112 chapter three
psychologizing. Wang depicts suicide as the inevitable consequence of
“pure” poethood “witnessing truth” and hence “facing death” in an
age governed by “the logic of commerce,” adopting a deceptively sim-
ple opposition of poetry and money that is questioned at various points
in this study. While decrying a popular tendency to glorify deaths in
poetry, Wang himself does just that. His essay was written for Li Xia’s
1999 Essays, Interviews, Recollections and Unpublished Material of Gu Cheng,
Twentieth-Century Chinese Poet: The Poetics of Death (1999), a volume whose
thanatographical motivation shows in the writings of its editor and sev-
eral contributors. Zeng Hong’s commentary in An English Translation of
Poems of the Contemporary Chinese Poet Hai Zi (2005) is also thanatography.
While Zeng makes a laudable effort to acquaint Anglophone readers
with one of the best-known modern Chinese poets, her introduction
of the poet and his poetry is less than balanced. It is, however, a para-
gon of levelheadedness when read side to side with Zhao Qiguang’s
preface to her work. Referring to accounts of Haizi’s suicide that listed
several books he had taken with him on his way to the railroad at
Shanhaiguan, Zhao writes:
I was saddened and flattered when I saw the title of the last book that
Haizi took to another world, because I compiled, co-translated, and
prefaced the Selected Novels of Joseph Conrad. Before leaving for the US in
1982, I handed the manuscript to a publisher and I had scarcely heard
anything about it since. Now I received the most overwhelming feedback
that an author or translator can expect. Haizi is no stranger anymore.
I didn’t know I had such a sincere friend and fellow traveler. Togeth-
er we penetrated the heart of darkness and sailed through a typhoon.
We went there together. We both decided we liked the beauty in those
places. I left but he stayed there, forever.This borders on the perverse. Zhao proceeds to call Haizi’s death “a
gallant and romantic declaration of his passions, devotions and be-
liefs,” and his life a poem—written, of course, in blood.^33
Other representations of Haizi in what foreign-published scholar-
ship there is to date are less overdetermined by the end to his life and
less inclined to mythify and frame his life and work as one, even if
he is almost invariably mentioned in connection with suicide. Yeh’s
essays on death in poetry and the cult of poetry in China are literary-
(^33) Wang Yuechuan 1999; Li Xia 1999—see, for instance, the opening paragraphs
of Li Xia’s foreword, and the essay by Henry Zhao that gave the book its name
(1999); Zeng 2005 and Zhao Qiguang 2005 (ii and v-vi), both in Haizi 2005.