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Bei Dao (b. 1949) - pseudonym of Zhao Zhenkai |
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Chinese poet, who became in the 1970s the poetic voice of his generation. Bei Dao's education was interrupted by the Cultural Revolution. He was a political activist but later lost his enthusiasm, and started to write as an alternative to his early actions. His central themes are the pressures of a conformist society, disillusionment, and sense of rootlessness. After braving the music of the air raid alarm Zhao
Zhenkai (Bei Dao) was born in Beijing to a family originally from the south of China. Zhao Mei Li (née Sun), his mother, was a medical doctor, and his father, Zhao Jinian, a
professional administrator. As a child Bei Dao
played hide-and-seek in the courtyard of their house, and when it
became dark, was the perfect time to tell ghost stories. "In a country
that doesn't believe in God, to manipulate ghosts to frighten children
as well as oneself reinforces Confucian orthodoxy," Bei Dao said in
his memoir.
"Chairman Mao made appeals for don't-be-afraid-of-ghost stories
to be told in school, at once confounding the people.. . . One must
first accept the existence of ghosts to prove one shouldn't be afraid
of them." (City Gate, Open Up by Bei Dao, translated from the Chinese by Jeffrey Yang, New York: New Directions, 2017, p. 7) Bei Dao received
good but brief education at Beijing Middle No. 4, also known as BHSF, or
Beijing High School Four. At the age of
sixteen, he joined the Cultural Revolution,
which interrupted his formal education. He was briefly a Red Guard and
"reeducated" in the country, first working as a concrete mixer for five
years, and the another six years as a blacksmith. In the early 1970s
Bei Dao started to write under several
pseudonyms poems which probed the boundaries of the official literature
of his time. Literally Bei Dao means North Island – the name was
given to him by friends because he is from the north and something of a
loner. To earn his living Bei
Dao worked as a laborer for a Beijing construction company. He
was among the protesters who went on the streets following the power
struggle after the death of Premier Zhou Enlai in 1976. His most famous poem, The Answer (Huida), declared: "I
don't believe the sky is blue". Bei Dao expressed a growing desire for
freedom and disappointment of unfilled expectations. The
April Fifth movement was suppressed by the police and militia. Bei Dao
temporarily stopped writing, but normality was restored when the Gang
of Four was overthrown. "The chance to publish openly brought forth a
new burst of writing from Bei Dao." ('Introduction: Love, Truth and Communication in Contemporary Chinese Fiction: The Case of Bei Dao' by Bonnie S. McDougall, in Waves: Stories by Bei Dao, edited with an introduction by Bonnie S.
McDougall, translated by Bonnie S. McDougall and Susette Ternet Cooke,
New York: New Directions, 1990, p. x) On December 23, 1978, Bei Dao cofounded with
Mang Ke an unofficial literary journal Jintian
(Today), which
gathered around it other young poets and dissidents. The journal was
banned 1980. (However, it was re-established in 1990 in Stockholm.) At this time Bei Dao's work made a clear break from the official, orthodox expression. Hostile critics considered it nihilistic. Bei Dao used elusive imagery and linguistic ambiguity. "Life. The sun rises too," he wrote giving the officials much trouble to conclude, is he criticizing Mao Zedong (often referred as "the red sun in our hearts") or not. He also attempted to resolve the problem of the gulf between spoken and written Chinese in experimental poems. The "misty school of poetry" was attacked in the press, when its representatives arose from the underground, and in 1980 the magazine was banned. Their mentality was strange to their critics, but at the bottom it was a question, was the Chinese reality behind words "obscure" or their writings. The Answer was published in the official poetry journal Shi Kan (Poetry Monthly) in 1980. 'I don't believe the sky is blue. / I don't believe what the thunder says. / I don't believe dreams aren't real, / that beyond deat there is no reprisal." (in 'Answer,' A Splintered Mirror: Chinese Poetry from the Democracy Movement, translated by Donald Finker, additional translations by Carolyn Kizer, San Francisco: North Point Press, 1991, p. 9) Bei Dao's tone was defiant and especially the last lines from 'Notes on the City of the Sun,' have been often quoted as representing the disillusionment of his generation. Peace Motherland Life In the early 1980s Bei Dao worked at the Foreign Languages
Press in
Beijing. He was the key target in the government's Anti-Spiritual
Pollution Campaign, but in 1983 he managed to meet secretly the
American poet Allen Ginsberg, who had came
to China as part of a group of American authors. Bei Dao soo realized
that Ginsberg did not know much about contemporary Chinese poetry. He
was mostly interested in Bei Dao's dissident status and recommended
that he should translate Gregory Corso's (1930-2001) poems into
Chinese. Later they met several times, among others in South Korea, where Ginsberg upset high officials with his questions about Korea's human rights. "At the banquet, the highest of officials and lowliest of interns pushed their way into photos with him. Allen always dragged me along, despite my protests. I had never seen him as angry as when one of the officials, seeing that I was sharing in Allen's limelight, showed me out of the way. Allen stomped his feet and exploded: "You son of a bitch! Don't you fucking know he's a friend of mine — a Chinese poet!?" (Blue House by Bei Dao, translated from the Chinese by Ted Huters & Feng-ying Ming, Brookline, MA: Zephyr Press, 2000, p. 5) In 1983 Bei Dao's poems were published in the East Asia Papers series of the Cornell University East Asia Program and in Renditions 19/20 in Hong Kong by The Chinese University Press. Poems also appeared in the Bulletin of Concerned Asinan Scholars (1984) and in Contemporary Chinese Literature, edited by Michael Duke (1985). The novella Bodong (1985, Waves) made Bei Dao one of the
prominent
figures in Chinese modernist fiction. Its first draft was completed already in 1974. The stories about the
"lost generation" of the Cultural Revolution are seemingly disjointed.
Bei Dao uses multiple narrators and interior monologue, breaking away
from the traditional ways of expression. Wang Qi, who has been denounced by his daughter, thinks in 'In the Ruins': "I'll die, but my books will live., they haven't paled into insignificance through years of criticism: on the contrary, they have proved even more that they are worth surviving. As long as one's thought are spoken and written down, they'll form another life, they won't perish with the flesh." (Ibid., p. 6) Waves was followed by shorter prose pieces dealing with contemporay subjects, such as the gulf between the official truth and reality.
The dream world have an important place in Bei Dao's poetry. Rarely expressing nostalgia for the days gone by, he made an exception in his poem 'The Old Temple'; the temple is run down, cobwebs cover everything, the dragons and strange birds are gone, but Bei Dao suggests: "yet perhaps / with a glance from the living / the tortoise might come back to life in the earth / and crawl over the threshold / bearing its heavy secret." (translated by Bonnie S.McDougall and Chen Maiping, in Out of the Howling Storm: The New Chinese Poetry, edited by Tony Barnstone, Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1993, p. 47) Mirrors, the sky, different seasons and clocks appear often in the imagery - the sky could be "doomsday-purple," "scoop-shaped," 'absolute," or a vast "five-year-old sky." The poet's efforts "to pass through the mirror / have not succeeded," "we are born from the mirror," and "the window makes a frame for the sky." When the
political situation changed in the mid-1980s, Bei Dao obtained a passport. He started to travel
in Europe and in the Unites States, often with his wife, the painter
Shao Fei, and their daughter, Tiantian. Although political control of
the public debate showed some signs of relaxation, his poetry turned
more pessimistic, culminating in the nightmarish "Bai ri meng" (1986). Bei
Dao shi xuan (1986,
The August Sleepwalker), a collection of poems written between 1970 and
1986, was received with enthusiam, but the work was soon banned by the
authorities. After a year in England, followed by a tour in the United
States, Bei Dao returned to China in the late 1988. "I watch the
process of apples spoiling / children with a tendency to violence /
ascend like black smoke / the roof tiles are damp," he wrote after
student protest along Beijing's main street in 1989. ('The Bell,' Old Snow, p. 3) Writing in free verse, Bei Dao is best known for intensely
compressed images and cryptic style. It leaves the reader to supply the
nuances in the empty spaces between the lines. His search for a new
poetry has drawn on classical Chinese poetic grammar, modernist poetry,
and influences from Western literature. While conducting a lecture tour
at selected U.S. universities in 1993, he also adopted the drinking
habits of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. "Not gods but the children In
1989 Bei Dao signed a letter with 33 intellectuals to the
NPC and
the Central Committee, which led to a petition campaign that called for
the release of political prisoners, among them the democratic activist
Wei Jingsheng. When the demonstration in Tiananmen Square was
suppressed in the massacre of June 4, Bei Dao was in Berlin. Some of
his poems were circulated by students during the democracy movement in
1989, and he was accused of helping to incite the events in the Square.
On the banners had been his lines from the 1970s: "I won't kneel on the
earth, / the firing squad might block / the last free breaths of air." (in 'The Testament,' A Splintered Mirror: Chinese Poetry from the Democracy Movement, p. 16) Bei Dao decided to stay in exile. Also his friends Duo Duo, Yang Lian, and Gu Cheng chose exile – Gu Cheng's wife was killed and he committed suicide. With former contributors he reestablished Jintian, one of the forums for Chinese writers abroad. All the poems in the bilingual collection Old Snow, published in 1991 by New Directions Books, were written post-Tiananmen Square, traumatic watershed in Bei Dao's life. After teaching in Sweden, where his acquaintances included the
Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer,
Bei Dao moved in 1992 to Denmark and Germany, and eventually settled in
the
U.S., becoming a resident at the University of Michigan. He has said:
"On the one hand poetry is useless. It can't change the world
materially. On the other hand it is a basic part of human existence." A
collection of Bei Dao's short stories, 13, rue du bonheur
(1999), was translated into French by Chantal Chen-Andro. Bei
Dao's stay in the United States ended in 2007. He settled in Hong Kong
and has also visited continental China. Bei Dao became a U.S. citizen in 2009. He is an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Bei Dao's memoir, Cheng men kai (City Gate, Open Up),
came out in English translation in 2017. He tells that when his father
fell seriously ill, he returned to the
city of his birth in 2001, and suffered a momentary shock: everything had changed, Beijing
looked like a huge, glittering soccer stadium. His experiences growing up in Beijing
had vanished as the city he had know had also vanished. Jennifer Wong
said in her review of the book: "His writing is marked by poignant
silences of feelings, allegiances, and the pursuit of truth, when
history is "ten thousand things return to silence."" (Asian Review of Books, 14 August 2017) Bei Dao is Honorary Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Disappointed in the quality of texts aimed at young readers, he has edited books for children. With Shelby K. Y. Chan, Gilbert C. F. Fong, and others he edited the anthology Poetry and Conflict: International Poetry Nights in Hong Kong 2015 (box set of 21 chapbooks). The biennal poetry festival, established by Bei Dao in 2009, was hosted by the Chinese University of Hong Kong. (in 'Prologue,' Sidetracks by Bei Dao, translated from the Chinese by Jeffrey Yang, New York, NY: New Directions, 2024, p. 3) After the death of Dr. Li Wenliang, who had reported on the mysterious
new virus in Wuhan, the opening lines of Bei Dao's 'The Answer' spread through
Chinese social media. "I'm tired of that poem, even if it is my most popular poem in China," Bei Dao has said. (CNN.com Books - News, November 2, 2000)
The Chinese security law (The Law of
the People's Republic of China on Safeguarding National Security in the
Hong Kong Special Administrative Region), which entered into force on
30 June, 2020, marked the end to freedom of expression in Hong Kong.
Bei Dao himself has kept his profile low, emphasizing that he is not
political figure. "Why draw prison walls in the dirt / in the name of freedom". (in 'Prologue,' Sidetracks by Bei Dao, translated from the Chinese by Jeffrey Yang, New York, NY: New Directions, 2024, p. 3) For further reading: Identity, Home and Writing Elsewhere in Contemporary Chinese Diaspora Poetry by Jennifer Wong (2023); Chinese Poetic Modernisms, edited by Paul Manfredi, Christopher Lupke (2019); The Manifestation Of The Translation Style In Bei Dao's Poetics by Erin Heather Deitzel (2019); 'The Poetics of Exile: the Cases of Shang Qin and Bei Dao' by Nikky Lin, in Chinese Poetic Modernisms, edited by Paul Manfredi, Christopher Lupke (2019); The Chinese Poetry of Bei Dao, 1978-2000: Resistance And Exile by Dian Li (2006); The Literature of China in the Twentieth Century by B.S. McDougall and K. Louie (1997); 'Inledning' by Göran Malmqvist, in Landskap över nollpunkten (1997); 'Bei Dao,' in World Authors 1985-90, edited by Vineta Colby (1995); Modern Chinese Poetry by M. Yeh (1991); Literary Exile in the 20th Century, edited by M. Tucker (1991); Contemporary Chinese Literature, edited by H. Martin (1986) - Suomeksi Bei Daon runoja on julkaistu mm. Pertti Seppälän kääntämänä teoksessa Maailman runosydän (1998), toim. Hannu Tarmio ja Janne Tarmio. Puhun peilille kiinaa - Valitut runot (2013), suom. Pertti Seppälä, kattaa valikoiman Bei Daon runoja usealta vuosikymmeneltä. Selected works:
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