exile 151Beijing for domestic travel with official permits. In «For Bei Dao» (㒭
࣫ቯ, 2004), Shizhi recalls one such visit:^26
At parting, when you turned and walked away from me
a gust of wind lifted your coat up high
taking you along to drift through foreign lands
unceasing worry made me set pen to paper that nightIn 2005 the authorities suspended the intermittent permission they
had given Bei Dao to visit China and restore something of a “real”
domestic presence. On the level of a single individual, this illustrates
the PRC authorities’ tactics of alternate release (ᬒ) and restraint (ᬊ)
in their exercise of political control, lucidly analyzed for the realm of
literature by Perry Link.^27 Bei Dao’s conditional right of entry was
suspended after he refused to comply with demands for ideological
submission and politically correct behavior, as measured by the Com-
munist Party’s position on issues such as June Fourth and, more gener-
ally, human rights.
As for Bei Dao’s self-perception and his public presentation, where-
as he appears less committed to maintaining a strong media presence
than Yang Lian, and has—like Yang—often vented his frustration at
the politicization of his poetry that the word exile almost invariably
entails, he has also referred to himself as a poet in exile ever since
June Fourth. Barely a month after the massacre, in an interview with
Suizi Zhang-Kubin, he outlined the future of PRC literature in three
compartments: official, underground and exile. When invited to write
an autobiographical essay for the Amsterdam cultural center De Balie
in 1990, he called it “An Exile Looking Back” (ϔϾ⌕ѵ㗙ⱘಲ乒).
There are many more such examples.^28
The circumstances of Wang Jiaxin’s sojourn abroad are less clear-
cut than those of Yang Lian or Bei Dao. Wang appeared on the heels
of the early Obscure poets featured in Today that include Bei Dao and
Yang Lian. He counts as one of the most senior of a younger genera-
tion—or, depending on historical and critical perspectives, as a junior
associate of the Today poets, with whom he established contact early
on, during his student days in Wuhan. In the second half of the 1980s,
(^26) Shizhi 2006: 221-222.
(^27) Link 2000: ch 2. See also Pollard 1985: 655.
(^28) Bei Dao & Zhang-Kubin 1989: 57-58, Bei Dao 1990, Bei Dao & Wedell-
Wedellsborg 1995 (conducted in 1992), Bei Dao & LaPiana 1994.