A little about my semester
Exam in Chinese History today. I realized last night that in the past two weeks, I’ve read 4 books about China and written 3 papers on various aspects of Chinese history or politics. My entire semester, actually, has been full of China—it’s been fun (minus exams and all-nighters). Besides Modern Chinese History, I’ve also been taking Chinese 301 (language) and Intelligence and Foreign Policy. For that class I was assigned the China “desk officer” and tasked to prepare a weekly briefing on what’s up in the Middle Kingdom. So anyway, I thought I’d share a little bit. As I have time, I’ll post snippets of things that I’ve read or written—random for the most part I suspect, but we’ll see. Oh, and please leave comments, if you care to!
~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~
So, tonight my brain is fried and I’m not in the mood for serious analysis. Here’s a quotation from Almost A Revolution, written by Shen Tong, one of the organizers of the student movement that resulted in the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989.
“That summer, to make extra money, Qiu was also selling a three-volume collection of poetry, Xinshichao Shiji, or New Age Poetry Collection, which had just been released by one of the publishing houses on campus. I became one of thirty students who sold this collection at Beida. At first I was just helping Qiu, but when I started to read the poetry, I wanted everyone else to read it too.
The book collected the work of a generation of writers who had grown up during the Cultural Revolution. These poets, whose work had first become public during the 1976 movement in Tiananmen Square and had resurfaced on the Democracy Wall in 1978, were now in their late twenties and early thirties. When the government had crushed the Democracy Wall Movement, their poetry, which the Communist Party considered “spiritual pollution,” had gone underground again. Although some of it had been written during the Cultural Revolution, it had never been collected and published.
Chinese poetry written before the Cultural Revolution painted lovely pictures of landscapes and celebrated the beauty of nature. During the 1960s and 1970s, however, poetry became so filled with political slogans and revolutionary imagery that it lost its lyricism. But this group of writers, known as the Misty Poets because their images were impressionistic and full of sorrow, had a style completely unlike that of any Chinese poets I had ever read. The poems, which often expressed the poets’ suffering during the Cultural Revolution and which came to be known as “scar literature,” were beautifully written and also had deep meaning. The poets looked inside themselves for inspiration. They were individualists, a trait I cherished but had seen only in Western poetry.
For the first time I began to learn about contemporary China and about life outside my own sheltered environment. I could feel the pain, the loneliness, and the power in this poetry. […] Before I read the New Age Poetry Collection, I was hooked on Western poetry. But now I was reading pure Chinese poetry that had the same resonance as Byron, Shelley, and Tagore. Western poetry was beautiful, but it had nothing to do with my own world. […]
I proudly brought the books home to show my father. He had always been the one to give me books and introduce me to the writers, but now I had a collection of poems I knew were dear to him, since I had stood with him at the Democracy Wall seven years before as he intently read the works of the Misty Poets. He said very little to me about the collection, perhaps because he was concerned that the poems might still be considered illegal. But I noticed that he kept the books under his pillow for a very long time, which told me that he read them every night before he went to sleep.
That summer I discovered for myself why these poems meant so much to my father. I saw in them the power of ideas. No matter how hard the government had tried to crush them, they kept coming back. I discovered through these poems that art and literature could be active. Through their writing, the Misty Poets told people about themselves and about what was wrong in China. That summer showed me that I was ready to do more than just cultivate myself; I was ready to act, to put my ideas—whenever I figured out what they were—into practice.”
Almost a Revolution
~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~
So, tonight my brain is fried and I’m not in the mood for serious analysis. Here’s a quotation from Almost A Revolution, written by Shen Tong, one of the organizers of the student movement that resulted in the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989.
“That summer, to make extra money, Qiu was also selling a three-volume collection of poetry, Xinshichao Shiji, or New Age Poetry Collection, which had just been released by one of the publishing houses on campus. I became one of thirty students who sold this collection at Beida. At first I was just helping Qiu, but when I started to read the poetry, I wanted everyone else to read it too.
The book collected the work of a generation of writers who had grown up during the Cultural Revolution. These poets, whose work had first become public during the 1976 movement in Tiananmen Square and had resurfaced on the Democracy Wall in 1978, were now in their late twenties and early thirties. When the government had crushed the Democracy Wall Movement, their poetry, which the Communist Party considered “spiritual pollution,” had gone underground again. Although some of it had been written during the Cultural Revolution, it had never been collected and published.
Chinese poetry written before the Cultural Revolution painted lovely pictures of landscapes and celebrated the beauty of nature. During the 1960s and 1970s, however, poetry became so filled with political slogans and revolutionary imagery that it lost its lyricism. But this group of writers, known as the Misty Poets because their images were impressionistic and full of sorrow, had a style completely unlike that of any Chinese poets I had ever read. The poems, which often expressed the poets’ suffering during the Cultural Revolution and which came to be known as “scar literature,” were beautifully written and also had deep meaning. The poets looked inside themselves for inspiration. They were individualists, a trait I cherished but had seen only in Western poetry.
For the first time I began to learn about contemporary China and about life outside my own sheltered environment. I could feel the pain, the loneliness, and the power in this poetry. […] Before I read the New Age Poetry Collection, I was hooked on Western poetry. But now I was reading pure Chinese poetry that had the same resonance as Byron, Shelley, and Tagore. Western poetry was beautiful, but it had nothing to do with my own world. […]
I proudly brought the books home to show my father. He had always been the one to give me books and introduce me to the writers, but now I had a collection of poems I knew were dear to him, since I had stood with him at the Democracy Wall seven years before as he intently read the works of the Misty Poets. He said very little to me about the collection, perhaps because he was concerned that the poems might still be considered illegal. But I noticed that he kept the books under his pillow for a very long time, which told me that he read them every night before he went to sleep.
That summer I discovered for myself why these poems meant so much to my father. I saw in them the power of ideas. No matter how hard the government had tried to crush them, they kept coming back. I discovered through these poems that art and literature could be active. Through their writing, the Misty Poets told people about themselves and about what was wrong in China. That summer showed me that I was ready to do more than just cultivate myself; I was ready to act, to put my ideas—whenever I figured out what they were—into practice.”
Almost a Revolution
posted by Mike and Jean Anne at 8:48 PM
<< Home