Bei Dao

Exile from land where royalties talk replaces culure:

BEI DAO is not superstitious, he assured me. The Chinese poet was waiting in a Sydney hotel lobby, the same spot where I had interviewed a visitor to last year's Sydney Writers' Festival.

Anna Politkovskaya, the fearless Russian journalist, had shrugged off the death threats, and gone back to Moscow. Just over four months later she was gunned down on her doorstep.

Exiled for 18 years after being blacklisted as a leading counter-revolutionary, Bei Dao is being drawn back towards his homeland, where the risk he sees is not physical elimination but slow death of the culture that sustains him.

Later this year, he quits his exile in the West to take up a post at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, at least on the periphery of China.

Lean and scholarly at 57, in the tweed jacket and chinos of the American academic he has recently been, Bei Dao hardly looks like an enemy of the people.

In the 1980s, it was all different. The young Zhao Zhenkai had inspired a generation as Bei Dao ("Northern Island"), the leading "misty poet" expressing the disillusionment of a generation fired up in Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, then told by a new leader to get rich.

His bitter lines were on banners in Beijing's Tiananmen Square when that movement reached its climax in 1989. Away at a literary gathering in Berlin when the tanks finally swept in, Bei Dao found himself in unexpected exile.

He was allowed back only in short visits over 2001-2003 to see his dying father, under strict conditions about whom he could see and where he could go.

It was a changed Beijing. "Of course the physical changes were very obvious. But changes in the mentality … people used to be very relaxed, very honest, very direct, straightforward. Now the pace is getting faster and faster, people are so busy, it's getting hard to meet, to find time for classmates to get together.

"The topics are quite different from the 1980s: we used to talk about culture, literature, arts. Now most people talk about money, sports, like anywhere in the Western world."

He found a commercialism that has invaded and coarsened all arts, with writers talking incessantly about their royalties, frauds and forgeries everywhere, and artists cynically playing off East and West with tired symbols such as Mao.

A brief return only turns the knife for the exile.

"You feel that it is not your home that is in your mind, that it's somewhere else," Bei Dao said. "It belongs to a strange world to which you don't belong."

Hamish McDonald
writing for the Sydney Morning Herald
May 2009