exile 173I have called the audience’s overwhelming interest in the poet’s per-
sonal history. The poem becomes a metonym for its author, enabling
straightforward empathy with a historical human being, rather than
interpretation and appropriation of the text by the individual reader.
Here, historical circumstance bolsters the lingering influence of an as-
pect of traditional Chinese poetics earlier summed up as reading the
poet—and reaffirms that such strategies are not solely practiced by
Chinese readers. Bei Dao’s declarations of exile can additionally be
seen to offer relief from the (in)famous “difficulty” of his work.
These things help explain the frequency with which Bei Dao’s com-
mentators cite and praise the more declarative of his poems. «Local
Accent» (е䷇), hailed by Leo Ou-fan Lee, Li Dian and others as a
stellar example of exile poetry, is a case in point.^61 Bei Dao doesn’t
date his poems, but publication details suggest that it was written soon
after his forced settlement abroad, in 1989 or 1990.^62
«Local Accent»
I speak Chinese to the mirror
a park has its own winter
I put music on
in winter there are no flies
I make coffee, at my leisure
flies don’t know what your homeland is
I add some sugar
your homeland is your local accent
at the other end of the phone line
I can hear my fearA local accent evokes the image of one’s (local, native) dialect or lan-
guage marking one’s speech with a foreign accent, of making one a
stranger, someone who is “here” but not “from here”—or, of one’s
dialect or language, spoken in dialogue with a distant interlocutor, as
a painful reminder of the “there” that is out of reach except by calling
it on the phone, as a surrogate for physical presence.
(^61) Lee (Leo Ou-fan) 1995: 18-19, Li Dian 2006: 41-42.
(^62) Bei Dao 1991: 50 and 2003: 114. The table of contents in Bei Dao 1995 con-
firms this estimation of the date of composition. Cited in Kubin 1993, Lee (Leo Ou-
fan) 1995, Yiping 2003, Zhang Hong 2003, Yang Siping 2004, Zhang Zao 2004, Li
Dian 2006 and Tan Chee-Lay 2007.