narrative patterns by invoking historical trauma, everyday resistance,
or a metafictional self-awareness.
A less readily observed characteristic shared by these critiques of
Cultural Revolution representation—overlooked by its very ubiquity—
is that they begin and end in the domain of narrative. Due to the
predominance of the narrative mode in such texts, or because of an
assumed affinity between history and narration, the search for alterna-
tive versions of the Cultural Revolution has presumed narrative as a
master genre. Further, it seems the study of narrative has slipped into a
dominant pattern of its own, one in which narrative meets counter-
narrative, such that the poetics of hegemonic story patterns serving a
particular ideology can serve as ground to the figure of alternative
narrative forms representing resistance, dissolution, and dislocation.
Narrative, in short, stands as both disease and cure for recovering
meaningful historical experience; nonnarrative genres, meanwhile, are
easily dismissed as irrelevant, or worse, part of the problem.
Undeniably, the study of narrative has yielded tremendous historical
and aesthetic insights into representations of the Cultural Revolution
period, while also speaking eloquently to narrative’s power to structure
and disrupt memory, identity, temporality, and social belonging. At the
same time, however, one wonders what genres have been excluded or
rejected as other means for comprehending such a deeply formative era
of China’s revolutionary past. In view of such concerns, this study
posits that for all its powers of figurative representation, narrative does
not tell the whole story. In fact, the weight given to interrogating
literary form in the analysis of Cultural Revolution narrative seems log-
ically to demand a look at the nonnarrative genre whose identity as
well as meaning-making ability depends by and large upon intensity of
figurative language: poetry. The question then arises: how might
poetry—and in particular the short poem unbound by conventional
narrative expectations for character, plot, chronology—rewrite the
Cultural Revolution experience? To venture an answer, I turn to two
recent sets of poetic texts that explore the memory of childhood during
the 1960s and 1970s. One is “Two or Three Things from the Past”
, a series of twelve poems by Yu Jian (b. 1954), the
majority of which are set in Kunming, Yunnan province, the city where
Yu grew up and still resides (Yu 2003: 106–120). The other is a series
of thirty-six poems by Sun Wenbo 文
(b. 1956), collectively entitled
“1960s Bicycle” 十
, that recalls the people, things, and
events in the New Railway Village 村 neighborhood in
Chengdu, Sichuan province, where Sun’s family lived during the
1960s and 1970s (Jiang 2002). Although quite different in style and
166 John A. Crespi