a riot of sticky, icky, tic library. These episodes are poignant Waking up, ceiling bright with the earthy, gooey and often rancid tastes enough since the larger public events reflected light of a heavy snowfall. and smells. Consider this description did not really affect Bei Dao. But the Warm air from the heater stirs the of a government pool: “As we swam, is another story. curtains as the window frame blurs we’d bob up and down in the smells of Bei Dao was 17 years old when Mao with the light pouring in, making it formalin, bleaching powder, urine, bob unleashed his chaos. In City Gate, he seem as if a train is slowly, ever so up and down between the boisterous mentions the exact date. He adds, im- gently, moving forward, taking me to din of people, with a moment’s serenity mediately, that he was “at Beijing High a faraway place. I linger in bed until underwater.” Or his claim that “Dust No. 4—in the throes of a math-physics- my parents rush me out. ... A heavy is the commander in chief of all odors, chemistry crisis, final exams around snow turns the city into a mirage, as making one’s mouth parched, tongue the corner.” Exams are cancelled; if gazing into one face of a looking dry, throat a smoky soreness, mood school is closed. And so, “the start of glass. In a flash the glass will smash foul.” Or that the taste of cod liver oil the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolu- and shatter, mud splashing every- “brought the loneliness of the ocean’s tion seemed like a carnival.” where. ... I burst into the classroom abyss.” This is meant as a joke. And it is fun- as the school bell rings.... In the The approach owes to Bei Dao’s ny. You cannot be straight-faced about gloominess, the teacher’s silhouette knowledge that all sensations, when such an event. Unhappily, that deadpan turns, chalk dust flies up, the numer- properly inhabited, yield vital life les- tone more or less persists throughout als on the blackboard seem to fade. sons. His descriptions are also crucial his account. City Gate follows Bei Dao The teacher raises her pointer at me from a historical perspective. On an until he turns 20, when he is sent to and shouts, “Hai! Yes, YOU—are you official level, the Chinese state cre- the countryside. Those last three years deaf?” ates amnesia by rewriting history; on a occupy a good part of his memoir, espe-

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ated by the Cultural Revolution. A real reckoning with the present would have to take this conti- nuity into account. Bei Dao knows this. Much of his later poetry gets its energy from the tension between a profound desire to return to the past— which, since he is an exile, equates to a return home—and a bitter wisdom that such a return is impossible, and, in fact, ill-advised. The options are well represented in ‘Going Home,’ from his collection Unlock (2000). Here is Eliot Weinberger and Iona Man-Cheong’s translation:

Going home, useless hope takes back its wisp of smoke my road runs parallel to the privacy of a mouse

the past makes me anxious it is a tuning fork of lightning that hidden instrument trapping a forgotten hand

yet the pressure of this moment

adrian cook / writer pictures ap photo comes from a deeper blue turning the corner I examine heaven’s book and the printing of the sea above: Bei Dao cially its latter half, where proceedings turn more spent more than a narrative. Yet, he makes no meaningful attempt I watch myself going home dozen years in exile to analyse the revolution, or even seriously reckon passing those nighttime toys as a result of the with his own participation in it. In fact, despite a where brightness ends 1989 Tiananmen few representative episodes (kidnappings, public shouting and wine glass coincide Square Massacre. When he returned shouting matches) one emerges with little sense of to Beijing in 2001, what life was like at the time. The flame of nostalgia is extinguished before he could barely The omission is particularly troubling when Bei the first line; it has no place in the inner well recognise his native Dao plays an active role in violence. Early in the where poetry, and our true selves, reside. Yet the city. revolution, for instance, he convenes a “struggle poet is not dismissive of the past. Though wary of session” with some friends from his building. They its dangerous illusions (“wisp of smoke”; “hidden drag an aged neighbour from his house, shave his instrument”) he also recognises a more funda- head and force him to humiliate himself with self- mental need for human continuity that lies behind criticisms about his alleged role in the anti-Mao them. “The pressure” from the hidden “deeper Kuomintang army. Then, they lock him in a base- blue” flame driving this poem, and driving the ment. poet’s feeling, is not nostalgia but the swelling It should be a shameful memory. But Bei Dao’s awareness that our present comprises all that attitude towards it is understated and pious: came before it. In that sense, the past is not only attractive but unavoidable. After that, bumping into him on the street was Having negotiated these pitfalls, the poet re- like meeting a ghost; I tried to give him as wide turns to the place “where brightness ends”—a a berth as possible. Many years later I happened reference to a darker, remembered Beijing—to see, to read Golding’s Lord of the Flies: his bold vi- once again, what happened there. The final line is sion, alas, had been a ruthless reality for us. exquisitely menacing. Is it a party where people are fighting—a dark pun on the Party? Is it that vi- The dissonance partly stems from form: since olence and joy are themselves inextricable? There City Gate is non-linear, there is not much room for is no final answer. The past in itself is shown not sustained narrative analysis. But the larger issue to answer the poet’s deepest questions. He might is that of intention. Bei Dao’s book is a response return there from time to time, as he does bril- to post-reform China’s rapacious development, liantly in City Gate, but salvation, or at least the which filled the cultural and moral vacuum cre- hope for it, lies in the future tense. s

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