thanatography and the poetic voice 119“Afterword,” which occupies a central position among commentar-
ies on Haizi, even if it expresses what is clearly a minority viewpoint.
Xi Chuan cites Haizi’s lifestyle as a third possible reason. He recalls
that Haizi lived in seclusion and kept social contacts at bay for fear of
distraction from his art, and as a result suffered from loneliness and
lacked a social network that might have kept him from killing himself.
Allegedly, Haizi once asked the owner of a Changping restaurant for
drink in exchange for a public recital, and the owner replied that he
could drink all he wanted, as long as he did not read any poetry. In
poetry circles, the anecdote has become something of a classic, if only
because it is well suited to serve as an illustration of the “marginaliza-
tion” of poetry or indeed its being in “crisis” as measured against social
trends of consumerism, commercialization and so on.
Xi Chuan’s fourth category is that of “the issue of honor” (㤷䁝
䯂乬), meaning public acceptance of one’s art. He depicts Haizi and
all other Chinese avant-garde poets as facing mistrust by society at
large and conservative forces in literature, calling this “not a literary
but a political problem.” In addition, he remembers Haizi as vulner-
able to infighting within the avant-garde, a famous example being
poet Duoduo’s and others’ scathing criticism of Haizi’s epic poetry
at a gathering of The Survivors poetry club at Wang Jiaxin’s home in
central Beijing, late in 1988. The event reputedly left Haizi devastated.
Wei’an, writing around the same time as Xi Chuan, also associates
it with his suicide. Wang Jiaxin, reminiscing in 2001, disagrees.^41 Xi
Chuan goes on to note that on one occasion, a better-known poet—
whom he calls “LMN,” in a series of alphabetically veiled attacks
(“poet AB,” “poet CD”) on those who wronged Haizi in one way or
another—plagiarized a typescript Haizi had sent around to friends,
fellow poets and editors, and got away with it. The fifth category is
Haizi’s fascination with qigong, a traditional Chinese technique to
control one’s vital energy, mostly through controlled breathing and
meditation. Qigong is associated with exceptional physical abilities,
such as in martial arts and medicine. According to Xi Chuan, when
Haizi felt that he was entering higher stages of qigong he began to suf-
fer from delusions. Specifically,
(^41) Wei’an 1994: 107; Wang Jiaxin 2002: 33-40, esp 37.