‘One Man’s City’ (Yige ren de chengshi) is written about myself
wandering like a phantom in the city of Auckland, New Zealand, car-
rying on a non-stop dialogue with myself. This conversation with
myself I found later to be the basis of all ghost-talks (guihua)” (Yang
2003: 245). It echoes Bei Dao 北) (b. 1949) when he states “I speak
Chinese to the mirror” in his poem “A Local Accent” (Xiangyin),
written in Stockholm (Bei Dao 1991: 51). It further reminds one of
Duo Duo **(b. 1951), whose first poems written in exile bear the
same ghostly recognition of the native land in a foreign city, as shown
in “The Rivers of Amsterdam” (Amusitedan de heliu) (1989):
After the passing of the +,-.
autumn rain /01蜗3的4顶
That roof crawling with snails —我的祖8
—my motherland
9:;<特>的?@, AAB- 。。。
On Amsterdam’s rivers,
slowly sailing by...
(Duo Duo 2002: 106–107)
This ghostly recognition reflects a poignant double alienation. On
Gu Cheng’s part, when he says that Berlin reminds him of Beijing, an
opposite statement rings equally true, that he can neither inhabit
Berlin nor return to Beijing. You cannot inhabit the society or city
where you are physically present (“seeming to leave no traces”), while
the home city that you have left behind very quickly regresses in your
perception into a ghost city because of your absence. The only way
that you can return is to revisit it in your mind, in an afterlife, or, as a
ghost. Gu Cheng once admitted that “I see my life after I enter the city,
which is like a specimen pinned down by a needle, its limbs waving”
(Gu 1995: 922). Now returning again, Gu Cheng still finds himself
trapped—his native “city” is walled, infernal, not existing in reality or
the present, only existing in his own mind, and decaying in a posthis-
torical time. Earlier, Gu Cheng was a child in nature to which he was
exiled; now, he is a ghost in the city that was once his home. Here
nostalgia rhymes with claustrophobia, and to exist means no exit.
In the direction of “returning to the city,” Gu Cheng’s late poetry
becomes overtly subjective, fragmented, whimsical, and opaque.
Dreams of the future that once appeared in “A Fantasia to Life” and
“I Am a Willful Child” are replaced with nightmares and ghost stories
from and of the past. As if retreating into a cocoon, Gu Cheng gradually
retreats from an open, fluid, and natural imagination into a shrinking,
morbid, and claustrophobic inner space. Apparently Gu Cheng is still
132 Yibing Huang