New Perspectives on Contemporary Chinese Poetry

Gu Cheng’s “anticultural” and “willful” nature is not purely Romantic
in the Western sense, but imbued as well with influences from classical
Chinese traditions such as Daoism.^3 Nevertheless, such a view as
nature itself is quintessentially culture-oriented, and an irreconcilable
dilemma surfaces. The more Gu Cheng moves his poetic scale toward
an “anticultural” nature, the more he actually falls back into the realm
of culture. As a poetic ideal and as a physical reality standing in
opposition to each other, nature becomes self-alienated, and the sheer
“innocent” lyricism of “I Am a Willful Child” withers away.
This transition had already started before Gu Cheng’s exile (see Li
1999: 184), but its pace accelerated after Gu Cheng left China and
changed his landscape entirely in 1987. Just as Gu Cheng finally
regained the lost paradise of “nature” on Waiheke Island in New
Zealand, this paradise in the “new world” proved instead too wild
and too alien for the “willful child” to endure.
Such a change of perspective in the “new world” is duly registered
in Gu Cheng’s autobiographical novel Ying’er(1993):

The strangely shaped rock outside the window displays its irregularity,

revealing its stubborn and rough edges to the gradually lightening blue

sky, and baring its uncompromising nature. All this is evil, utterly and

bluntly. It stares straight at the blue sky, taking the blow that was struck

by the light of Heaven, acknowledging, damning, and resenting this

shape and fate imposed upon him by Heaven.^4

It shatters my usual tender understanding and appreciation of love, and

all those intoxicating fantasies are softly crushed and mercilessly

destroyed by this rock. Nothing is left, the normal and taken-for-

granted life is no more, nor does love lead to life. Only now do I realize

for the first time the horror of freedom and truth. (Gu 1993: 124)

Both time and space have outgrown the fantasized communion
between “child” and “nature.” Moreover, the raw and alien reality of
the “new world” forces Gu Cheng into an epiphanic awareness of an
“evil spirit” (xieling) lurking underneath his own skin:

This island, this forest, lure him to leave behind the distant northern

continent, leave behind the city, yet he has never become a real man, he

has always been a monstrous and naughty child, who has never grown

up. (Gu 1993: 128)

In an interview given in 1992, Gu Cheng goes even further:

Nature is not really as pretty as what people would claim—that’s

the “nature” seen through the eyes of vacationers. If you want to live a

Gu Cheng’s Metamorphosis 127