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Partingby WU Ningkun
Finally you are gone A light breeze will blow it all away A light breeze will blow it all away And the water like a mirror 1989 Note 1: This poem was first published in Chinese and English in The World of English bimonthly in Beijing in 1989. While visiting the Chinese University of Hong Kong in the spring of 1994, I took part in Tolo Lights, an evening of poetry and music in which English and Chinese language poets gather to read their work together at Shaw College. Three poems of mine were read by the poet Huang Canran and myself. A year later , Tolo Lights: a Collection of Chinese and English Poems , was published by Shaw College. In his Introduction to the volume, which Professor Andrew Parkin compiled, he wrote: “The poems Wu Ningkun read at the climax of the evening were moving testimony of his moving capacity for sympathy with young people, although he himself is now in his seventies. ‘The Dead Do Not Forget: In Memoriam' is one among many poems born out of the Tian'anmen Square events in 1989. It presents two voices , that of a survivor looking back on something that happened five years before; the second, italicized, brings us to the words of a dead youth: ‘ I was so easily silenced/By a little bullet' . The final lines give us the shabby reality of human affairs. ‘The living are busy living/Only the dead do not forget'. What he does not add is that poetry or literature, as a vision of reality, preserves strong images that may react to remind the living in subsequent generations of what they should not forget. This is why poetry can be dangerous. The idea that officials might find poetry dangerous and therefore undesirable is given a certain humor and sly irony in Wu's “Parting Advice to a Poet' in which he speaks in the voice of a security officer. The U.S. pressure on the People's Republic to respect human rights or forgo ‘Most Favored Nation' trading status is neatly captured when the young poet is allowed to leave, because ‘You are granted MFN parole' despite a diagnosis that the young poet's politics are ‘Center-right'. The new China asserts itself with the invitation:'…come home, do business,/Don't dabble in poetical nonsense.' In ‘Parting' Wu gives us a moving example of the nostalgia and ambiguity we have come to recognize as elements in so much classic Chinese poetry. We get a very Chinese literary sensibility expressing itself in English in such a way as to enrich both the Chinese and English poetic traditions. The poem can be read as the words of a lover to a young person left behind. But the image of the heart like ‘still water' mirroring ‘the young face' left languishing may also be read as the old poet leaving his own youth behind. Such readings are personal rather than overtly political. Yet a third way of reading the poem, though, suggests the loss of country, the memories of it, and of his lost youth as the poet finds himself in exile. Such a reading combines the personal and political levels of experience. Of course, the words and syntax allow these readings and probably more: for instance, an old poet's farewell to life itself. Wu himself, I should add, is far too vital to be writing a farewell to life! The poem, nevertheless, is polyvalent in the way I suggest. Whatever readings we discern, the poem is in fact very clear in its realization that there is a price we all pay for being able to say ‘And I [am] free as a floating cloud.'” Note 2: A choral composition by Professor Debora DeWitt, based on the poem Parting, was performed at Carnegie Hall in New York on Memorial Day 2001 as part of a program presented by the Manchester College choir. I attended the performance as a guest of the choir.
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