by Shuyu Kong
“As long as the living survive, the dead will never die” (Van Gogh)
1. Asian Bronze
Asian Bronze, Asian Bronze
Grandfather died here, father died here, here I will also die
You are the only place left for burying people
Asian Bronze, Asian Bronze
Birds love to doubt you, to soar over you; the ocean may devour you
But your master is the green grass, living there slim-waisted, guarding the wildflowers’ secrets
Asian Bronze, Asian Bronze
Did you see those two white doves? They are white shoes left by Qu Yuan on the sandbank
Why don’t we—we and the river—try them on?
Asian Bronze, Asian Bronze
After we strike the drums, we’ll call our hearts, dance in the darkness, in the moonlight
This moonlight comes mostly from you
(by Hai Zi, 1983)
The first time I heard this poem was in my college sophomore year, down in the Shaoyuan basement. Shaoyuan was a collection of buildings housing foreign students and professors, right near Peking University’s main West Gate, looking out over a lotus pond and the curved eaves of an old-style Chinese zigzag terrace. It had its own stores, a canteen and a café, and the café was down in the basement. Back in the mid-80s, drinking coffee was still something to write home about, and this place was like the epicentre of campus cool. A bunch of Chinese students who liked hanging out with foreigners used to meet up there. And every now and then they would host an art event or literary salon.
I guess it was the May Fourth Literature Club that held this poetry reading. A girl called Hong recited Hai Zi’s poem, her voice was kind of husky but still young and innocent. Another girl followed with her own dance creation, moving elegantly, fluidly, like the white doves in the poem. I can’t quite recall if she was dancing to the poem, or dancing alone.
It was the first time I’d heard of Hai Zi, and this poem always triggers those youthful feelings, of beauty mixed with pathos, a beautiful girl dancing to a lilting young voice—Peking University in the 80s, in the age of poetry. Back then we joined so many clubs, the May Fourth Club, the Yan Garden Campus News Club. Clutching our latest creations, we would rush down to the editorial offices of Campus Literature by Nameless Lake, hoping to get published.
The main event of each term was the Nameless Lake Poetry Festival. They held it in a packed auditorium with an overflow crowd at each window, and Xi Chuan (English class of ’81) recited his future award-winning poem “People Say.” It was the time when PKU students organised the first unofficial art festival; when they came out to protest the closure of Ding Ling’s literary magazine China; when the student union invited major poets like Bei Dao, Gu Cheng and Duo Duo to discuss their work with students; a time when young guys would spend the evening on the East Lawn outside the library, endlessly singing songs to their imaginary lovers, till their voices grew hoarse and night faded into dawn.
Maybe that’s why I always feel “Asian Bronze” is Hai Zi’s best short poem—certainly not that bland and obvious piece everyone goes on about, “Facing the Great Ocean, Flowers Bloom in the Warm Spring.” I still can’t explain what he was trying to say, but there’s a kind of sacred mystery in great poems, a divinely inspired language, that can’t be analysed, only intuited by kindred spirits.
I didn’t hear this poem again until 2013, at a symposium hosted by the Australian National University in Canberra. As I listened to a German doctoral candidate read out her carefully researched paper on “Hai Zi and Campus Poetry,” part of her Ph.D. thesis, all the old feelings flooded back. With a jolt, I realised Hai Zi had become a myth, and those experiences we shared long ago were now dusty historical artifacts.
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2. First Love
I only met Hai Zi once, during Spring 1986, in the Chinese Department men’s dorm where my boyfriend lived.
My first love was two years older than me, a boy who stood out as weird even in that crowd of eccentric Chinese literature majors. It was more of a secret love, to be honest. That spring was his final semester before graduation, and somewhere I came across a few poems he had written—including one about meeting an old man while taking a short cut across the South Campus Gardens, and gazing into his eyes:
I really wished to linger a while
Looking at him, smiling, thinking no thoughts
But he had to go see his doctor
And I had endless classes to attend …
I also spotted him a couple of times in the distance, on my way to the library, and that was enough to make me fall helplessly in love. His slightly receding hairline, and the swaying of his shoulders when he walked—even his total lack of hygiene, like not washing his jeans for six months—all these details only confirmed his uniqueness and talent in my eyes, and added to his dazzling charm.
We began dating, sincere but also awkward, like most campus romances back then. He made it pretty clear we had no real future together—he needed to go back to his hometown a provincial city after graduation—but it was like I was enveloped by his aura, like I’d drunk a magic potion that made me deaf to any practical realities. Maybe he was also moved by my girlish innocence and persistence. He started taking me on walks round the campus, and on visits to his American friend “Old Du.” I seem to remember Old Du had a very plain room in Shaoyuan, furnished with a single rattan mat, which he used for meditation. The two of them would get into deep discussions about Zen and poetry, which for me added another level to my boyfriend’s mystique.
That whole spring I felt restless, knowing that he would leave so soon. But overwhelmed by his talent and his sense of superiority, I also felt kind of inadequate when we were together, like an ugly duckling. I was so tongue-tied and awkward, it made me hesitant to see him. He had finished his graduation thesis, and I realised if I didn’t go see him now, it would be too late. Disturbed by these complicated feelings, I headed to his dorm room—and that’s when I met Hai Zi.
The Chinese Department men’s dorm had a constant flow of visitors: poets from other cities, student wannabe poets from other departments seeking wisdom from the masters and alumni writers who would slip back to campus to recharge their spiritual batteries. Back in the 80s, poets were the centre of attention at PKU, and the girls all loved them, kind of like rock stars today. It wasn’t so much the real people we loved as the spirit they represented, the dream of being different, like the free wandering girl in the Taiwanese pop song “Olive Tree.” But all these visitors knew the real world outside was very different, and that’s why they came to the campus, to find their kindred spirits and a temporary refuge where poetry was all that mattered.
That’s why Hai Zi came to visit from his mundane job in the distant suburb of Changping, to see his friends, talk poetry, cast off the “loneliness of Changping life.”
Arriving at the dorm room, I saw several people sitting on the bed or standing around. My boyfriend came out to say hi, and told me that skinny, bespectacled wild-haired dude sitting over there was Hai Zi.
His poetry had gained some renown in literary circles, especially with those of us who studied literature. You could say he was a minor celebrity campus poet. My boyfriend and I chatted about him for a while, and I could sense my boyfriend’s unspoken concern, that he and all his classmates would soon have to leave the campus cocoon, like Hai Zi, and go out into the harsh world. He never expressed his feelings openly—whether in conversation or in poetry. He wanted to be like a worldly recluse, laid back, free from all stormy clouds of emotion. But he agreed with another poet classmate, who said “These few years are the best times of our life. If you don’t want to go downhill from here, you’d better just get an iron shovel to dig a hole and bury yourself!” I knew they were exaggerating, typical poets, but his words still made me feel sad inside.
One more evening together, in early summer. We sat on a lake-side bench by the dilapidated Spring Dew Mansion. In fluent English, he recited lines from one of Ezra Pound’s “Pisan Cantos.” I didn’t really understand it, but I just thought the words and tones coming from his mouth were so beautiful. Then he kissed me. In the darkness, I heard a frog croaking, and myself weeping.
Before he left, he gave me a two-volume set of Selected Modern American Verse. He wrote a couple of inscriptions on the inside covers: the Tang Dynasty poet Li Shangyin’s poem Untitled “Last night’s stars, last night’s wind” for the first volume, and a short verse in English by Robert Frost for the second:
I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;
I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I shan’t be gone long—You come too.
(Frost, “The Pasture”)
Then it was time to say goodbye. He saw me off at the station, heading home for the summer vacation. Like all young lovers, we couldn’t bear to let go. Just thinking that he wouldn’t be there when I came back in fall made the tears flow. But the train started, and through my tears, I saw him receding into the distance.
We did meet one more time, many years later. At the museum where he worked, I listened to his life story, where he lived, the books he read, his translations. He became a real classical scholar, just like he wanted to back then. I felt calm and collected. I even started to wonder whether he really was that same poet I knew all those years ago, but it didn’t really matter. Time has taught me that we projected our own young souls, full of fervour, imagination and idealism, onto those poets, and our true first love was poetry itself.
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3. The Death of Spring
My memories of the year when Hai Zi passed away, long suppressed, have now mostly faded, leaving only fragmentary recollections of death and escape.
In spring 1989, exactly three years after I met Hai Zi, I heard the news of his death. He killed himself by lying down on a railway line near Shanhaiguan. He had four books with him when her died: The Bible: Old and New Testaments, Thoreau’s On Walden Pond, Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki Expedition: By Raft Across the South Seas and Joseph Conrad’s Selected Novels. As soon as I heard this news, I couldn’t help recalling my former boyfriend and his total admiration for Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
As for the actual reason for Hai Zi’s suicide, some claimed he had got sucked into occult practices and become paranoid; others claimed it was just his personal emotional frustration. But I couldn’t forget that scene three years earlier in the dorm room, and the feeling both my boyfriend and I had that life was so much more difficult when you left the campus, especially for poets.
Peking University was a blessing, yes, but it was also a curse. No wonder the poet said:
Constellations glitter
A chessboard and the horizon stretch out beneath the heavens
I see a heart, blue and white porcelain,
Rice and wheat. These are objects that cause us to disappear.
(Luo Yihe, “Heroic Scenery”)
The same poet also said:
The thunderstorm this Spring
Will not let us go so easily.
(Luo Yihe, “Resplendent Calm”)
It’s true, too many things happened that spring, it was one piece of news after another in a constant stream of incidents, pushing us along, causing us to risk our young lives, towards that fateful moment of grave danger. It was an unstoppable force that even so many years later we still cannot comprehend.
Thinking back, the events of that spring were really a clash between the idealistic spirit represented by poets and the reality of the world outside. That’s why those young people sang the songs of Cui Jian and Luo Dayou and chanted the poems of Bei Dao and Gu Cheng.
In that time of mass indignation, few people spent much time mourning the loss of that lonely young man outside Shanhaiguan, and even fewer saw the deep spiritual link between a poet lying on a railway in the wilderness and those hunger-striking students in the square. But another poet, Luo Yihe, like a prophet, demonstrated that link through his own death, on May 13, collapsing in Tiananmen Square. The doctors said it was a massive brain haemorrhage, but his close friends and family knew it was caused by spiritual passion and exhaustion.
My diary only has a vague entry from that time: “A few days later, the May Fourth Literary Club published his obituary, and started planning a poet’s memorial celebration. It’s not even two months since the last poet’s obituary.”
Before this, literature enthusiasts like myself had vaguely heard of Luo Yihe, but he was mostly known only by other poets. He had already graduated by this time and worked as an editor at a literary magazine. Unlike most poets, he wasn’t arrogant or conceited, and he wasn’t really that famous. But somehow, even among those campus poets who rarely acknowledged any talent greater than their own, this modest and quiet young man had earned respect as a mentor. The force of his character was demonstrated by all that he did for Hai Zi that Spring.
After Hai Zi’s death, Luo rushed to Shanhaiguan and made all the arrangements for his funeral, just like a brother. On April 1, Luo and fellow poet Xi Chuan organised a major fund-raising campaign, and on April 7, they held a “Hai Zi Poetry Reading Memorial” at Peking University.
Within a few weeks, Luo also edited two collections of Hai Zi’s poems for publication, and he persuaded People’s Literature, Poetry Journal and Poetry News to run full-page commemorations. Luo’s own essay, “On the Life of Hai Zi,” was the last thing he wrote.
It was only later I realised that Luo’s total immersion in these activities came from his poet’s prophetic intuition: this fellow poet’s death was not merely the passing of an individual. Xi Chuan summed it up best: “The death of Hai Zi became a mythical event of our times. As the years go by, we will see even more clearly that in the twilight hours of March 26, 1989, we lost a truly precious friend. Losing this true friend means that we also lost a great spirit, we lost a dream, a piece of our own life. We lost a responding echo.” (Xi Chuan, “Mourning,” from Complete Edition of Hai Zi’s Poems)
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4. Blank Space
But we hardly had any time to mourn these two dead poets. That spring, we experienced too many unimaginable things: anger, terror, violence and more death.
Then, one early Summer morning,
we dispersed in all directions,
like countless hunted birds,
desperate to escape.
Then—suddenly—everything stopped.
A blank space.
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5. Cherishing the Memory
One late summer night in 2018, in Vancouver, I read about a group of young people who had just organised a Hai Zi Music and Poetry Salon at the Watermark College in Guilin. I saw a photo of the white-haired old German Sinologist and poetry scholar Wolfgang Kubin, meeting Hai Zi’s mother and breaking down, covering his face and weeping like a child. It brought back memories of the late 80s at Peking University, when I was a graduate student at the Comparative Literature Institute. Kubin came to give a guest lecture, wearing a black formal tail coat, like a priest, and never cracking a smile. A dozen years later, I met him again at the Association for Asian Studies Conference in Chicago. He was drunk at a dinner with a bunch of other China scholars, and he loudly denounced Chinese popular literature of today as a pile of garbage. This German who dared to weep and rage reminded me of the Romantic poet Holderlin that I read when I was still a student at Peking University, and also of how distant we had grown from our idealistic youth of poetry:
Yearning for you, I am really yearning for a multitude of people
I almost believe they are all your transmutations
They come and go over centuries, through markets and harbours
White clouds grant them authority, the myriad creatures inspire them
They raise the quality of our lives, creative, digging deep
They transform beating rain and wind into nobility, prophecy
I almost believe death gave you multiple names
Whoever mourns you mourns a multitude of people
Whoever speaks of them is not wasting their time.
(Xi Chuan, “Written for Luo Yihe”)
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6. “If You Are Still Alive”
That autumn of 1989, our return to campus was delayed time and again. It wasn’t till one week after October 1st that we finally received permission. By the time we came back from our state of terror, restlessness and the trapped frustration of an enforced long vacation, arriving at that familiar yet strange campus, the ginkgo trees were already fading to golden yellow.
All scars had been wiped clean, and everything was back to normal, as if the events of early summer had been a sudden but short-lived case of heatstroke, or just a bad dream.
But it wasn’t a dream, of course, which is why we now had to attend Political Study classes twice a week.
The whole cohort of graduate students had to attend together. I saw Luo Yihe’s wife there. She was slightly older than me, another literature student, doing her Ph.D. They were married just a half year earlier. She sat in the back row, still the same angular proud face, tall, clothed in black, like an inauspicious bird, or a sharp-pointed question mark. She quietly got on with her knitting, indifferent, betraying no emotion whatsoever.
It reminded me of a poem that Luo Yihe wrote for her, which I had just read in Venus, the student magazine of Chinese Literature Department. It was the first volume of Venus to be published since that spring, and on the first page were Hai Zi’s “Striking the Bell (one more poem)” and Luo Yihe’s “Beautiful (one more poem).” Both poets’ names had black borders, signifying death, but their poems seemed freshly written:
Young (for F)
Barefoot
Swinging her pure white calves
Singing a song
Shaking leaves from the tree
Making really weird gestures
Very gently
She enchants her lover
Makes him smile
And then makes him suffer a little
Finally, out of his deep feelings, he grows a great green tree
Flowerless but emerald green
The distant sky
Is outside them
The clouds in grey masses slide over the golden yellow fields
And the rain falls in the warm Spring shade
In that moment, I was suddenly possessed by a single desire: “I want to leave. I have to get away from here.”
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7. The Sound of Departing Dreams
We had dreams back then
About literature and love
About travelling across the world.
Now, deep in the night, we drink
Clinking our glasses together
The sound of dreams shattering
…..
…..
Back then I often woke in the middle of the night
Because so many dreams were not fulfilled
Because I resisted realityBecause I still had hopes for the future
Because I still believed I could become a miracle
(Bei Dao, “Visitor from Poland”)
My final two years at Peking University, I felt the spirit of the place had dispersed with the death of those poets in the spring of 1989. It wasn’t just a physical death; it was a spiritual collapse and departure. Even those poets who managed to escape abroad couldn’t escape that kind of spiritual death. Like one of our poetic icons, Gu Cheng, self-exiled on Waiheke Island in New Zealand, who killed his wife and then committed suicide. Or like countless poets who jumped into the sea of business, some getting rich, others not. Or those who went overseas and made a living but suffered from amnesia.
On campus, a sense of decadence and oppression spread, a feeling of doing whatever just to get by. I constantly rode my bike alone, away from campus, not really knowing where I was heading. Once I even joined some English majors to apply for copywriter jobs in the newly opening tech businesses at Zhongguancun, but the interviews only convinced me that I didn’t want to get stuck in an ever-narrowing space doing stuff I didn’t enjoy.
I was discontented, still young, desiring a breath of fresh air, a new environment. I wanted to see if other possibilities existed—for freedom, for poetry, and for believing again!
Many years later, when I finally had the chance to read Luo Yihe’s epic poem “Blood of the World,” on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, I saw it as a personal blessing and encouragement from this poet I had never met:
All you people round here
After you read my poem
Forget it immediately
Rush down to the ocean.
Darkness is eternal, but light
Must circulate
Shining out from our breasts.
Darkness soaks the crystals, the seeds
And the tools of Spring
The lenses buried beneath the earth, soaking them
With the gloom of mercury.
Eternity is still and silent; time passes over it.
You still need a lot more time
Before
You fall in love or become immortals.
(Luo Yihe, from “Blood of the World” 1968–88)
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8. Epilogue
It is a winter’s night in 2017, at a hotpot restaurant on Minsheng East Road, Zhongshan District in Taipei. This city’s streets are decked out with all the Chinese names you can imagine: Zhongshan Road, named after Republican hero Sun Yat-sen; Jinan Road, named after my Mainland hometown; Zhongxiao Road, named after the Confucian virtues of loyalty and filial piety. Even this hotpot restaurant has a grand name, Shiji, written in cursive calligraphy on its menu, which immediately evokes the Records of the Grand Historian, one of China’s greatest historical works by Sima Qian (c.145–86 BCE), who refused to stop writing despite being punished with castration.
My Taiwanese friend K is treating me to a farewell dinner. I will leave Taipei in two days, a city I visited for the first time two months earlier, and which already feels so familiar, like the home I have always longed for in the thirty years since I left China.
K is a professor of media studies at National Chengchi University. We have frequently met up in the past few weeks, visiting Zhanlu Café for coffee brewed using a hand press; browsing the independent bookstores along Wenzhou Street; sipping afternoon tea at the Grand Hotel where Nationalist celebrities used to hobnob in the golden lobby, a place full of intriguing connections to the elite Soong family and inspiration for the famous novel by Luo Yijun, Dream Hotel. K told me about her family, and why she has remained single. Our common experiences have drawn us together: literary studies, a Ph.D. in North America, teaching at university, writing.
But she is different from me. She returned to Taiwan after her five years in Madison—a cold place, she says, where she couldn’t find a single soul to talk to on those long winter nights. She is now a well-regarded writer, frequently invited to do readings in bookstores, public libraries or cultural centres. I first met her when I hosted a Taiwanese writers delegation in Canada back in 2009, including K. She talked about what it was like to write as a middle class woman in Taipei’s fin de siècle. After the three writers finished their talks, I took them to Vancouver’s Chinatown for Hong Kong-style milk tea. Outside it was raining, as it always does in November. I felt jealous of K for realising my dream of writing in Chinese for an understanding audience, able to share her meaningful experiences. Not like me, torn between two languages, living neither here nor there.
That night in Taipei, over the steaming hotpot, we swallowed at least as much gossip as we did fish, lamb and mushrooms. We talked about the bestselling ghost story Demons from Taiwan, wondering at its attraction for younger readers; we dismissed the prolific yet overly verbose and repetitive writer Tang Nuo; we wondered whether the international success of Wu Ming-yi’s Man with the Compound Eyes was due to the marketing prowess of his brilliant agent, who also represented Haruki Murakami. When at last she presented me with her latest book Departure in the Wild, as I caressed the beautifully designed cover, I once again felt the pain of that suppressed dream of mine. I said to her, “You made the right choice when you decided to come back to Taiwan.”
K looked at me with a confused expression. I had never mentioned why I chose not to return to China.
How could I explain it to her? I would have to go back to that summer—the summer I had never talked about since I left; the summer I only wanted to forget.
When I first arrived in Canada, it had become fashionable for former student leaders or survivors to publish memoirs about June 4. Even my doctoral supervisor, who was in Beijing for just a few weeks that spring, published a memoir of the Chinese Democracy Movement and the Tiananmen Massacre. People wanted me to write something, or at least talk about it, but I just couldn’t. It was not only because my family and friends were still in China, but because I feared that transforming the nightmare into poetic words would be a betrayal. All those years, I just wanted to forget about it and, as the years passed, I almost succeeded.
But that night, I suddenly recalled those trivial moments of my personal history almost 30 years before.
Early that morning, I was woken by a rude knocking on the dorm door. A student was looking for my roommate, who used to be one of the volunteer newsreaders for the student broadcasting station set up in Building 27. He said there was shooting in Tiananmen Square, and they needed to get the news out. Seeing me alone in the dorm, he rushed off. I couldn’t sleep, so I went to the South Gate, where students would normally return from the square. More and more people were gathered there, whispering the news to each other, many of them young faculty members, as the buildings beside the South Gate are junior teachers’ dorms. Then we spotted a man with a bandage around his head holding a bloodstained stone in his hand. He had just been carried in by another student on a pedicab. He was exhausted but couldn’t stop talking—or rather shouting—and his anger and helplessness spread like a virus. We grew outraged and horrified by what had happened, and several people started crying.
When the day finally dawned, more and more people came back with horror on their faces. It was too much to bear. After almost three hours standing in the morning chill, I felt exhausted and went back to my dorm.
I can’t remember what happened the rest of that day, just a jumble of bad news and confusion. I only knew there was no point going to the square any more.
Around dinner time, I suddenly realised I should send a telegram to my parents in Jinan. It was before the days of mobile phones. I rode my bike to the nearest post office at Huangzhuang, and saw a line extending out for dozens of metres. They were all students from other colleges nearby, just like me, wanting to tell their families they were alive.
Nobody talked.
Finally it was my turn. Just like all the others, I wrote only one line: “Mom and Dad, I am fine, don’t worry.”
At that moment, I felt we were the loneliest children in the world.
I see the tears rolling down K’s face, and I think she understands now why I chose to stay in Canada.
[Author’s note: All poems here are translated by Colin S. Hawes.]
Shuyu Kong is Professor of Humanities at Simon Fraser University, Canada, where she teaches Chinese literature, film and media. She received her BA and MA in Chinese literature and comparative literature from Beijing University, and her PhD in Asian Studies from the University of British Columbia. Shuyu is the author of two academic books and the co-translator of Beijing Women: Stories (Merwin Asia, 2014). She also contributes regularly to Chinese journals such as Shucheng (Booktown). She splits her time between Vancouver, Beijing, and Sydney. She keeps herself busy with bilingual writing and cross-continental travelling.
Colin Hawes (translator of all poems in the piece) is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Technology Sydney. He has an LL.B. and a PhD in Chinese literature from the University of British Columbia, Canada, and has published widely on Chinese corporations, law, and literature, including two books entitled The Chinese Transformation of Corporate Culture (Routledge, 2012), and The Social Circulation of Poetry in the Mid-Northern Song (Routledge, 2006). With Shuyu Kong, he co-translated a collection of short stories by the contemporary writer Wang Yuan, Beijing Women (MerwinAsia, 2014).