158 chapter four
How does the sixth dimension qualify the writer’s exile status? Argu-
ably, the most exilic situation occurs when a writer is banished and
wants to repatriate but is barred from doing so by the authorities in
the country of origin. The other dimensions can be seen to work in
similar ways. The stronger the tension between the desire to belong
to a—geographic, ethnic, cultural, linguistic—community of origin or
“home” on the one hand, and the impediments to such belonging on
the other, the greater the multi-dimensional distance and the farther
into exile one travels, in the figurative as well as the literal sense. The
operative notion is that of distance. As long as one experiences “here”
and now as meaning away from “there” and then, the predicament of
distance will only end if “there” should somehow fade or disappear.
Seen thus, the relative poignancy of exile is a function of the enduring
relevance of “there,” meaning a place where one is no longer. Hence,
the frequent association of exile with nostalgia. According to this in-
terpretation of Glad’s dimensions, the farthest one can travel into exile
would be by being forced to leave one’s native land for a deeply dif-
ferent, “alien” host country and barred from returning; and continu-
ing to write in one’s native language but being unable to publish in
the community of origin. The utter loneliness of this situation—as an
abstraction, aside from the writer’s individual experience—is wrapped
up in the fact that the actual, foreign audience is not the one the writer
primarily wants to address.
Shades of ExileIn sum, Yang Lian’s and especially Bei Dao’s status as poets in exile
is more than a transient label or a mere blip in literary or media dis-
course. One can see why Li Dian calls Bei Dao “the face of contem-
porary Chinese poetry in exile,” and why the blurb on Yang Lian’s
Yi says that the author “stands with Bei Dao and others as one of the
major living Chinese exiled poets.”^38
The complexity of exile makes assessing the “true” nature, the “au-
thenticity” or the “legitimacy” of individual cases a tricky business, not
made any easier by the phenomenon of groups or individuals engag-
ing in the strategic packaging of dissent and, more generally, privileged
(^38) Li Dian 2006: 37, Yang Lian 2002b. According to Li, Bei Dao has managed to
make a living in this capacity, and is the only Chinese poet in exile to have done so.