With war tensions high between China and the US in the Pacific Ocean's Yellow and South China Seas, where the US seeks to contain China, I think it is appropriate to revisit the Misty Poets of the 1980's in China and exiled beyond for their poetry's relevance. I have two brief reviews (essays) to post:
The “Misty Poets” from a Historical Perspective
A long time ago in high school mathematics, we learned a technique in “linear programming” to maximize a variable while minimizing another one. This is the minimax or the maxmin problem. One of the applications of this technique is investing in stocks. Let’s say Investor X has an S amount of money she wants to invest in the stock market. How should she invest the money if she wants to be safe about it in the sense that regardless of what’s happening in the world, her investment will be “protected” even though it is possibly not the most lucrative of investment portfolios.
She would invest equally in Peace and she would invest in War.
For example, she would invest in Dow Chemicals and Boeing or Lockheed in case that there is war and these companies would then profit from war by making weapons. On the other hand, if the world was at peace, she would benefit more from luxury goods such as cosmetics and tourism businesses in companies such as Proctor and Gamble, Starbucks Coffee, and Northwest Airlines. And so either way, her investments are “protected.”
This seems to be the approach China is taking with domestic investments and its foreign polices with the rest of the world. China is investing in peace as well as in war. By strengthening its defense, it is securing its domestic and foreign investments. The realistic understanding of the meaning of “property” is that property isn’t what is in your name, but what you can protect. Witness the oil in Iraq and the reasons we are in Iraq and I don’t think I need to say any more on this score nor should I say any more about vast buying of arms by Saudi Arabia.
It is a long way to get to the Misty Poets from this economic and military angle but I will get there eventually and explain why the Misty Poets came into being, and why they were tolerated for a while, flourished, and then squashed, and exiled, and forced into suicide.
We need to really go back to ancient history in China with the Music Bureau in the early dynasties, but for our discussion, we will merely go back to the complacency of China’s imperial past until the Manchu Invasion and the subsequent occupation by foreign Western Powers which notably was highlighted by the Opium Wars some 150 years ago.
China had such a difficult time to kick out all the foreign powers, imperialist Japan, and to engage in a civil war of its own, and then to help fight two major border wars (Korea and Vietnam) since 1950, because as Jean Follain had written, Southeast Asia is the “warm belly of Asia.” By this he means the food production capabilities of Indochina as the French were in Vietnam one time and learned the lesson that it cannot stop the yearning of a people to be free of foreign domination. When the US-Vietnam war concluded, this is where our analysis of the Misty Poets begins.
In 1972, US President Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger made a secret trip to China and secretly agreed to end the Vietnam war and to normalize relations with China.
Deng Hsiao Ping, the Paramount Leader of China, came to Texas and sported a cowboy hat and the television sequel “Kungfu” became a hit. And an era of “ping-pong diplomacy” began. China introduced limited capitalism into its economy and worked “miracles,” so that 30 years later, it becomes the 4th largest economy of world, and it is predicted by the Economist that it will be the biggest economy of the world by 2020, just 12 years away.
However, with the introduction of limited capitalism in China, a sort of freewheeling capitalist entrepreneurial class developed in its cities, so that within a span of 30 years, it spawned great “wealth” and created a deep division between “the have it” and “the have not’s.” The Chinese government for a time experimented with individual freedoms and liberal attitudes for a short while, and so a group of writers and poets clustered around Bei Dao and his experimental magazine “Today,” and wrote poetry in what is known as
”Misty Poetry,” in which strange, surreal, and indirect ways were used to criticize the excesses of the Cultural Revolution in the past and the lack of complete bourgeois freedom that these writers sought.
Much of the poetry of the “Misty Poets” was a kind of self-indulgence and complaint about the Chinese censorship. They were tolerated for a while but once the authorities realized where this kind of writing was going, they cracked down on it, culminating in the Tien An Men Massacre.
Bei Dao himself was out of the country at the time and so he chose exile. Some of the poets were imprisoned and some where exiled and a couple in exile committed suicide. Shu Ting, the most distinguished woman poet of this group, never left China. And I think her reasons are very mature and laudable. I will just include one poem by her, which in my mind, is the most mature and telling of why she never left China and is imminently loved outside of China as well as she is in China:
Perhaps
- reply to the loneliness of a poet
Perhaps our hearts
will have no reader
Perhaps we took the wrong road
and so we end up lost
Perhaps we light one lantern after another
storms blew them out one by one
Perhaps once we’re out of tears
the land will be fertilized
Perhaps while we praise the sun
we are also sung by the sun
Perhaps the heavier the money on our shoulders
the more we believe
Perhaps we can only protest others’ suffering
silent to our own misfortune
Perhaps
Because this call is irresistible
we have no other choice
December, 1979 Tr. Tony Barnstone
Note: Shu Ting was only 27 when she wrote this poem.
Koon Woon, March 15, 2008
_________________________________________________________________________________
Koon Woon (Poetry 2010) on the Misty Poets
Out of the Howling Storm, Ed. Tony Barnstone, Wesleyan University Press 1993
Actually one can draw a parallel between the birth of Beat poetry in the US in the 1950’s and the rise of the Misty Poets in China in the decade of the 1980’s culminating in the Tien An Men Massacre. The parallel that can be drawn is of course the reaction to a faceless, mass, and authoritarian culture. The reason why the United States was so conformist in the 1950’s is still poorly understood, at least by me, but I can understand why it was so in China for many decades since the founding of the PRC.
Mao Tse-Tung had urged writers and artists to serve the cause of the revolution in his famous “Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art” in May, 1942. He said that along the military front to push out invaders from China and to liberate the proletariat and the masses from oppression by counter-revolutionary forces, the writers and artists must help the new Chinese nation by educating and uniting the masses as a component of the “revolutionary machine.”
In the ensuing years, Mao kept his power until his death in 1976, but during the times he faced disloyalty and complaints of his mistakes, he variously called out the Red Guards and instigated the Cultural Revolution to build a new base of power founded on the younger people, teenagers.
Bei Dao, the foremost proponent of Misty poetry, which was a term later given to it by its critics for being obscure had been a red guard and was re-educated by construction work. He started the influential underground literary magazine, Today, in Beijing in 1979, which operated for 2 years until it was banned. Here the poets wrote poems obliquely criticizing the authoritarian mass culture of China by using fantastic images and obscure language and syntactical innovations. His most famous poem, “Answer” contains the following lines and stanzas in part:
The scoundrel carries his baseness around like an ID card
The honest man bears his honor like an epitaph.
Look – the gilded sky is swimming
with undulant reflections of the dead.
…..
Listen. I don’t believe!
OK. You’ve trampled
a thousand enemies underfoot. Call me
a thousand and one.
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 death there is no reprisal.
….
I think the line “I don’t believe what the thunder says” refers to the revolutionary doctor turned writer, Lu Hsun, who wrote “In the Stillness of Mountains/Hear the peal of Thunder.” (Thunder is the English word for Lu Hsun’s name).Whereas Lu Hsun served the revolution with his writings, Bei Dao is calling for a literature of the individual.
Even though Bei Dao has been nominated several times for the Nobel, I do not think that his poetry is of that caliber. It is a fetish of the Western World to elevate anything that is critical of modern China, witness the uncritical homage paid to the Dalai Lama, who actually is the head of a theocracy, which the US Constitution itself advocates the separation of Church and State, and thus it is a little hypocritical in this stance, although it is not necessarily true that China treats the Tibetan as well as they treat the Han Chinese, but that’s no different from how the whites treat the blacks in the US.
Yang Lian is another one of the original Misty Poets who now teaches university in New Zealand. His poetry is more lyrical and less strident than Bei Dao’s. In most ways, it is less nihilistic than the whole lot of the Misty Poets. In the poem “Sowing,” he is more concerned with the future generations and seemed to have benefited from being sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. [I have known several people personally who had been sent to the countryside living now in the United States and I did not detect any real hatred for this experience from this limited sample]. Yang Lian writes:
I dreamt I was a shuddering field of wheat,
ripe, swaying like a thousand suns,
and even the hot winds were golden,
calmly singing me
a delicate song
soft as an ancient smile,
like a blurred blessing from afar.
Let my desires spill over
and my love be sown. (refrain)
Bury me deep in the warm earth
and let my blood flow into underground rivers
to water shriveled hearts
from the miserable past.
I am a seed where life has hibernated,
a green burning vitally…
There is a feeling of redemption here of the past pains. His lyrics are so beautiful; I cannot help from quoting another portion of it:
I am proud to be close to the earth;
Even when winter stars are frozen over or under snowdrifts
I think of the coming hope of spring
and the next sure harvest;
after the growing pains
I now know that joy is in faith
And my only duty is to create abundance…
I will end this short commentary with another poet, whom I think is the most remarkable of this group of Misty Poets, who came to be modern Chinese poets sort of like water that has flown to sea and comes back during the high tide to the river. The Chinese literature that was carried out of China like its pottery and imitated by the Dutch comes back with the European ideals of individualism, romanticism, and political freedom, but also with a sense of nihilism and this is acknowledged and echoed by Shu Ting, but her reaction is mature for she knows the burden of the poet when she wrote in “Perhaps,” at the remarkable age of 27, and having only a middle-school education, the following lines which I quote:
Perhaps our hearts
will have no reader
Perhaps we took the wrong road
and so we end up lost
And this was the reply to the loneliness of a poet, which she ends the poem with:
Perhaps the heavier the monkey on our shoulders
the more we believe
Perhaps we can only protest other’s suffering
silent to our own misfortune
Perhaps
because this call is irresistible
we have no choice
December, 1979
It was not surprising that when she was only in her 30’s, twice she was the top woman poet in all of China, loved by the world in and out of China. She gives me hope that the greatest talents are not self-seeking, but cast their lot with humanity.
