170 chapter four
- when, across from the hotel, there lies a graveyard
in my homeland it’s raining, inside me....
This is entirely different from the exile factor in Yang Lian’s poems.
And while representativeness is a tricky notion, «The Book of Exile»
and «Autumn in Europe» are recognizably works by Yang and Wang,
reminding us once again that exile will only make poetry in the hands
of poets—and, therefore, will do so in varying ways. The difference
between Yang and Wang is one of verisimilitude above all else. In
Yang Lian, exile sets in motion a tense dynamic of the imagination. In
Wang Jiaxin, on the other hand, it appears in basically “realist” scenes
from the lives of outsiders and, more specifically, people experiencing
a type of loneliness that is the direct result of being in a foreign coun-
try. They relate to their alien surroundings in ambivalent ways: from
misery in everyday life—sorrow, dogshit, mailing a letter that will nev-
er arrive—to consolation in music and literature. Even if the speaker’s
perspective is not automatically linked to its author’s biography or to
the fact that the original is in Chinese, he is an outsider to Europe as
a whole, not just London or Paris. The birds flying off to southern
lands make the outsiders yearn to journey—home?—themselves. The
view from the hotel room, surrogate home to the traveler, is that of
a graveyard and by implication of a death on foreign soil, especially
once we read the poem’s final line. There, the exile factor becomes an
explicit exile marker, in in my homeland it’s raining, inside me. This recalls
the closing stanzas of «The Rivers of Amsterdam» (䰓ྚᮃ⡍Ѝⱘ⊇
⌕), a famous poem by Duoduo, written late in 1989:^55
after the autumn rain
that roof crawling with snails- my homeland
slowly sailing by on the rivers of Amsterdam
In several other poems Wang Jiaxin wrote in England, the exile fac-
tor is similarly explicit or directly implied in related words such as ᓖ
‘alien land,’ થ䇁 ‘sign language’ but literally ‘the language of a
mute,’ and ⌕ѵ ‘exile’ itself. The first, short prose poem in the series
(^55) Today 1990-1: 26; included in Duoduo 2005: 158-159.