more than writing, as we speak 465association with մᅶ (xiákè) ‘knight errant’: a neologism of clear
phonetic inspiration. The Thinker Café is part of the wonderful
All Sages bookstore (ϛкು) on Chengfu Road, between PKU
and Tsing hua University. All Sages was once based in a couple
of rooms along the same alley as the original Sculpting in Time,
and likewise shifted its location to rise from the rubble once the
demolition crew had moved in to pave the way for Science.
If Yan Jun is a young voice on the poetry scene, he is well
known for the spectacular acoustics of his readings, and a good
crowd had assembled by the time the lights in the café went out.
Yan has a deep, powerful voice and isn’t shy about using it to the
full to roar and sing, such as when he participated in the Guang-
zhou Poet’s Voice Happening (䆫Ҏথໄ) in November 2002, be-
fore an audience of about five hundred. What’s more, he is in the
habit of reading his poetry to the accompaniment of music and
soundscapes. When he appeared in December 2002 as support
act for one of Hei Dachun’s recitals with the rock band Vision,
he operated the sound equipment himself. It was a good reading
but nothing like that in the Thinker Café, where fm3’s and Wu
Quan’s acoustic and visual contributions allowed Yan to concen-
trate entirely on his vocal delivery.
The overall effect was that of a three-dimensional poetry per-
formance. In the first dimension, the technician-artists projected
a dynamic, sometimes poetically repetitive collage of documen-
tary images on a large screen facing the audience. These included
fuzzy, newsreel-type footage of the American-British invasion of
Iraq, of operations on the ground as well as political leaders like
Donald Rumsfeld and Saddam Hussein orchestrating the events.
This was alternated with glimpses at other worlds such as the
inside of a hospital, with a double focus on the helplessness of
patient-victims and the power, both comforting and macabre, of
medical personnel, the “army clad in white” hailed in the Chi-
nese press as the vanguard in the fight against SARS. Another
recurrent image was that of a child learning to read, implying a
vision of education as another System held together by seemingly
self-evident power relationships. The audience also got a good
look at residential areas with the character ᢚ ‘disassemble, tear
down’ slapped onto the walls of houses marked for demolition,
an eye-catching bit of local color in contemporary Chinese cities