The ghost is as quiet as still water, but when it is disturbed, it can also
destroy everything. I don’t want to say words such as “history” and
“culture.” But I know that the dead don’t just disappear. The ghosts
melt into the air, the dusk, the lamplights and the bodies of all the
people. Things don’t just stop there. I’ve regained my Beijing in Berlin.
(Gu 1995: 6)In another letter written from Berlin in 1992, Gu Cheng further
elaborates:
Coming to Germany felt like traveling to the Beijing of my childhood. It
had snow, and bare tree branches swaying in the wind. I felt as if I could
return home by walking along the street under my window, and that
I could see Xizhimen Gate, with the bleak light of dusk shining on the
huge silhouettes of the city walls, and fading away.
In my dreams, I often return to Beijing, but it has nothing to do with the
Beijing of today, and is where I was destined to go. Taiping Lake or
Zhonghua Gate no longer exist, nor do the bricks in the fine sky, the
cinder slopes, or the wild jujube trees, but I’m still walking above them,
looking down below, and at the future.
I know about one thing, which people won’t mention, but they will still
give a hint every once in awhile. This thing is about myself, about that
murder and the dead ones. I know it’s this thing that has made me unable
to find exit anywhere in the city. (Hong and Zhao 1993: 195)^7The letter ends on a sorrowful and elegiac note, and Gu Cheng sounds
like a drowned person, or, a ghost, desperately trying to reach for home:
It is said in the poem: “Following the water you want to go back/Each
ticket costs one dime.” I stroke the river water with difficulty, without
strength, because I am a dead person, living in a moment that is doomed
to die.
As for the sequence of City, I have only finished half of it, with many
city gates yet to be repaired... This perhaps will be a new Seeking
Dreams at West Lake(Xihu xunmeng), I do not know, but I often sing
a line from a Vietnamese folk song: “how sorrowful—my homeland.”
(Hong and Zhao 1993: 196; Gu 1995: 856)Whereas nostalgia for the poet’s native city looms large, such
nostalgia is another name for the alienation that the poet experiences in
foreign cities. It is in fact a familiar theme that can be immediately
recognized by all of his fellow “misty” poet-exiles. It certainly strikes a
chord with Yang Lian in his Notes of a Happy Ghost(Xingfu guihun
shouji) as Yang contemplates his own exilic experience: “My prose-essay,
Gu Cheng’s Metamorphosis 131