BOOKS Where Brightness Ends Bei Dao’s nostalgia for a pre-liberalisation Beijing / LITERATURE RATIK ASOKAN 84 THE CARAVAN BOOKS 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 Liu Xiaobo, 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 China 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, Duo Duo 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, Maoism 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.