exile 163to the US in 1988. His prestige in post-1989 PRC exile communities
is evident from a collection of essays by several tens of writers and
intellectuals, entitled The Undying Exile (ϡ⅏ⱘ⌕ѵ㗙). This impor-
tant book, edited by Zheng Yi, Su Wei, Wan Zhi and Huang Heqing,
is dedicated to “big brother Binyan” on the occasion of his eightieth
birthday in February 2005—in the nick of time, as Liu died in Decem-
ber. While The Undying Exile has June Fourth as its most conspicuous
point of reference, the editors show that the history of PRC exile litera-
ture starts long before 1989. They leave room for various conceptu-
alizations of exile and their earlier (Chinese) manifestations, including
the domestic variety forced upon many PRC citizens during political
upheaval such as that of the Anti-Rightist Campaign and the Cultural
Revolution.
But back to Yang Lian. In an atmosphere that is unrelentingly
nightmarish, many of Yang’s poems from 1989-1990 present an as-
tonishing, sometimes unmanageable density of images of bodily vio-
lence, death, mutilation and rot. They frequently feature the unborn
or newborn child, conventionally a carrier of innocence and the prom-
ise of vitality, in ways that would count as perverse by everyday stan-
dards. These things have remained regular features of his work in later
years—Simon Patton writes that Yang’s fascination with death makes
his collection Non-Person Singular “monotonous with morbidity”^47 —but
in the aftermath of June Fourth, they relate directly to the massacre.
Following a reprint of Yang and Gu Cheng’s Words of Mourning, which
assumes preface-like qualities, several poems in the book’s opening sec-
tions engage with exile in outraged, sometimes bizarre scenes that cry
out to be read as restagings of the carnage on and around Tiananmen
Square. Examples include «To a Nine-Year Old Girl Murdered in the
Massacre» (㒭ϔϾሴᴔЁ⅏এⱘбቕཇᄽ, 1989), «Bloodstains in
Heaven» (ූⱘ㸔䗍, 1989?), «Missing» (༅䏾, 1989?), «The Dead
in Exile» (⌕ѵⱘ⅏㗙, 1990) and «The Year Nineteen Eighty-Nine»
(ϔбܿбᑈ, 1990).
These poems speak a tormented language whose fury breathes an
anxiety of powerlessness in the face of the horrors that had occurred
in historical “reality.” They address the event that led to the status of
exile for many mainland Chinese, rather than the state of exile itself.
Perhaps a better way of putting it is that outrage over the event makes
(^47) Patton 1995b.