Contemporary China Confronting Orthodoxy

Bai Hua

(China, 1956)

Born in Sichuan province in 1956, Bai Hua seems to have decided from an early age to pursue a writing life. After completing an English degree at the Guangzhou Foreign Languages Institute, he went on to study an MA in Western Literary Trends at Sichuan University.

He comes across as a highly serious writer, steeped in the classical Chinese tradition, but keen to apply its lessons to the contemporary world. The short poem ‘Reality’ seems to express his view of writing poetry as a painstaking harvesting of the real.

This is gentleness, not the rhetoric of gentleness
This is tedium, the sheer fact of tedium

Ah! Prospects, readings, about-faces
All of these things are slow . . .

The slowness inherent in the composition also influences the reading of such poems. One begins, is stumped by an image or a reference, continues, begins to get a sense of where the poem is headed, is stumped again, and returns to the beginning in search of fresh clues. Clearly, Bai Hua doesn’t want us to read him too quickly, and he doesn’t allow his poems to settle into readily decipherable patterns.

The exception is his more political work. Poems such as ‘Hate’, ‘Heaven Watches On’ and ‘Wheat: In Memory of Haizi’ are sharply focused on some of the political realities of contemporary China and try bravely, if bluntly, to confront orthodoxy with an alternative picture of recent historical events. As a result of comments Bai Hua made during the events of 1989, it has been difficult for him to get his work published in China.

You can probably hear the screaming in these translations: I had to drag them kicking and screaming into English, fighting every inch of the way with, and against, their cultural and poetic resistance. Like his allusive ‘Cloud Diviner’, Bai Hua uses the poetic culture of China to scale the heights, to create a vantage point from which to see the gold, geometry and palaces that materialise in the mists of language.

Simon Patton

Some of his poems

Ancient Tune

I

One youth slides off towards the abyss

One youth slides off towards the abyss

And is followed by another . . .

Happiness will soon be obsolete

A boy writes down a line of poetry

One line, alas, just one single line :

“Above the Bridge of Twenty Four the moon dispels the night”

II

Winter, South of the River

You cannot focus your thoughts or find a theme

Yaorou pork leg, the Ge Garden, Shanghai folk

The tour guide is hot with enthusiasm

Photo, please. A photo

His frozen red face smiles

Cloud Diviner

The Cloud Diviner is in a hurry to depart
He climbs a height and gazes down from afar
Gold, geometry, and palaces grow
In the heavy evening mist in his eyes

The west wind abruptly changes course in a slum lane
A hero is about to set out on a thousand-mile journey
The Cloud Diviner has spied
The excitement in his straw sandals and his cloth shirt

Remoter mountain valleys coalesce in the distance
At odd intervals the faint sound of bells is heard
Two boys sweep the pavilion’s terrace
The Cloud Diviner sits facing the solitary dusk

Auspicious clouds are magnanimous
A wizened spiritual guide sits in silence
Alone, he breathes fire and makes pills of immortality
The Cloud Diviner sees through to the patterns inside stones

Days pass in the country with timely winds and rain
Vegetables grow in the fields, and water flows in the creeks
While the verdant freshness is still changed here
The Cloud Diviner has already reached the next hilltop

Fish

The bewildering fish does not know how to sing
From silence on to silence it swims

Needs it has, and the need to speak
Instead, blind and blank, it stares at a rock

To endure is a power so precise in it
Physical decline hurries it along the road of kindness

What can it be? An image of a people
Or the act of a soundless absorption?

The face of Blame is turned towards Shadow
The reticence of Death is turned towards Error

A metaphor born to explain some fact:
The throat an ambiguous pain gives rise to

Hate

This hate has the smell of fatty meat
And the smell of ribs
It springs from ideology’s flat chest
And from the excess hair of class

I have met her, this woman who hates with every cell
She wears a bleak political uniform
Her face filled with a sex-changed world view
Her nerves slack after three years of kow-towing

Has she gone mad, this inhuman soul?
Watch how this Red woman soldier who wallows in struggle
Is starting an uprising, from her flesh to her breathing
To the blind venom that drips from her teeth

A woman who lives only to hate
A pathetic woman whose lungs burn
She is here in amongst us already
And her war on us has begun

Heaven Watches On

Twilight falls
My homeland dries out
A line of soldiers pass outside my home
Five willow trees stand before the gate

I sit bored by a window
Watching a man in the street eat beans
Someone opposite is ramming the earth
Someone stands around for no reason
Gazing at the hills opposite

The day is about to go out
Landlords will soon be killed
Let them do as they please
The Reds are on their way

Precipice

In one city there is one man
In two cities there is one orientation
The lonely overcoat waits in silence

A strange journey
A bashful yet gratuitous advance
To requite one kind of weather
Restraint is murdering time

Don’t go up to the attic at night
An address has one death of its own
That indistinct white neck
Will turn around and face you

At this moment you are making a poem
Which amounts to making a sunken ship
A black tree
Or a rain-shrouded embankment

Endurance becomes unfathomable
Excessive riddles
Ears of the enigmatic Diao Chan
For no good reason, determination departs

Organs shrivel all at once Li He weeps bitterly
Those Tang-dynasty hands will never return

Reality

This is gentleness, not the rhetoric of gentleness
This is tedium, the sheer fact of tedium

Ah! Prospects, readings, about-faces
All of these things are so slow

Through long nights, the harvesting is not done out of necessity
Through long nights, the speed should be left out

And winter could just as well be summer
And Lu Xun could just as well be Lin Yutang

Wheat In Memory of Haizi

Bitter sacrifice strengthens bold resolve
Which dares to make sun and moon shine in new skies.
Mao Zedong

Wheat, as I stand here before you
I let my aching hands hang down by my sides
Wheat, with my Mao badge pinned over my heart
I ask you to desist from your mad growth!

Wheat! Wheat! Wheat!
There will be bloodshed in the North account of this
See for yourself: from Anhui province to my hands
And then all the way to China’s core
A grain of spirit is transmitted at lightning speed

Who gave the order to begin the hunger strike?
Wheat! Wheat! Wheat!
A tear falls and strikes the crown of Starvation’s head
You lead the hunger strike into its 168th hour

Wheat. Our wheat
Ah, wheat, wheat of Mother Earth
In the vast sky stars shine brightly
The South weeps within bodies of flesh

Please announce the next move, wheat! The next move!
The next move can only be Sacrifice
The next move can never be Feast