exile 139name of law and order in their native land—Duoduo as one of the first
witnesses of the mayhem in Beijing to arrive in the West—all three
became enmeshed in an uncontrollable media discourse that tended to
portray them as exiled political dissidents rather than poets. Contrary
to plan, they ended up staying abroad. Other mainland-Chinese poets
had moved to foreign countries from the mid-1980s onward, including
Zhang Zhen, Yan Li, Zhang Zao, Jiang He, Beiling and Gu Cheng, in
roughly chronological order. I cite Yang Lian, Bei Dao and Duoduo
as examples because they were overtaken by the events at home while
journeying abroad. Partly as a result, they enjoyed—or suffered—high
visibility as exiles. Each traveled widely and lived in various countries
before settling in the UK, the USA and the Netherlands respective-
ly, and later making the occasional short-term visit to China, now as
holders of foreign citizenship. Duoduo eventually returned to live in
China in 2004.
During the cultural purge after June Fourth and later in the 1990s,
yet more poets went on long sojourns or settled abroad, most if not
all in Western countries. Wang Jiaxin (1957), the third poet discussed
in this chapter, lived in the UK in 1992-1993. Others include Jing-
bute, Xue Di, Hu Dong, Song Lin, Zhai Yongming, Ouyang Jianghe,
Huang Xiang, Meng Lang and Xiao Kaiyu: again, in roughly chrono-
logical order, from soon after the massacre until the turn of the century.
Several had had their brushes with the Chinese authorities, with ex-
periences ranging from intrusive surveillance to imprisonment. If this
was usually on account of political protest or intellectual and cultural
activism that were incompatible with state-sanctioned orthodoxy, that
is not to say they were all “dissidents” who happened to write poetry,
an infelicitous description of the sort that has often been applied to
Bei Dao and others. For their subsistence many Chinese poets abroad
have relied on adoption by cultural and academic networks, as writers
in residence and sometimes as teachers. Such support has been mo-
tivated by their post-June-Fourth status as exiles among other things.
I second Haun Saussy’s rebuttal of Zhang Xudong’s disparagement of
the integrity of institutions outside China that have supported them,
and of their poetry, as noted in chapter One. Zhang shows little regard
for the development of their art over the years.^2
(^2) Cf Duckworth 1991 and Zhang Zhen 1999b: 65. Saussy 1999, Zhang Xudong
1997: 136.