152 chapter four
having moved to Beijing, Wang was an editor at the influential Poetry
Monthly and a respected poet in his own right. Both in the Poetry of-
fices and in important anthologies like Selected Contemporary Experimen-
tal Chinese Poems (Ёᔧҷᅲ偠䆫䗝, 1987), which he co-edited with
Tang Xiaodu, he played an instrumental role in publishing younger
avant-garde authors.^29 After June Fourth, when the authorities tight-
ened their grip on education, the media and cultural life, the Poetry
editorial board was reshuffled, and in 1990 Wang lost his job. Positive
motivations aside—a wish to see the world beyond China’s borders,
as Yang Lian and Bei Dao had done in the 1980s—Wang’s two-year
stay in England in 1992-1993 may well be viewed as the result of a
conscious decision to lie low during a time of intense political repres-
sion, when finding new, meaningful employment after having left Po-
etry would have been exceedingly difficult. He began planning to leave
the country and in fact left it before there was any hint of the relative
political relaxation that arrived in mid-1992, three long years after
June Fourth.
Wang Jiaxin hasn’t presented his time in England as an instance of
exile forced upon him by the Chinese authorities. Yet, several avant-
garde poets inside China—Shen Haobo, Yi Sha, Xu Jiang, Song
Xiaoxian, Tang Xin—have mounted scathing attacks on him for mak-
ing unjust claims to exile status, summed up in Yi’s words as Wang’s
“pseudo-exile” (Ӿ⌕ѵ). The explanation may lie in their resentment
of Wang’s habit of citing near-exclusively foreign greats as kindred
souls in literature, coupled with his self-assigned “fate of exile” in a
1994 poetical statement, and this description of himself in the preface
to a 1997 collection of his poetry:
Always on the road. Always running, then held up again without re-
course or hope; always get to the end only to find that it is but a begin-
ning; always take to the road inside one’s words, but forever without a
home to return to; always between native soil and foreign lands.The book’s title, Moving Cliffs (␌ࡼ ዪ), alludes to the rocks called
the Wanderers in Homer’s Odyssey, one of the dangers on the long way
home of Odysseus, an archetypal exile in Western literary traditions.
A couple of pages on, Wang cites an adage saying that “when you
finally come home, you will be a stranger” to explain his feelings upon
(^29) Tang Xiaodu & Wang 1987.