comprising mostly workers in
large state-run factories.
(Jiang 2002: 3–4)
From the opening image of the poet seated naked indoors, the
entire surface of his skin sensitive and exposed, “Overture” introduces
the autobiographical subject as a palpable presence located firmly in
the “now.” Soon, however, the reading of Samuel Beckett’s biography
prompts movement elsewhere, to the “then” of a childhood during
China’s Cultural Revolution. Enumeration—a form of repetition long
prevalent in free verse (Fussell 1979: 78–9)—loosely structures the
remainder of the poem. One after the other, Sun calls up from memory
a series of vivid images that record specific instances of random
violence, anonymous death, and domestic terror.
In contrast to Yu Jian’s poems, where memory is implied but not
examined as such, Sun foregrounds remembrance as a self-conscious
act, a highly mediated movement of the mind underscored by recur-
rence of the words “recall” 1 Çand “memory” 12. These two
words, which function as the hinges of remembrance in the poem,
mark a mnemonic oscillation between “now” and “then,” a shifting
reference to a present and a past that insists on the objective and
material reality of both.
Sun highlights the reality of the “now” by describing it as “fixed
deep” SS/入in the poet’s memory. This is memory situated within
the corporeal reality of the poet’s body, naked, sensitive, alive, and
firmly located in the space of present-day, ongoing experience. The
reality of the “then,” meanwhile, assumes empirical weight in two
ways. First, it is “witnessed” :睹, that is, seen with a first-hand
immediacy and photographic intensity that insists on a reference to
historical fact “out there.” Second, and rather more unconventionally,
the places and institutions enumerated in the poem—the Imperial City,
the Xixiang Middle School, the Industrial Army—are each referred to
beyond the poem by means of footnotes. Footnotes by nature literally
point the reader elsewhere, doing so in order to validate or elaborate
in ways that, according to conventions of writing, do not fit within the
body of a text. The footnotes that appear throughout “1960s
Bicycle”—a total of eighteen appended to one-third of the poems
comprising the series—perform just such a function: they confirm and
explain historical realities the poems seem unable to accommodate.
They inform the reader, for instance, of the digging of air-raid tunnels
in the 1960s, traitor-villain characters in period films, Sichuan’s first
large-scale battle between Red Guard factions, old city names, a
Poems of Yu Jian and Sun Wenbo 179