of the Cultural Revolution period—political activism, the suspension
of everyday life, the hooliganry of teenagers—but in terms of formal
structure runs counter to the diachronic conventions of Bildungthat
figure so centrally in the genre of Cultural Revolution narrative, par-
ticularly in the autobiographical narrative. As the first of Yu’s series of
Cultural Revolution poems, “So Hot Then” introduces a larger ambi-
tion for the series of twelve poems: not to narrate a “factual” coming-
to-awareness and eventual political liberation of an individual or a
society, but to immerse the reader in the climate of an era by recreat-
ing its time and space in the verbal environment of a poem. Unlike the
popular narrative representations of the Cultural Revolution, “So Hot
Then” does not claim to reenact a movement toward resolution
through catharsis, crisis, or self-realization. Instead, by inviting the
reader to work through carefully configured language, the poem
recreates history not as a movement from “past” to “present,” but as
a self-contained but deeply formative poetic moment.
Where “So Hot Then” describes the Cultural Revolution period as a
complexly figured moment writ large, most of the remaining eleven
poems in the series narrate discrete events presumably drawn from the
personal experience of the poet, who at age twelve in 1966 was entering
adolescence himself. These memoiristic poems lend closer specificity to
the broad strokes of “So Hot Then.” In doing so, however, they do not
represent the era as a flow of history structuring the growth of the
autobiographical subject, but as a collection of personally experienced,
though temporally discontinuous, events. Yet, at the same time and
within the poetics of recurrence, the individual texts are linked asso-
ciatively by the repetition of tropes, in particular turns of phrase that
defamiliarize situations otherwise easily recognized as elements of a
Cultural Revolution “story.” The poems, for example, relate instances of
death, insanity, fear, betrayal, home invasion—all standard dramatic fare
of Cultural Revolution narrative. Yu, however, often ends the poems with
bleakly humorous, sometimes startling imagery that leaves the meaning
of these events open and unresolved. Thus, an image of the absurd con-
cludes a poem of eighteen lines in which Yu calmly relates how a cousin,
stricken by a persecution complex in the spring of 1967, refuses to follow
his work unit’s order to enter the insane asylum, until finally,
at the end of their wits 单Z的-有
his coworkers squatted g} 千顶样
lifted him and the bed like lifting a car q¡顶¡来
and carried him to the madhouse ¢到£-院¤¥
(Yu 2004b) (Yu 2003: 110)
Poems of Yu Jian and Sun Wenbo 175