exile 169Mo Fei. He has also been grouped together with Chen Dongdong
and Ouyang Jianghe, as fellow Intellectual poets, and associated with
1990s Narrative (ভџ) poets such as Zhang Shuguang, Sun Wenbo
and Xiao Kaiyu, but he can in fact hardly be pigeonholed as belong-
ing to any one group or trend in the avant-garde. Wang’s work was
marked early on by its quiet, flowing tone and by its melancholy at-
mosphere. «Autumn in Europe» (㔫Ꮘⱘ辛, 1993) is a good ex-
ample from his years in exile:^54
«Autumn in Europe»
When autumn comes to Europe
people holidaying on the seaside start going back
with warm skies looking weary
When autumn comes to Europe
amid the falling leaves adrift, there are those
who sit in sorrow on a park bench reading this or that
and there are those, on the streets of London or Paris
who step in dogshit
There are those, at the thin hour of nightfall
who are retrieved by Chopin’s Nocturnes, and there are those
who go out to mail a letter that will never arrive
there are those who register for the new term at the Chinese department
and there are those, in the west wind suddenly rising
whose words will rhyme with Shelley’s verse
When autumn comes to Europe
there are birds that fly up, and fly off to southern lands
and there are those who paint another journey in their hearts
there are those who want to cry for no reason at all
and there are those who return to that same old bar
to wait for a miracle
Now together with autumn I set out
and with the autumn winds I cross the English Channel
because of the earth’s emptiness, and because of
guitar music drifting through the subway entrance
I become the last insomniac in Paris(^54) Wang Jiaxin 1997: 104-105.