150 chapter four
up again, this time by himself, urging China’s rulers to get used to
“hearing different, even discordant, voices.”^22 Over the next months
he was harassed by the police and came under the credible threat of
arrest. It may well have been only because of the emergence of the
Protest Movement in April and the media attention that came with it
that his mid-1989 trip to the USA and Europe could go through. Dur-
ing the Protest Movement students publicly cited Bei Dao’s poetry.^23
After June Fourth, like Duoduo and Yang Lian, he found himself on
foreign soil and took part in public protests against the Chinese gov-
ernment’s brutal action. Had he gone back to China, he would have
got in serious political trouble.
From this point onward Bei Dao’s work was thoroughly banned
from domestic publication. In 1991, for instance, the entire print run
of Wang Bin’s Critical Anthology of China’s New Poetry in the Twentieth Cen-
tury (ѠकϪ㑾Ёᮄ䆫䡈䌣䕲) was confiscated when the books
were about to reach the bookstores, with only a couple of copies slip-
ping through into private libraries, the reason being that this tome of a
book, some 1500 pages long and featuring 443 authors, contained six
short poems by Bei Dao. The fact that all had been previously anthol-
ogized any number of times makes the incident a poignant illustration
of the retroactive workings of ideological assessment and censorship.
When a new version of Wang’s original project appeared in 1998, Bei
Dao’s poetry had been duly removed.^24
Bei Dao’s family was torn asunder in the years after June Fourth.
In 1989 his wife, the painter Shao Fei, and their daughter Tiantian
were kept from boarding a plane at Beijing Capital Airport that would
have taken them toward reunion. In the following years Shao Fei and
Tiantian were never granted exit visas at the same time. In November
1994 Bei Dao’s effective banishment by the Chinese government was
confirmed when he flew to Beijing from the USA but was stopped at
the border and summarily deported.^25 Between 2001 and 2005, he was
allowed a number of short-term visits—the first when his father was
critically ill—on condition of keeping a low profile and only leaving
(^22) On a series of such petitions and similar activities in the first months of 1989,
see Barmé & Jaivin 1992: 23-30.
(^23) Bei Dao & LaPiana 1994, Li 1995: 11, Yeh 1996b, McDougall & Louie 1997:
430, Saussy 1999. 24
Wang Bin 1991 and 1998.
(^25) See Van Crevel 1996: 97-98.