grammatically created in the earlier portions of the poem. Unlike
the adults and children, the teenagers engage in a progressive
sequence of linked action: they “felt the call” mm地op; more literally,
“are moved to hoarse cries,” “opened their pants” tuv,and
“gripped... that little thing” wx... ;5. In one respect, this
sequence explains that teenagers, like those older and younger than they,
do indeed respond to the political imperative or “call” of the times com-
ing “full blast” from the loudspeaker. Yet the grammatically marked
departure from the established verbal pattern effects a difference as well.
For while the oldest and youngest move in politicized parallels driven by
the amplified, official voice of revolution; the teenagers, although sensing
the political imperative of the era, deform the command of ideology by
lying idle, sequestered, and utterly self-directed in a separate temporal
regime—one defined not by politically created borderless, empty time,
but by an apolitical sense of the timeless carried by images of the
“ancient river” and primitive fire-making. It is in this alternative space
and time that Yu Jian’s autobiographical subject moves; as will be shown
later on, it is in this regime that the subsequent poems elaborate their
alternative, internally dynamic vision of the era.
Further offsetting any sense of diachronic movement in “So Hot
Then,” and at the same time enhancing the parallels among the three
age-defined spheres of activity, are the images of heat that suffuse the
poem. As the poem’s title already suggests, an associative sense of heat
dominates all parts of the poem as it generates multiple intertwined
meanings among them. For instance, “burning tongues” suggests phys-
ical thirst as well as the figurative heat of political passion. Likewise,
the warm summer season that becalms schools, theaters, and other
institutions aligns with the political “heat” of the Cultural Revolution
that suspended regular patterns of everyday life in China for so many
years. Finally, all these imaginations of heat echo the “white flame” of
sexual climax that animates the detached world of adolescence. These
metaphorical leaps among multiple domains, each enacting a poetics of
variation within repetition, represent another level of spatial structure
in the poem. The effect of superimposing heat imagery across the
parallel domains of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood defines a
figurative unity for the Cultural Revolution’s historical “then.” The
poem’s spatial structure, in other words, evokes a singular, temporal
moment; at the same time, however, the slippages in meaning intro-
duced by the metaphorical play of the poem suggest a life-world of
dynamic and unstable heterogeneity.
To sum up, patterned repetition in “So Hot Then” generates the
sense of a complex, synchronic moment that includes familiar events
174 John A. Crespi