In this information overloaded times, poetry, as one of the most ancient and prestigious literary forms, continues to become more marginal and irrelevant. China, where every child starts with his early education by reciting famous poems from Tang dynasties, where poetry writing was once considered the essential part of being a scholar, is no exception in this crisis. Compared to the west, Chinese poetry did enjoy a few more recent golden years in early and mid eighties. But after the student protests in TianAn Men the entire poetry community suffered and never ever recovered. The very economic and internet booms not only did not help but further diverted more readers to other mediums. While the Chinese avant-garde visual art blossomed in the nineties and attracted more and more international interest, the few well-known poets from the eighties either went exile, or went mad, or killed themselves.
Wang Jia Xing was not the biggest name from that talented pool of poets sprung from those eventful years. He first came to my attention when I read his London poems and felt very moved by them, due to our shared experiences of drifting oversea and missing home. Last year, I finally got a copy of his colleted poems which was published in 2001 as one of the Blue Star Series. After I flipped through the book and reread some of my favorite poems, his whole life and his entire artistic trajectory started to take shape in my mind. Wang’s writing career covered two important decades after the Cultural Revolution. His works are the best testimonials of the opportunities and the predicaments Chinese poets faced in this dynamic time period, and his own life, reflected through his works, is very typical of his generation.
Wang JiaXing entered the poetry scene as a late member of the misty group when it already started to disband. He did not become famous until he published a set of poems titled under “Chinese Paintings”. The series has been used as a representative piece for the “root-finding” movement started from late 1984. All of sudden everyone went back to ancient Chinese myths and philosophy to look for inspiration and spirituality, and Wang seemed to be particularly enlightened by the minimalist and naturalistic philosophy of Zhuangzi and Tao. Here is one stanza from “Blankness”:
You painted the mountains,
Painted the clouds
But you stopped your brush
At this blank spot
Were you afraid of something
Or this is a puzzle within puzzle
A dream that was dreamed
So you sidestepped
And made the pine tree extending its arms
From the rock
Towards this emptiness……
Wang in this period demonstrated a very genuine and positive attitude towards every thing he was experiencing. He dreamed an ideal pastoral life in which he could both withdraw from the world yet remain an active participant. These two conflicting and polarized urges are common among Chinese poets. Since ancient times, scholars always wanted to play the role of a public intellectual. When they spoke they wanted the world to listen. But in the meantime they longed to become a hermit. Wang is no exception. On one hand he idolized the reclusive Beat poet Gary Snider, on the other hand, he looked up to Russian public poets such as Pasternek and Mayakovski.
1989 was a year of political turbulence, and it also turned out to be a critical year that put a final end to the prospering and noisy post-culture-revolution poetry scene. Almost over night, Wang changed his style. Gone with that child-like joy and calmness, instead his poems became increasingly dark and emotionally charged and showcased a tortured romanticist in all his nakedness. The same image of snow, which used to be a symbol of wonder, repeatedly appeared in his new poems as an image of repression, clinical pain and shattered hopes.
Pasternak
It is you who has found me, put me through trials
Through countless catastrophes
And inject pain into my bloodstream
Against the snowy sky I am reading your poems
On the roaring bus in Beijing
I am crying out those noble names
Those exiles, sacrifices, testimonies, those,
Trembling souls gathering for the final Mass
Poets are often the most vulnerable under the authoritarian government, and the whole Chinese poetry suffered collectively after the student protests of 1989 ended in bloody massacre. Following the suicide of Haizi, Luo Yihe died of a sudden stroke when he was barely 28. Other prominent poets went to exiles: OuYang JiangHe and Ju YongMing went to New York, BeiDao ended up in California, and Gu Cheng drifted around in Australia and eventually settled in an isolated island outside New Zealand. Wang joined the migrating flocks and went to England. The change of environment, and the close distance to observe the Western world from an underprivileged position, seemed to have affected Wang profoundly. The intellectual freedom came with homesickness, loneliness, marginalization and prejudice, and the suffering was no less inflicting than the oppression back home. Melancholy and solitude were prevalent in the poems of this period, echoing the gloomy weather and grey skies of London. While images of the British landscapes and references to Magarite, Picasso, Auden and Yeats made their presence in his works, Wang also missed China intensely:
Now you can recognize
That china man who is walking through the West End:
Through rose garden and Lady Chatterley’s white villa
You speculate on the discreet charm of the bourgeois
In the midst of the chopping sounds from the basement kitchen
You think of Marx and his On Capital
The family letters arrived frequently
Passing false news
You don’t remember who you are
Until you wake up in the heavy sweat
You have seen everything
A China man, a loner in the sky
Still wanders in the West End…..
On your own departure you don’t need to say goodbye
But you have to go to the art museum
Tucked under the heavy fog
You finally understand that one man’s pain
Can brighten up the entire hall
And your own future…
Wang wrote these lines two years after he left London. He saw his lonesome self drifting rootlessly in a country that was not his own, and this unease finally made him come back to Beijing. Wang never ceased to look for connections and the reconciliation with his surroundings, but his refusal to copromise destined him to be the loner in this rapidly commercialized world. Not surprisingly, Wang also failed in his personal life while his marriage disintegrated shortly after he came back to China and his only son was taken away from him. Relationship dramas could be particularly powerful for poets. Some were ultimately destroyed (such as Gu Cheng, who killed his own wife and himself), and some gave up poetry completely. In the end of 1997, Wang got a writing grant from Germany and spent two coldest months in a Stuttgart castle. It was two prolific months. The isolation finally made it possible for him to sit down and focus on writing, and it was only through writing that he could vent out the pain, the anger and the sadness. The following stanza is from a long poem titled “Replies”, which could be read a letter addressed to Wang’s divorced wife:
For a long time I have been accompanied
By these nonexistent women
Now I understand:
These fake angels
Have destructed my life, poisoned my heart
But could never be the protagonist of this book
My only lead, is destined to come from a small alley
In Beijing.
What we have known since our childhood
Made what is the present, and the shared pain we were never aware of
Made us come together:
From the very beginning
We compromised neither to life, nor to each other
It made us alike yet so different
It brought us the dark night which we still have not walked through
It writes on us, loves us, threatens us
-----It is violent, but we are as loyal as a dog.
Life would never be easy for a poet. The muse brings in both wine and poison. In late nineties Wang moved to ChangPing, a small town close to Beijing. Here he built his own house with a yard and seemed to become increasingly reclusive, just to live up to his earlier admiration for Gary Snider. But his withdrawal was more motivated by a disillusion with the real world rather than an urge to calm his own ego down, and he could not stop writing even if he knew fully well how useless this is:
As if in a dream, in this long but beautiful summer evening
When I look up to the sky
Another plane is flying by
But I already know,
The miracle will no longer come
I am no longer holding flowers
And waiting at the airport
My heart has been hardened to a stone
In the evening of silence, with scissors in my hands
I am repeating the ancient and useless craftsmanship
Until the night falls
But are all that all totally useless? I hope Wang would feel a little comfort if he knows that someone in San Francisco have reread his poetry collection again and again and spent hours typing this blog piece.
