neighborhood restaurant, and the size and location of a plant nursery.
All these factual items are explicated in detail “outside” the poetic
texts themselves; and all, by directing the reader out of and back into
the poem, further enhance a sense of oscillation between “realities”
past and present.
Sun’s poetic choices, then, seem deliberately to point the reader
away from the intratextual, verbal environment of the poem and
toward an extratextual, material context presumably “out there,” be
it in the “external” world of past events or the “internal” world of the
poet’s present subjectivity. However, even as this aesthetics of refer-
ence would seem to leave the poetic function behind, it realizes
another aesthetic effect, one that differentiates the poems from the
narrative memoir toward which they gesture. For where the Cultural
Revolution memoir is structured by a temporally continuous story of
individual and social emergence, Sun’s poems attempt to leap a tem-
poral gap that narrative seems no longer able to bridge. Through
devices that point beyond the poem itself, he creates a poetics of
memory that alternates between the material and historical “realities”
of present and past, attempting to fix both in place by means of an
almost documentary style of reference.
The irony of this oscillatory movement, however, is that the very
effort to anchor memory in a lost past and a present self implies an
eroding link between lived experience of the past and that of the pres-
ent. As if to combat such loss, the poems of “1960s Bicycle” invoke
intensely specific people, places, and things: each a site of memory in
or near Sun’s childhood home in New Railway Village, each altered,
destroyed, dead, or missing, but all recovered through acts of poetic
salvage. One by one they appear as titles to the poems: “Loquat Tree”
枇杷树—the scene years ago of a murder in Sun’s courtyard and now
a species of tree that raises a lucid vision of both the victim, an elderly
bachelor, and the samurai sword used to kill him; “Stone Columns in
the Courtyard” 院¼H的«¬—a pair of ancient, ornamental carved-
stone pillars around which Sun played as a child, later toppled and
broken to clear the lot for a drab building; “Nine-Mile Dike Nursery”
&Ð堤®圃—a wooded area thick with groves of cassia, loquat, and
bamboo, now transformed into a landscape of gas stations, asphalt
paving, and caged-in balconies; “Neighbor” °—an older resident
of New Railway Village, remembered fondly for his acts of kindness,
but now gone forever after succumbing to acute liver disease.
More than acts of poetic testament, these poems to the places,
people, and events of the past are also monuments: not the sort erected
to permanently enshrine great events or major figures, but minor
180 John A. Crespi