Paradoxy and Meaning in Bei Dao's Poetry

Poetic language is the language of paradox.

—Cleanth Brooks

Paradox exists in order to reject such divisions as those which exist between "thought" and "language," between "thought" and "feeling," between "logic" and "rhetoric," between "logic," "rhetoric," and "poetics," and between all of these and "experience." . . . In paradox, form and content, subject and object are one, conflated, as the ultimate instance of the unity of being.

—Rosalie Colie

Only the paradox comes anywhere near to comprehending the fullness of life.

—C. G. Jung

Arguably the most eminent Chinese poet today, Bei Dao lives and writes in two worlds. In China, he is a memory, a literary giant of the 1980s whose pathbreaking writings influenced a generation and sparked the democracy movement that helped accelerate the country's reform and openness. In the West, he is a reminder of China's repression and intolerance, a poetic enigma whose well-translated elliptical syntax and cryptic imagery represent a complex interior response to a hostile exterior world. Such different reactions toward Bei Dao underscore the transformation of the poet himself—from an uncompromising young rebel in pre-1989 China to a mellowing and meditative poetic voice in exile in the West.

Born in Beijing in 1949 (the year of birth for the People's Republic of China), Bei Dao's life for the most part has intertwined with the politics of China. Mao's crusade of sending the city youth to the countryside (the rustication campaign known as zhishi qingnian shangshan xiaxiang) caught Bei Dao right after his high school graduation, and he was sent to work as a construction worker in a Beijing suburb, where he started to write perhaps to fight boredom and a feeling of despair. By the end of the 1970s, China had just awakened from the nightmare of its Cultural Revolution, and the oppressive Maoist ideology had lost much of its credibility. After years of overfeeding on the formulaic propaganda of socialist literature, the public, especially young readers, were ready for an alternative. Thus Bei Dao's personal pulse became that of a generation. Although, understandably, his writings paralleled the official poetry in their style of grandiosity and sloganizing, they could not be more different in message. The significance of a simple statement such as "I—do—not—believe!" can only be grasped by those who must believe nothing else but Mao.¹ The central concern of Bei Dao's poetry at this time was a plea for the restoration of personal space and life's ordinariness against a general deprivation of humanity in China for the past decade. "I am no hero," he writes. "In an age without heroes / I just want to be a man."² Being a man means, Bei Dao repeatedly clarifies, living a life of dignity and fulfillment without political consequences. Such apolitical ideas were given a political reading by both the student protesters of the 1980s and the Chinese government. When Bei Dao's influence spread from small circles of friends to many college campuses, the literary establishment launched a campaign against him and a like-minded group of young poets, maliciously labeling their works "Misty Poetry," a label that Bei Dao would later gleefully embrace.³ The official hostility made Bei Dao famous but it ultimately led to his forced exile in 1989 following the Tian'anmen Square student protest.

"The exile of the word has begun," Bei Dao announced upon his arrival in Europe in the spring of 1989, immediately becoming the symbol of China's abortive democracy movement.⁴ He revived his short-lived journal Jintian (Today) and made it an important forum for the community of exiled Chinese writers and artists. By now, Bei Dao's writing career in exile is longer than it was in China, and he has a much larger body of work to match, all of which has been translated into over thirty languages. At present, maintaining a principal residence in the United States, Bei Dao continues to be a citizen of the world, giving readings and lectures in places as far away as Latin America and Africa...