by XIAOLU GUO
Tiananmen Square, Beijing, 1989. PHOTO/Stuart Franklin/Magnum
My generation, once impassioned by the Western literature of rebellion, is now lulled by ‘Wealthy Socialism’
When I first read the Chinese edition of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl in 1988, I was a skinny 15-year-old girl who had lived all her life in a southern Chinese province surrounded by stubborn bamboo mountains. I was shocked by its opening lines, even without understanding them fully: ‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked…’. I repeated the three adjectives: starving, hysterical, naked. Beside me was my brother, who had read the whole poem already. So I asked him: ‘starving and naked, are Americans like our hungry and poor peasants without clothes to wear?’ He answered me dismissively: ‘Are you stupid, or what? America is the richest place in the whole world! The poem’s about spiritual poverty.’ He strode off to his room with a newly obtained copy of On the Road.
Alone, I chewed over the poem, line by line. At that time, like my brother, I had been falling in love with any sort of Western literature I could lay my hands on in Zhejiang province. Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate was also translated that year. Intellectual youth, fed on classical Chinese legends such as Dream of Red The Chamber, suddenly discovered new vocabularies from the West. Everyone was ravenous.
My father, who had recently been promoted to the position of state painter in the local town bureau in compensation for his sufferings in labour camps during the Cultural Revolution, had all these literary magazines and Western music records in his office – chained to the shelves so that no one could steal them. Every day after school my brother and I would go to his office, just to read or look at this stuff from the West. My brother told me that Ginsberg had visited China and had spent a month touring and lecturing in our country. All the elite youth would have read his new poem written during the China visit: One Morning, I Took a Walk in China. What a cool title! I dreamed that one day I would write a poem entitled One Morning, I Took a Walk in America.
The following year, abrim with idealism, my brother left our typhoon-ridden hometown to study in Beijing and quickly found himself caught up in the protests on Tiananmen Square. At home, we followed events closely on our newly bought black-and-white television set. Hundreds of thousands of university students occupied the square, calling for democracy and shouting the slogans of their manifestos in front of Mao’s mausoleum, addressing the then-General Secretary Zhao Ziyang.
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