156 chapter four
The August Sleepwalker is largely a product of Bei Dao’s pre-exile years.
This still holds if we take his 1987-1988 sojourn in the UK as a time
of pre-1989 exile, even though at the time, he hadn’t been literally
banished from China. Bei Dao has recounted his initial euphoria at
the “golden years” of 1985-1986 for literature and art in the PRC, and
cited disappointment and weariness at Hu Yaobang’s fall from power
and yet another curtailment of cultural liberalization early in 1987 as
one of the reasons for his first long stint abroad.^35
iv-v. The Way of Life and the Language of the Host CountryGlad’s fourth and fifth dimensions compare the way of life and the lan-
guage of the host country to those of the country of origin. For ways of
life, Glad offers a scale from roughly comparable (Germany to Scandi-
navia) to significantly different (Hungary to Austria) to radically differ-
ent (USSR to USA) to overwhelmingly different (Somalia to France).
In this scheme of things, for all three poets, the ways of life of their
host country or successive host countries would be radically different
from China; and the language, overwhelmingly different. This makes
their decision to continue to write in Chinese more or less self-evident,
especially since they had had limited exposure to foreign languages
before leaving China.^36
vi. RepatriationGlad calls repatriation the most emotional dimension, and asks wheth-
er the writer accepts or rejects it, if it is available to them to begin
with.
For Wang Jiaxin, repatriation was indeed an available option, if not
the only one. Considerations of livelihood, political status and immi-
gration procedures combined, it is impossible to say if he could have
continued to live in the UK or elsewhere outside China. Also, Wang
(^35) On the arguably exilic nature of Bei Dao’s time in the UK, see Bei Dao 1990:
77.
(^36) After some early work in Chinese, Li Li has primarily written in Swedish, and
only recently translated some of his poetry into Chinese. He is, however, an émigré
rather than an exile (Krämer 1999: 167). Li is not well known as a poet in China. Cf
note 46.