Road to East
Asia
Road to East
Asia
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York University
Vol.3, 1998-1999
Both writers explore how reality is viewed from the self's changing perspectives. Their concept of the self apparently stems from Taoism, which cherishes the individual's unrestricted autonomy.1 Yang Lian uses the "yi" motif to convey his worldview. It consists of a circle with its center cut through by the gender-neutral Chinese character "ren" ("person"). The circle represents nature, heaven, and the sun, notes sinologist Mabel Lee.2 Yang Lian believes "Man is an integral part of heaven," she adds. "The unity of heaven and man therefore constitutes ever-changing unities in the world as perceived by the self; poetry is the verbalisation of the self's ever-changing perceptions."3
The many selves of a person are also portrayed in Soul Mountain,
a 560-page fictional autobiography,4 which delves into author Gao Xingjian's
boyhood and his past relationships with women.
The various protagonists, "I," "you," "he," and "she" take on each other's
identity as the novel develops.
The "I" protagonist has escaped from Beijing to the remote Hunan province, where
local residents, in
defiance against the Communist ban on "indecent" songs, are once again
expressing their human need for
love. The character "you" acts as an observer of the author and of everyone he
meets. When "you" is
romantically involved with "she," he fearfully guards his separate identity. The
protagonist "he," Mabel Lee
notes, is "the back of you."5
An Associate Professor in the School of Asian Studies at the University of Sydney, Lee has rendered the works of both writers into English. In a conversation with Road to East Asia, she explains why they hold special appeal. Excerpts:
Wai: In the foreword to Masks and Crocodile, you wrote: "More than any other Chinese poet of modern times, his [Yang Lian's] poetry may be considered poetry about poetry." I am in total agreement with you. How does he blend this tendency and his exilic experience into his poetry?
Lee: I do not
consider him to be living
in exile any more, as he has been back to China several times now. He acutely
felt he was living in exile
while in New Zealand after June 4, 1989. He is now settled in London. He thrives
at social gatherings.
There is, however, an abstract exile which compels him to write. Yang Lian has a certain air of authority about him, and he is always the life of parties. I have done several poetry readings from Masks and Crocodile with him. The most spectacular one was to a hundred people as part of the Festival of Sydney one year. He is a great performer. I read the English and he followed with the Chinese. The audience clapped enthusiastically after every of the four-line poems, and the reading lasted for one hour.
Wai: The idea of "blankness" appears a lot in Masks and Crocodile. Is it similar to the blankness in Bei Dao's landscape over Zero, as discussed in my conversation with Angus Cleghorn?
Lee: Let me
answer without going to
your website. I would prefer not to be influenced by it or Bei Dao's blankness.
I will read it later. As I said
earlier, Yang Lian's feeling of exile is
abstract, but it is nonetheless real for him. He and his wife, Yo Yo--Liu
Youhong, who writes prose and
fiction--have stayed for two longish periods with me in the early 1990s. From my
observations, it seems
that Yang Lian feels a physiological compulsion to write poetry. (See for
example his Crocodile
poems.) He would wake up early in the morning and immediately lock himself away
to write, without
getting a cup of tea or eating anything. He would not
emerge until about 2:00 p.m.
The blankness is the nothingness from which he must construct poetry. The agony he experiences tears at him like a crocodile as he searches for words, the words of his true self buried under layers of social requirements. He is also an artist who demands linguistic perfection in his poetry.
Wai: How well does Yang Lian handle the tension between truth and falsehood in Masks and Crocodile and later poems?
Lee: I think he
does it well, or maybe it
corresponds with my way of looking at things. Both Yang Lian and Gao Xingjian
have a basic outlook like
my own, this is why I like their works. Masks in particular is concerned
with the how the true self
is annihilated by
socialization from the time of parturition. The effect of rigorous enforcement
of ideology during the
Cultural Revolution was an extreme case of annihilation of the self.
Wai: I think he has put an interesting spin on the interdependence of truth and falsehood, which is a paramount concept of Taosim.
Lee:For Yang Lian
and Gao Xingjian it
is the perceptions of the individual self of the writer which is paramount. They
have their unique ways of
artistically portraying this.
Wai: I don't know exactly where I have learned Taoism, but it comes to me naturally, possibly because of my roots and possibly because the concepts are similar to some of those in The Book of Ecclesiastes. I am a Christian.
Lee: I am not a
Christian. I was born in
Australia of Cantonese (poor) merchant background. My father was born in Sydney
and returned as a child
to his native village of Doumen (formerly Zhongshan county but now a county
itself). He returned to
Sydney at the age of seventeen and had very limited education opportunities,
although he was literate. My
mother was also literate. She came with my three older siblings at the beginning
of 1939. I
find that I am close to many elements of Taoist thinking but not in a
religious way. I guess it's an attitude to human existence.
Wai: I am intrigued by the "yi" motif of Yang Lian. As you have noted, the circle represents nature, heaven, and the sun: "Man is an integral part of nature and that Nature does not stand in a controlling position over Man."
Lee: Yang Lian's
present writing retains
this basic philosophy of
Man/person being a part of the cosmos, that Heaven or nothing else controls
him. This I presume would be the state of (self) perfection which he achieves
in the creative act. I think he feels that "yi" completed his pronouncements
on the subject. He has already stated his basic stance towards life, history,
society and the individual.
Wai: The interaction between human vision and the kaleidoscopic world is a recurring theme of contemporary American poetry. William Carlos Williams' "The Red Wheelbarrow," Wallace Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," and Richard Wilbur's "The Beautiful Changes," to name but a few. In your article "Personal Freedom in Twentieth Century China," you have noted a similar concern in Yang Lian's poetry. I also agree with what you say about the long history of the Chinese concept of the self (133).
Lee: Good to hear
that you feel the
same. I am in total agreement with Yang Lian. I believe that one's perceptions
change with one's
experiences and environment, one's education, one's readings, reflections,
etc.
Wai: Your articles have given me scholarly pieces of evidence that support the conclusions I have drawn based on my academic studies of contemporary American literature. It seems that we approach modernism in Chinese literature from two opposing starting points but have arrived at similar conclusions.
Lee: This is
interesting. I think the term
"modernism" was used rather loosely by the Chinese writers themselves in the
late 1970s and early 1980s.
When I first met Yang Lian in 1988 in Sydney, he seemed to be somehow ambiguous
about the term. As I
say in the Masks & Crocodile introduction, the so-called Menglong poets
all read modernist poets
such as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Yang Lian says that he was later than the
other Beijing poets in reading
modernist works in translation: up to that point he wrote classical Chinese
poetry. I was interested in
making a comparison, but he told me he burnt it all once he started reading
modernist poetry.
I was drawn to the feel of his language. I had not considered myself a translator previously, but a mutual friend, a Chinese artist, brought him to my house one day. They saw my many bottles of Maotai and decided to spend Chinese New Year with me. Many other parties followed. One day he asked if I would like to translate Masks & Crocodile, "this small collection of very short lined poems." I later translated Yang Lian's Yi, but getting a publisher is not easy. He has now signed a contract with Sun and Moon on the basis of my translation. He tells me that they will be sending me a separate contract. I still have not heard from Sun and Moon but should contact them, I guess.
Wai: Of all the poems written by Yang Lian, which one is your favorite?
Lee: I think I
am not one for picking
favorites; I like them all: for their
stark imagery and for the way the words sound together and what he is saying.
He is an artist who works in the linguistic medium i.e. in the Chinese
language.
Wai: What kind of "changes," beautiful and otherwise, has Yang Lian, as a poet, gone through since 1989?
Lee: He has begun
writing in English,
and can speak English with confidence. He resisted speaking English to begin
with because he was afraid it
would corrupt his Chinese. I think he is still the same Yang Lian but he seems
to be holding his own and
mixing with writers successfully both in Europe and the U.S. His sister Rey Yang
did
her PhD at the University of California and is now teaching Chinese there, I
think. Her book The Spider
Eaters (University of California Press) was published this year or last
year. It is written in English.
Probably the most beautiful thing is for Yang Lian to have Crocodile 1-15 published in Poems for the Millennium: The University Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry , Volume II, edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris (1998) 763-66.
Wai: Where is Yang Lian now? What is he doing?
Lee: Yang Lian is
based in London, but
he travels frequently to Europe. I will be seeing him in Sils-Maria
(Switzerland), where he will be reading
poetry at the Nietzsche in East Asia conference which I will also be
attending.
Wai: How would you briefly compare Yang Lian with Bei Dao and Duo Duo. Of all the Chinese poets, why have you selected Yang Lian as the focus of your academic study?
Lee: It was a
case of Yang Lian selected
me. I like his poetry. . . I did translations of poetry with
students but had never thought of myself as a translator. Before that I had
translated Lu Xun's Wild Grass poems and his classical poems as parts of
my
articles. Apart from Yang Lian, I have only translated Gao Xingjian's work. I
like
their use of the Chinese language, and what they do with it. I have not read
much of Duo Duo's work but it is somehow more complex and I would need to
read more before making an assessment. In recent years I have been burdened
with a heavy administrative load and have done little reading apart from Yang
Lian and Gao
Xingjian when there was a little time available. I liked Bei Dao's early
poems but have not read his later ones.
Wai: The creative process, as depicted by Yang Lian, is close to some Taoist concepts, which have influenced many modern American poets directly or indirectly. Isn't Yang Lian's modernism at least partly homegrown?
Lee: The word
"modernism" worries
me. Perhaps just "modern" would be better. Chinese poets in the 1930s were
writing modernist works. I
think the Jintian poets and those who wrote about the writings of the
Jintian poets both in
China and the West gave them this label and compared them with
Western modernist writers, sometimes unfavorably.
Wai: Yang Lian's poetry does have a classical ring to it, but it is near-impossible to be translated into English and other European languages. While Chinese characters are monosyllabic, many of the words in European languages are polysyllabic. There are other difficulties involved as well. What are they? What are your experiences as Yang Lian's translator?
Lee: The classical ring is strongest in his "Yi" collection. His poetry has less of a classical ring in later poetry such as "Masks 7 Crocodile"; nonetheless a Chinese musicality continues to characterize his poetry. This is because he has a high sensitivity to music and writes with sounds in his mind.
Wai: Who are the leading Chinese literary exiles in Australia. How well are they received? In your article presented at Leiden University in 1997, you featured quite a number of Chinese writers based in Australia.
Lee: I don't
consider any of them exiles,
except perhaps in an "abstract" sense, as they can come and go freely to China,
and they do.
Wai: Apart from Yang Lian, why do you have an affinity with Gao Xingjian?
Lee: As in the
case with Yang Lian, it
was the language of his novel Lingshan ("Soul Mountain") which attracted
me. I met Gao Xingjian
through Yang Lian in Paris in 1991 when I was on my way to Copenhagen to see
friends and to see Yang
Lian. I have recently completed the 560-page novel, and the manuscript is now
with a literary agent.
Wai: Gao Xingjian was made Chevalier de l'Ordere des Arts et des Lettres de la France in 1992. Why? What are some of his accomplishments as an exile?
Lee: Gao Xingjian
is truly a writer in
exile who believes he cannot return while the Communist Party is in power. He
himself is not clear why he
was so honored. He has also written a few plays in French. Many of his plays
have been performed in
Sweden, France, Germany, Poland, and Italy. His novel Lingshan has been
published in Swedish,
French, and a Greek translation from the French version is forthcoming. I hope
my English version will
also find publishers. Gao has supported himself through selling his ink
paintings.
Notes
1. Mabel Lee, "Personal Freedom in Twentieth-Century China: Reclaiming the Self in Yang Lian's Yi and Gao Xingjian's Lingshan," in History, Literature and Society: Essays in Honour of S.N. Mukherjee (Sydney: The Sydney Association for Studies in Society and Culture (1997), 133-55.
2. Mabel Lee, "Introduction," in Yang Lian, Masks & Crocodile, translated by Mabel Lee (Broadway, NSW: Wild Peony, 1990) 11.
3. Mabel Lee, "Personal Freedom in Twentieth-Century China," 141.
4. Mabel Lee, "Gao Xingjian's Lingshan/Soul Mountain: Modernism and the Chinese Writer," Heat 4 (1997) 128-143. The summary of Soul Mountain and its analysis, given in this interview, is based on Lee's article. The Chinese version of the novel, which the author began writing in 1982, was published in Taipei in 1990. Since then, it has been translated into Swedish and French: Andarnas berg (1992), by Goran Malmqvist; and La Montagne de l'Ame (1995), by Noel and Liliane Dutrait.
5. Ibid., 139.