in the 1960s was as rare and valued as the remembrance of it is for the
poet more than thirty years later. Indeed, the vision of the bicycle, its
components recalled in exact and loving detail long after it is gone,
would seem even more present than the one he rode three decades
before. As with so many of the poems in the series, such descriptive
precision creates for the reader a concrete image whose singularity
signals a desire to reach beyond the poetic text and gestures again to
the reflection of present remembrance into past reality. To go a step
further, because the poem is eponymous with the series as a whole,
“1960s Bicycle” asks to be read as representative of Sun’s overall
poetic construction of memory. Like its many counterparts in the
series, this text turns on specific images of the past, all local, all per-
sonal, and all as insistently real in the time of writing as the time of
first encounter. It is this recreated immediacy of memory that enables
the individual works comprising Sun’s series to act as vehicles for
oscillation between past and present. Such an oscillation, active all
through the series, plays out most strongly in the blur of the real and
the remembered constructed by the final two lines of the poem “1960s
Bicycle.” Just as Sun the child defended the bicycle from loss, Sun the
adult guards and preserves the image of the bicycle in memory; just as
the child once rode the Red Flag bicycle around his now bygone neigh-
borhood, the adult poet guides the recollected image of the bicycle
through a landscape of memory materialized in poetic remembrance.
This brief study is, unavoidably, more suggestive than exhaustive. It
suggests closer critical attention to poems as an alternative mode of
remembering China’s revolutionary past. But beyond such a partisan
defense of poetry, Yu Jian’s and Sun Wenbo’s visions of the past do
point toward a larger problematic of memory: the question of how to
remember versus what to remember. Such an opposition, writes
Richard Terdiman in his study of the “mnemonic disquiet” in memory
and modernity, implies a “delicate dialectic” “between reproduction
and representation, between fact and interpretation, between recollec-
tion and understanding” (1993: 357). Driven to reach beyond the text
to recapture the “real” of the past, Sun Wenbo’s poems recollect by
reproduction and fact. Meanwhile Yu Jian subjects memory to
complex intratextual dynamics, inclining him toward the countervail-
ing mnemonic problems of representation, interpretation, and under-
standing. The differences here are by no means absolute. In fact, by
confronting parallel historical experience through contrasting literary
aesthetics, both poets gesture beyond poetry to a gradual but impor-
tant trend: the unobtrusive but persistent and increasingly pluralistic
willingness to creatively recover the many meanings of the Cultural
182 John A. Crespi