for communicating the historical and political situation of modern
China and Taiwan. The 1950s fiction in Taiwan was largely ideologi-
cal or romantic in nature, with larger forces of the age overwhelming
realistic description. Only the lyric—with its elliptical qualities of half
music, half referential language, part discursive construct and part
aesthetic object—was suitable for the terrifying reality of the political
predicament of writers of the Chinese diaspora in the mid-century.
With cold war–ideology tending to dictate narrative modes of repre-
sentation, Zheng Chouyu’s lyrics flowed freely and vividly and became
an immediate and lasting sensation in Taiwan.
The sensational, or more precisely, sublime sentiment that Zheng’s
lyricism elicited stems from the underspecified yet unmistakably pres-
ent anxiety over political exile. As a northerner, Zheng Chouyu is
twice exiled both from mainland China and eventually, at least
spiritually, from Taiwan or any Chinese cultural milieu. His poem “In
Dreamland” 夢]crystallizes this sentiment of geographical dis-
placement through its discordant mixture of images and an aura of
hopeless relationships:
36 Christopher Lupke
The forest is already at my feet,
my cottage is still ahead,
The fence is in sight, but with a
turn it’s obscured again.
Someone should be at the
door waiting for me,
Waiting for me to bring new
books, and the repaired zither,
But all I’ve brought is a
jug of wine,
Because the person waiting
for me has long since left.
Clouds are in my road,
and on my clothes,
I reside in an indistinct thought,
A high elevation without
birdsongs, and no blossoms,
I reside in a cold, cold
dreamland...
The forest is already at my
feet, my cottage is still ahead,
The fence is in sight, but with
a turn it’s obscured again.
^林`在我腳bc, 我13de在]f,
gh`i到, klmnopc。
q有sQPt門我,
我v*的wx, yz理|c的琴,
~我v*s酒,
我的P`p。在我的
], 在我1衣],
我在sQoo的],
處有喉, 有$靨,
我在s片的夢\]。。。
^林`在我腳bc, 我13de在]f,
gh`i到, klmnopc。(Zheng [1954] 2003: 10)