262 chapter seven
opposition of a public persona and the pedestrian qualities of a private
life:
lots of faces first appeared in that place
if you go into town today and ask around
they’re all celebrities now
outside a drizzle was falling
when we set foot in the street
as for the empty public toilet
this was the first time he used it by himselfPerhaps the authenticity of «No. 6 Shangyi Street» doesn’t depend on
our ability to establish whether the poem ever “really happened,” but
rather on the convincing, mocking description of the ordinary-guy,
male mateship experience as something that could have happened and
that the poet could have been a part of. Be that as it may, the private
histories as they appear in the poem are casually linked to verifiable
public history in the literary world. In the lines all we could do was be a bit
vague / just like the poetry that was all the rage, the Chinese word rendered
as vague is ᳺ㚻 ‘obscure,’ ‘dim,’ ‘hazy,’ and the epithet of the Obscure
poets from whom Yu Jian and like-minded authors had been busy
dissociating themselves for some time when «No. 6 Shangyi Street»
was written. Also, protagonists Wu Wenguang, Fei Jia, Li Bo and Zhu
Xiao yang all contributed to the Kunming-based, unofficial Highland
Poetry Compilation (催ॳ䆫䕥, 1982-1983), as did Yu Jian under the
name of Dawei. The fourth issue, incidentally, contains a 1983 poem
by Wu called «Highland Poets» (催ॳ䆫Ҏ) that may well have been a
direct source of inspiration for Yu’s «No. 6 Shangyi Street».^18
And there is still more literary history here, most of it presented in
sarcastic fashion. Li Bo’s inside stories make him into a Mr Know-It-
All, and further down we read:
yu jian wasn’t famous yet
and would constantly be lectured
on an old newspaper
he’d write down lots of profound pen namesA central mood in the poem is that of nostalgia, for
(^18) See Van Crevel 2007.