Chapter Eight
The Ghost Enters the City:
Gu Cheng’s Metamorphosis in the
“New World”
Yibing Huang
“Fairytale Poet” and “Rebirth after
Death”: Gu Cheng’s Position in
Contemporary Chinese Poetry
Gu Cheng’s position in contemporary Chinese poetry remains a
mystery despite all the seemingly obvious facts surrounding it. Born in
Beijing in 1956, and being the youngest of the “misty” (menglong)
poets, Gu Cheng actually got an early start as a writer. His earliest
poems collected in the posthumously published Complete Poems of
Gu Cheng(Gu Cheng shi quanbian) (Gu 1995) are dated 1964, and
his youthful yet stunningly beautiful poem “A Fantasia to Life”
(Shengming huanxiang qu) was written in 1971, when Gu Cheng was
only fourteen years old. On top of that, Gu Cheng had been labeled as
a “fairytale poet” (tonghua shiren) in the 1980s, which was derived
from the eponymous poem that Shu Ting dedicated to him:
You believed in the fairytale 写的
you wove
成 的
So that yourself turned into a
blue flower in that fairytale
(Shu and Gu 1982: 1)
Tethered by the image of a child-prodigy and the label of a
“fairytale poet,” ironically, somehow Gu Cheng had never been fully
recognized as a mature (or adult) poet during his lifetime. Gu Cheng’s
violent and tragic demise—he committed suicide after murdering his
wife Xie Ye in New Zealand in 1993, at age thirty-seven—has only
further damaged his reputation. One of the most common posthumous