Black Map
by Bei Dao
in the end, cold crows piece together
the night: a black map
I’ve come home—the way back
longer than the wrong road
long as a life
bring the heart of winter
when spring water and horse pills
become the words of night
when memory barks
a rainbow haunts the black market
my father’s life-spark small as a pea
I am his echo
turning the corner of encounters
a former lover hides in a wind
swirling with letters
Beijing, let me
toast your lamplights
let my white hair lead
the way through the black map
as though a storm were taking you to fly
I wait in line until the small window
shuts: O the bright moon
I go home—reunions
are one less
fewer than goodbye
[Poem by Bei Dao, Translation by Eliot Weinberger, from The Rose of Time: New & Selected Poems (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2010), re-published at PoetryFoundation.org.]
There’s an old saying in Beijing: “First there’s the Gate of Virtuous Triumph, then Beijing City behind it.” During the Yuan dynasty, Dadu, the Grand Capital, was called Khanbaliq, and the Gate of Virtuous Triumph was known as Jiande Gate (健德门), or the Gate of Strong Virtue. In 1368, Xu Da led an army of one hundred thousand soldiers to conquer the city, and Emperor Shundi fled, escaping through the Gate of Strong Virtue, which was subsequently renamed the Gate of Triumph (德胜门). City walls indicated the boundary between the metropolis and the pastoral, that desolate wasteland one entered upon leaving the Gate of Virtuous Triumph for the northern outskirts. According to legend, the ghosts of lost souls roam the barren fields there. That’s the city gate that Bei Dao opens in this book and invites us to rediscover through his memories.
Chinese poet Bei Dao (北岛; pen-name of Zhao Zhenkai; 趙振开) emerged as one of the most influential “Misty” or Obscure Poets (朦胧诗人) in the late 1970s. He co-founded the famous literary magazine Today (今天) which was central to the menglong movement and was published on the mainland from 1978 until it was banned in 1980. Bei Dao was involved in pro-democracy movements in 1976 and 1987, and he was forced into exile in 1989 when prohibited from returning to China following a conference trip to Berlin. Born and raised in Beijing, Bei Dao spent decades in Europe (England, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, France) and the USA. In his memoir City Gate, Open Up, the author tries to recreate a city that doesn’t feel like home anymore. Through heartrending recollection and portraits, the author depicts the generations who have lived through those turbulent and fairly disturbing times.
When Bei Dao returns to Beijing, everything is completely different. The shock of this experience released the flood of memories and emotions that sparked City Gate, Open Up.
This memoir tells a narrative with lyrical qualities about growing up during the birth of the People’s Republic, surviving through the chaotic years of the Great Leap Forward, and experiencing the whole strange environment of the Cultural Revolution. Including both hard times of famine and ambiguous feelings of political celebration, the memoir doesn’t fall into any type of ideological promotion.
When reading the synopsis of City Gate, Open Up while knowing this acclaimed poet’s political background, one might wonder if the book is just a political pamphlet. However, the reading experience is much closer to a memoir, a way of peeping into the poet’s past life from afar. You can genuinely feel Bei Dao’s need to “put down” his memories so as to externalize and register them, as if this was something therapeutic, almost cathartic. It’s not an easy read since there is no dialogue, rather the whole book is one long monologue with some excerpts from other people in Bei Dao’s life, such as from his father’s diary. This book is a great way to understand where the Misty Poets came from—the 20th-century Chinese poets who reacted against the restrictions on art during the Cultural Revolution and whose work has been officially denounced as “obscure”, “misty”, or “hazy” poetry. Although not being completely political, it has unavoidable political and sociological views about Chinese society. Still, it’s not the best reading for people searching for an accurate account of political events, since the personal point of view of the author makes the reading of the facts rather emotional and not so historically objective. I would say that City Gate, Open Up will be the most interesting for Chinese literature enthusiasts.
While describing the author’s relationships as a child and teenager with friends and family, especially the sometimes turbulent relationship with his father, Bei Dao also observes the peculiarities and contradictions of the political messages surrounding him.
He remembers Chairman Mao making appeals for stories about not being afraid of ghosts to be told in schools, but to not fear ghosts requires a troubling complication: One must first accept the existence of ghosts to prove one shouldn’t be afraid of them. That’s the kind of memory that sets the tone for the episodes to come: “During the Cultural Revolution we’d make revolution by day and tell ghost stories by night, as if ghosts and revolution didn’t contradict each other at all. […] As fluorescent lights became more common after 1970, Beijing suddenly turned bright and ghosts no longer manifested themselves” (Kindle Location 120).
That was also a period of growing interest in foreign cultures and arts. Descriptions of how the author listened to Paganini for the first time and how it caused a feverish obsession among all his friends attending underground saloons is an example of how he characterizes those times. His friend Kang Cheng who taught himself German would translate word for word the liner notes on the LP cover for the other students. When that rousing Sturm und Drang theme resounded bold and unrestrained, Kang Cheng would wave his arms as if conducting the strings with the rest of the orchestra. “Just like a bird in the wind, rushing into the open sky, rising to new heights, then falling, and yet unyielding, unwavering, it rises higher, and rises still higher” (Kindle Location 822).
Bei Dao grew up with a father who regularly bought books. Among the works of Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin-Mao, the collected works of Lu Xun could also be found on the shelves of the poet’s house, as well as classical texts and modern dictionaries such as Three Hundred Tang Poems, Ci Poems of the Song Dynasty, Perfected Admiration of Ancient Prose, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Water Margin, and Dream of the Red Chamber (Kindle Location 1739).
In fourth-grade Chinese class, Zhao Zhenkai wrote his first poem, bricolaged together from a number of poems published in People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the CPC. He used an assortment of weighty-sounding phrases, such as “the wheel of history rolls forth”, “imperialist lapdogs”, “mantis arms blocking the cars”, “communist tomorrow”, etc.
At the start of the 1970s, rising into his early twenties, Zhao Zhenkai was already starting to write poems and novels. He frequently asked for sick leave and stayed home, turning the kitchen into his study, shutting the door, and immersing himself in his work. “Sometimes I’d get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and the dull yellow light in the kitchen would still be burning,” Bei Dao’s father wrote in his notebook (Kindle Location 1521).
But though some of his intellectual curiosity could be fed, the challenge was to find real food during those difficult times. The Great Famine was a time of daily desperation and fear. Everyone talked about how to get enough to eat, how to survive. Chairman Mao issued his own directives: “Ration according to the people, so when busy eat more, when idle eat less, when busy eat dried foods, when idle eat lean foods, when neither busy nor idle, half dried half lean, mix yams and greens and radishes and cluster beans and taro root and so on” (Kindle Location 1041). School hours were reduced; physical education class suspended; teachers urged everyone to save their energy, move less, recline more, go straight to sleep after dinner.
The hunger was at the same time mixed with a strange feeling of celebration:
“For me, the start of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution seemed like a carnival” (Kindle Location 1424).
Bei Dao gives us an insider perspective on how things were handled when hunger struck his family and relatives, as well as how teachers and the educational system as a whole responded to the scenario of political change. For the poet, the swift shift into mathematics and science was very disappointing since language, arts and social sciences were always his favorite subjects.
“The school day had barely begun when, lightly flicking the beads of an abacus, I suddenly realized the seriousness of my problem: The dominance of the language arts was over, its halcyon days past; mathematics, physics, chemistry held the keys; the nightmare smothered me until I couldn’t breathe, especially thinking about math, one glance at an integer and a thick fog swallowed me, east confused with west, north with south. All my peers were in you-leap-and-I’ll-leap-farther math-mode, some already using the Junior 3 calculus textbook. I moaned bitterly to myself, regretting that I had ever wormed my way into this Heavenly Hall of Numbers. Truthfully, the mood of the whole school felt oppressive, though the reasons why were very difficult to discern, like trying to trace dragon veins in a mountain — something always seemed off” (Kindle Location 2299).
High tide arrived on August 4, 1966, a Sunday. More than twenty teachers and school leaders were paraded around with tall paper hats atop their heads and wooden signboards around their necks, until at last they were led to the playing field, where they staggered through the throngs of screaming students who shamed them with epithets while punching and kicking them. Then they were forced to sing the “Battle Song of the Sorrowful Ghost” in unison: “I am an ox-ghost snake-demon / I am guilty before the people / I am guilty / I am damned / The people’s iron hammer / Has smashed me and mashed me up . . .”
Bei Dao writes, “As we had no choice but to attend, we made a garland of flowers and brushed Lu Xun’s elegiac couplet — ‘In enduring the sight of friends becoming new ghosts / Fury seeks a little verse in a thicket of swords’” (Kindle Location 2823).
As for the events that led the author to exile, the book doesn’t tell any specifics. He characterizes the 1980s as a white corridor connecting two nights — danger signs lurked here and there, shadows emerging from shadows, yet everyone seemed so full of hope, “until we entered a night of even greater loss, of the people wholly lost” (Kindle Location 3421).
In 2001, to visit his sick father, the exiled poet Bei Dao returned to his homeland for the first time in over twenty years. The city of his birth was totally unrecognizable. “My city that once was had vanished,” he writes: “I was a foreigner in my hometown.”
The way in which the poet describes the domestic management approach of his dying father may be the allegorical conclusion about the social problems and the political state of the country.
“In truth, within the heart of many Chinese-blooded men resides a little tyrant who plays a complicated role: In society, the little tyrant is essentially a magistrate’s servant, a docile subject, true to the menial tasks at hand and never crosses Lei Chi River for the capital, taking not one pace over the fixed boundary; but then, once rich his face changes, and he treats rivals and commoners with vicious cruelty, something particularly apparent with each successive generation of political rebels, the key being to switch smoothly, no need for a period of transition. In the family, the little tyrant rules by force, with no equals to speak of, neither wife nor child, to the degree that the master of the house has everyone in the palm of his hand” (Kindle Location 3444).
City Gate, Open Up by Bei Dao, translation by Jeffrey Yang.
Sara F. Costa is a Portuguese poet. She has published five poetry collections that won several literary prizes in Portugal. She has an MA in Intercultural Studies: Portuguese/Chinese from Tianjin Foreign Studies University. Her verses have been translated into several languages and featured in literary journals across the world. As an emerging European poet, she was an invited author of the International Istanbul Poetry Festival 2017. In 2018, Sara worked in the organization of The Script Road-Macau Literary Festival and China-European Union Literary Festival in Shanghai and Suzhou. She translates Chinese poetry into Portuguese and is currently living in Beijing coordinating events for the Spittoon Beijing-based arts collective. She also hosts the bi-weekly Spittoon Poetry Workshop.