164 chapter four
it impossible to focus truly on the experience of exile: any realization of
being “here” now irrepressibly mobilizes the memory of the massacre
over “there.” If we consider its author’s individual situation, the dis-
tance increases and the anxiety of powerlessness widens in scope. Yang
Lian’s experience of June Fourth, on another continent, thousands of
miles away, was mediated by radio, TV, print media and probably the
occasional live eyewitness account. As such it was fundamentally re-
moved from a reality that was at the same time deeply confrontational.
One surmises that the author must have experienced his activism in
faraway foreign media and literary circuits as essentially different from
“actual,” on-the-spot engagement with it all, from being “there.”
Notably, in itself, an analysis such as this—of the experience of exile
in the author’s life, inasmuch as it is visible in the public domain—
doesn’t suffice to explain exile poetry qua poetry, be it Yang Lian’s or
someone else’s. Any account of the desperate, near-maniacal tone of
Yang’s writing in the first half year or so following June Fourth should
take cognizance of his individual style, which had been aggressively
exuberant from the beginning, in both his poetry and his explicit po-
etics, and sometimes tumid and megalomaniacal. His commentators
differ on this point. Yang Xiaobin finds Yang Lian’s “grand diction”
productive in that it harbors a tension between the text’s aspirations
to the eternal or godly and its historical and human limitations. Lin
Xingqian, whose analysis centers on The Dead in Exile, speaks of Yang’s
occasional “hysteria” and notes that his “hot-blooded” style isn’t al-
ways conducive to the success of his work.^48
But the opening sections of The Dead in Exile also contain a text
called «The Book of Exile» (⌕ѵПк), dated January 1990, that ne-
gotiates the exile factor in relatively quiet, reflective fashion:^49
«The Book of Exile»
You are not here these strokes of the pen
barely writ down when mad winds sweep them away
emptiness like dead birds soars above your face(^48) Yang Xiaobin 1994: 118. Lin Xingqian 2001: 52, 61, 56, 46-54.
(^49) Yang Lian 1990: 51 and 1998a: 310. The date of composition is only recorded
in Lee’s English translation (Yang Lian 1990: 14). For Yang Lian and Bei Dao,
whose work has appeared in (Taiwan, Hong Kong and PRC) Chinese-language as
well as bilingual editions, I include reference to Chinese-English editions wherever
possible.