POET'S LIFE, HERO'S LIFE

Andrew G. Emerson

The formative and noteworthy events of Huang Xiang’s life, particularly the circumstances under which he wrote the poems included in this volume, are a fascinating subject. Readers have an opportunity to observe that he is not only a major author, but also in a certain sense a hero. Because of the longstanding ban against publication of his writings in China, only a small circle of academic scholars inside and outside that country are familiar with his works. They regard him as a world-class writer, and as more of his works are published outside of China, he will gain the recognition merited by the scope and caliber of his writing. As to the nature of his life and character, given his lifelong support for human rights and civil liberties despite subjection to constant harassment as well as harsh treatment in several terms in jail and work-reform, it is clear that he can with reason be regarded a hero.

Childhood

As Huang Xiang says in his Foreword, he was literally born “in fire.” A fire spreading through his neighborhood reached the very wall of the family compound on that day in December, 1941; newborn Huang and his mother, still connected by the umbilical cord, had to be carried for safety to a nearby temple. This took place in Wugang County in south-eastern Hunan Province near its border with Jiangxi. This part of China was then occupied by the Army of Japan that had invaded Manchuria a decade earlier. Sporadic fighting was taking place up and down the interior of the country hundreds of miles inland from the seacoast, the Communists active in the north and the Guomindang (GMD) in the south. Huang’s father, Huang Xianming, was a General in the GMD Army, having attained that rank at the age of 29 after receiving a graduate degree in political science at Meiji University in Tokyo under the sponsorship of the GMD. Huang Xiang’s mother Gui Xueshan was a graduate of Fudan University and his father’s number two wife; after giving birth to Huang Xiang she went to Beijing to live near her husband.

In keeping with custom, baby Huang, being the first-born son, was sent to live with his paternal grandparents, accompanied by his father’s number one wife. Huang did not see his mother for many years after the age of four, and was in effect raised by these grandparents. They were substantial landowners in Gui- dong County in south-western Hunan Province, where before the Revolution they enjoyed great respect because of their upright lives and fair dealings. The fact that he was the son of a GMD army officer and grandson of landowners constituted an hereditary curse in the eyes of the Communists, a severe taint of a sort that very few such class enemies were able to remove.

Huang’s father was in charge of supply for the army group that fought the GMD’s last great campaign in Shenyang and Liaoning Provinces in Manchuria in 1948. The decisive battle there was won by the Communists, and Huang’s father was captured. The family knew nothing of his whereabouts or fate and sadly bemoaned his absence for some years, until they learned late in 1951 that earlier that year he had been summarily shot in a prison camp near Beijing.

Immediately following the success of the Revolution, Huang Xiang’s grandparents were introduced to the same oppression suffered by other members of their social class. Their lands and much personal property were formally confiscated, and their home invaded and ransacked by marauding peasants. More than once they were personally subjected to public humiliation in organized mass denunciations. Huang’s grandfather was in one instance marched off a captive by a band of peasants, who were about to kill him when a Communist army officer happened on the scene. The officer had been sheltered by grandfather Huang several years earlier while trying to escape the GMD after being wounded; he recognized elder Huang and intervened to save his life.

Huang Xiang was only nine years old when he first personally suffered similar treatment. One day in all innocence he pulled an ailing fish from the village well. Immediately the village headman grabbed him and accused him of poisoning the well in order to kill the “poor peasants” who drank from the well. For three nights Huang was bound in a dark room, and paraded daily through the streets wearing a dunce cap bearing the legend “Huang Xiang, counterrevolutionary poisoner of wells.” He was only released when chemical analysis failed to detect any poison in the fish.

In grade school, Huang was denied access to extra-curricular activities and made to clean the toilets, while being constantly reminded that he, like his fa- ther, was bad, an enemy of the people. Although an excellent student in grade school, he was not permitted to matriculate into middle school because of his class origins. Some rather wistful poems that he wrote to several girls of his age-group who had gone on to middle school were discovered, and he was again seized and denounced publicly for attempting to corrupt the girls. His grandparents were also publicly denounced and humiliated in a mass meeting, because they were not raising him properly.

This denial of public education left Huang Xiang feeling severely hurt, for he strongly desired to continue his schooling. The quandary was soon alleviated, however, when he discovered in a concealed loft in his grandparents’ home a treasure trove of college books that his father had put away years earlier. It was indeed fortunate that the books had not been discovered by rampaging peasants, for they immediately became the basis of Huang’s education. Though aged only ten, he began reading them with a will. Those in English, European languages and Japanese he of course ignored, but most were in Chinese; they included classic works of Laozi, Zhuangzi, Li Bo and Du Fu, plus political treatises by Sun Zhongshan (Sun Yat-sen), Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) and others, as well as books of literature, political economy, philosophy, religion and the arts. There were also translations of major western authors, poets and statesman, plus the French “Declaration of Right” and the American “Declaration of Independence.”

Moreover there were the extensive notes made by his father in a notebook, including quotations from Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, as well as Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Goethe, Marx, Freud and others.

His father’s notebook also contained a picture with a poem attached that made a great impression on Huang:

Just now a thin bright dawning ray

Spreads o’er the trees and wavelets of the lake

Oh ye who seek the light, make haste to press ahead

The great sun slowly rises from the dark horizon.

His father’s death caused Huang continuing sadness, but reflection on the poem would restore his spirits. So doing also contributed directly to his decision to become a poet. At the age of eleven he submitted his first poems to a literary journal; although they were rejected, his grandfather was pleased and began to read Tang Dynasty poetry to Huang in order to encourage him. His father’s college-level books must at first have been little understood by the young Huang, but he per- sisted and over a few years’ time acquired a broad liberal and worldly education, as well as an immense vocabulary.

By 1956 at the age of 15, Huang Xiang had grown restless, and tired of the constant discrimination. With the help of an uncle, he managed to leave Guidong and go to Guiyang, the capital city of neighboring Guizhou Province. Here for the first time he encountered the system employed by the Communist regime to control the life and activities of every Chinese person. In order legally to reside and work in any place, a person needed two official documents. One was a Residence Registration, basically an identity card setting forth the assigned place of residence and conferring the privilege of some specified employment. The other was a Personal File containing everything bad and good that the Party and other relevant agencies saw fit to include; this file never left official hands, anroutinely preceded or followed a person when transferring from one location to another. In applying for a Registration for the first time in his life, Huang naively revealed his family background. The look of distaste on the face of the applications clerk made Huang realize that in being forthright he had made a mistake, one that he vowed not to repeat.

Notwithstanding his background, Huang was given the necessary Registration and assigned to the Guiyang Metals Factory. There it soon became apparent that he had little aptitude for operating machinery, so he was transferred to a small shop where nails were made by simpler methods. The workers’ non-working time was largely filled with political meetings, the study of assigned political materials, and frequent “criticize and be criticized” meetings, in which people were singled out, made to confess faults, and subjected to criticism by the others present. Huang spent what little money he had for books to read, and even managed to find time to write poetry.

While at the Metals Factory Huang produced the first poems to receive publication. These early efforts were on themes entirely acceptable to the regime, and couched in the style of traditional folk songs (min ge). A typical poem, which Huang transcribed from memory for this article, translates as follows:

Workers high up in the clouds

Harvest down below the clouds

Thousand sickles’ “shua-shua” sound

Swirling kernels flying down.

This poem and another one, entitled “My Heart Is Full of Sunlight on National Day,” were among several accepted for 1958 issues of the literary periodical Shan Hua ( Mountain Flower) then published in Guiyang. Others were on themes relating to the Great Leap Forward, one describing the red flames of the locally-constructed steel furnaces as “red mountain flowers.” Some of these were selected for inclusion in the competitive annual national compendium of poetry; as a consequence, Huang was invited to join the Guizhou Branch of the All-China Writers Association, then its youngest member. Conformity is not one of his attributes, however; he soon became dissatisfied with the tight limitions on style and subject matter that prevailed, and determined to eschew them completely in the future.

Years of Confusion: 1959 - 1979

Being of a restless and enquiring temperament, Huang Xiang soon became utterly bored with the unchanging factory routine of labor-study-criticism. In 1959, during the Great Leap Forward, he saw an advertisement seeking people to work in underdeveloped Qinghai Province and determined to go there. Ignoring the need for official permission, one night he stuffed his bed with a dummy and slipped out of the dormitory. Travelling by train, he went off to Qinghai, dreaming of “vast grasslands, snowy mountains, broad lakes, the Gobi Desert, and pretty Tibetan girls in red skirts.” In Xining, capital city of Qinghai, he managed to avoid incarceration as an unauthorized drifter by fast-talking an official into giving him a new Residence Registration and temporary personal file. A copy of Shan Hua that he produced to demonstrate his occupation as ‘poet’ did not impress the official, but his willingness to go to the Qaidam Basin, a truly remote location out in the Gobi Desert, carried weight, and some careful half-truths about his family background avoided denial on those grounds.

An arduous ride in an open truck took Huang and some other volunteers past the great salt Qinghai Lake, and eventually deposited them at a remote plain in western Qinghai called Da Qaidam. The operation there, under the authority of the Chaidam Political Committee’s Truck Battalion, supported petroleum explo-ration and extraction operations. Huang’s work was stoking a small rudimentary distilling apparatus that produced gasoline for the fleet of trucks, a job he found as boring as the one he had left in Guiyang. With roving eyes always open, Huang soon spied and befriended a half-Tibetan girl who spoke educated Mandarin.

Characteristically inspired by her, as well as by the rolling grasslands, he wrote some appropriate poetry, with titles such as “Depicting Chaidam” and “Arjin Life.” 1 Perhaps naively he mailed copies of these poems back to some friends at the factory where he had last worked in Guiyang. The letter was intercepted and read by a factory official, who was alarmed that workers would want to leave and follow Huang to Qinghai. Higher authorities thus became aware of his whereabouts and sent a security officr to Qinghai to arrest him and bring him back to Guiyang. To Huang’s great humiliation, in arresting him the officer charged him before other workers with being an “active counterrevolutionary who hated the Communist Party and intended to escape across the border.” However, rather than immediately returning Huang Xiang to Guiyang, the officer went sightseeing in the area, after first placing him in a local work-reform camp (lao gai dui). This marked Huang’s introduction to the Chinese equivalent of the Soviet gulags, in which both class enemies and criminals were forced to labor under dire conditions intended to break their spirits and wear them down physically, all at minimal cost to the Party for food and shelter. The police possessed the power to take people off the street and place them in laogai for any reason or for no reason, and whenever directed to do so by the Party, all utterly without any semblance of a trial or hearing, and no right of appeal. Courts of law, always directly under Party control, had similar powers. The duration of this type of ‘sentence’ could be up to several years.

Huang’s nighttime cell in this place was barely larger than a bed. It had no window, only a hole in the ceiling. Its floor of sand was thoroughly fouled with human excrement, for its occupants were not permitted to leave it at night to relieve themselves; the stench was horrible. The work in the camp was making bricks out of clay that were dried in the sun, each worker being required to carry a load of bricks from the drying site back to the compound at the end of the day. Huang received extra tough treatment, made to carry more bricks than the other sufferers.

When the arresting officer returned, Huang was brought up for interrogation and accused of writing a reactionary slogan on the wall of a toilet. He was instantly terrified, for he knew that even this minor infraction could be treated with great severity; he trembled and his mouth went so dry that he could barely speak. A glass of water slipped from his shaking hand and broke on the floor; for this misdeed an interrogator slapped his face, hard, a stinging blow that he can not forget. The rough treatment increased. One day as he struggled along with an unusually heavy load, the Section Head shoved him in the back, causing him to fall; two bricks were broken. As punishment the infuriated Head deprived Huang of his evening meal and called a mass meeting in the barracks; Huang had to stand on the broken bricks with his wrists bound with wire tight enough to cut, while the others shouted denunciation at him. Only at midnight was he allowed back to his cell. The officer from Guiyang continued his sightseeing.

Eventually the arresting officer finished his sightseeing and escorted Huang back to Guiyang. The Party promptly had him expelled from the Writers Asso-ciation, and imposed an absolute ban forbidding publication of his writings for forty years. At the mill where he had worked before, another mass meeting was called to denounce him; the Workers’ Committee sentenced him to three years in laogai, initially at Caigouwan, a prison-like place in a suburb of Guiyang. A thousand workers labored there at construction and auto repair under the control of the Production Section of the local Public Security Bureau. When Huang’s foreman in the auto-repair shop learned that he was literate, he gave him the job of preparing banners with exhortatory slogans, and gathering news from around the works for posting on a large bulletin board. In moving around daily, Huang witnessed brutal treatment of the workers and its effect on them. He remembers one young man who was forced to wield a heavy sledge hammer without rest; after seventy-two hours he finally collapsed and died on the spot. He had been subjected to laogai on the charge that he had unmarried sex with his girl friend, an act universally and strictly forbidden at the time. Huang was again subjected to mass criticism on two occasions, once for using a mirror to groom himself, and again because he broke wind in the presence of the section’s Foreman.

Huang soon made friends with a girl in an entertainment troop in the laogai compound. Always the romantic, he wrote a poem for her that was passed around and well received by all. A famous playwrite in the troop sent it to Mountain Flower, unattributed , and it was published. This came to light, and for his presumptuousness Huang was singled out at the next year-end meeting (when releases, extensions of detention, and changes in status were announced), and was once again roughly subjected to mass criticism for “contaminating” the girl. Subsequently he was confined in a small overcrowded house containing dozens of men, many of them hardened criminals. Each new guest was forced by the other inmates to drink a cup of “juice” consisting of their bodily waste. When the leader of the inmates approached Huang with his cup, he knocked it away, splashing some on the man’s face; the latter made to strike, but Huang reacted quickly with his fists and quickly bested the other man, thereby gaining acceptance among the inmates. Soon thereafter, Huang Xiang’s own brother was placed in the same house, on a trumped-up charge; one can imagine their emotional reunion. The charge against his brother was found to be false and he was soon released.

Huang Xiang was subsequently sent to various laogai sites, the last one a farm called Sanjiang, a few miles distant from the city of Guiyang. Security there was lax. The so-called ‘formal’ workers (those who were simply stationed there and paid wages, as opposed to those in laogai) were permitted to walk to the city on weekends to spend a few leisure hours. Laogai workers also occasionally did this serruptitiously, risking severe punishment if they were not present for the regular nighttime bedcheck. Huang could not resist and went there a few times; he would look longingly at the college students, whom he envied so much that he occasionally broke into tears. During this period of incarceration at the age of twenty Huang Xiang wrote the first two poems included herein, “Singing Alone” and “Great Wall.” A fellow worker observed him writing “Singing Alone” and reported him; this “bad act” earned him yet another mass denunciation.

One Sunday in 1963 while walking in Guiyang, Huang heard his name called out. He turned and saw behind him a former laogai worker who had simply walked away from Sanjiang and never returned. He exhorted Huang to leave likewise and travel around the country with him. Huang readily agreed, as he had not outgrown his wanderlust, and was then feeling extremely unhappy that the four years of laogai had deprived him of the “flower of his youth.” Together the two traveled around the country by train, going even as far as Tianjin in the north-east. After some weeks Huang was ready to settle down to a regular life again, and had come to realize that his friend’s inexhaustible source of funds was actually skilled pick-pocketing of travelers in the railroad stations. When Huang expressed a desire to return to Guiyang, the friend demanded that Huang also learn the craft and become self-suporting; Huang declined, forcefully seized the most recent snatch from the man, and drove him away with threats.

In one last jaunt, Huang headed for Jinan, the capital of Shandong Province, where he managed an impromptu visit with some female students at the Shandong Arts college; his recitation of the poems “Singing Alone” and “Great Wall” was met with great approval. As he boarded the train to leave Jinan, a student wearing an orange T-shirt slipped a piece of paper into his hand bearing her address, and pleaded with him to stay in touch with her. He never did, fearing to jeopardize her with his black family background and lack of official papers, but this fleeting encounter with its touching plea remains in his memory even as this article is being written forty years later.

Huang Xiang arrived in Guiyang utterly without money, and was for a short time reduced to sleeping in the railroad station and on park benches. Fearing he would be seized and punished if he simply returned to Sanjiang Farm, he went to Guiyang’s Nanming District Office to seek a new job. The elderly clerk in the office did not bother to require him to produce his Residence Registration, which would have shown that Huang Xiang was not a free man; he merely took Huang’s word that proper registration existed and issued him a letter of reference assigning him to a coal mine in Shibanshao Commune. With this letter Huang was able to obtain his Residence Registration from the farm and proceed legally to the mine.

Coal mining in China has long been dangerous, with all too frequent equipment failures, cave-ins, floods and explosions, not to mention the utterly primitive methods that exhaust the miners. The tunnels are too low to stand upright, so the miners normally are forced to crawl; the carts in which coal is dragged from a working seam to the lift have no wheels, only wooden runners. At first Huang had a relatively easy job as hoist operator at ground level, but when his personal file reached the mine, the authorities discovered his damning family background and promptly assigned him to drag coal in the depths of the mine. The other miners were encouraged to be hard on him, and they routinely loaded his cart with more coal than the normal load. Soon a plot was launched whereby the man who would lead Huang through the labyrinth of tunnels to the foot of the hoist was given a lighter load than usual, enabling him to pull so far ahead that Huang was left all alone. He became confused at an intersection and then totally lost as his light failed and went out. Pushing ahead in the total darkness without his coal cart, he came to water that gradually deepened so that he had to swim to continue. Soon he bumped his head against a large obstructing rock; he managed to clamber up and over it, and far before him he spied a small light. It was coming through a long unused exit from the mine, through which he finally climbed out, exhausted and relieved. The miners told him a tale about the rock, saying that it was the back of a giant fish that sometimes was so high that it touched the ceiling of the tunnel; a man who then could not climb over it perished there. Huang was lucky to have been able to escape over it; having survived this brush with death, he fled the mine on the following weekend.

The foregoing events all took place during the year 1963, a time when the entire country was still in severe disorder as a result of the disastrous Great Leap Forward of 1959 - 1960. Mao Zedong and the more leftward-leaning members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party had hoped that the widespread construction of small blast furnaces would rapidly increase the country’s production of steel; it proved to be mostly useless, and a vast waste of manpower and resources. This misallocation of labor, added to misguided policies respecting foodstocks and land use, caused a famine unprecedented in world history, in which many millions of people lost their lives.

Returning to Guiyang under these circumstances, Huang Xiang was desperate to find some way to support himself, so he went again to the Nanming District Office. The same old clerk, sympathetic to Huang’s description of the terrors of mine work, gave him a letter of reference to a tea plantation in Meitan County. Still, he needed his Residence Registration, and so had to return to Shibanshao to get it; when he arrived, the mine supervisor apprehended him and locked him in a small room, to await investigation of his unauthorized departure. Huang went on a hunger strike and the supervisor relented, taking Huang seriously and apparently fearing a non-work-related death in his unit; he reluctantly handed over the Re-gistration allowing Huang to move on to Meitan Farm.

Meitan is a lovely area, locally called “Little West Lake.” Its tea was harvested in the three warmer seasons of the year, leaving winters for study of political writings. Many of the laogai workers at this farm were educated people from the Guizhou city of Zunyi, who formed an informal literary discussion group in which Huang was pleased to participate. He also soon became friendly with a young woman named Ai Youjun, who danced and sang well enough to perform for the work force. Despite warnings from Farm authorities that it was bad to keep company with a man whose personal file had not arrived because his background was suspect, the two spent more and more time together until a physical love relationship developed. Always inspired by romantic feelings, Huang wrote poems during this period, but, like most of his early efforts, none survive.

When the Rectify Class Ranks Movement began in 1965, Huang’s personal file had long since reached Meitan and he was automatically a target. He and the other intellectuals were accused by the Farm authorities of counterrevolutionary plotting and were investigated by a special political team sent from the Provincial Department of Agriculture. Its leader had the police beat one worker until he

gave in and made damning statements concerning the intellectual group. Because of the total lack of other evidence, however, the case could not be pursued be- yond that point. Huang Xiang was nevertheless sentenced by his Work Unit to three years forced labor, being required to sleep in a cattle shed instead of the dormitory, and physically escorted to the hills to do extra-hard work. Reading and writing were strictly forbidden to him, as was all contact with Ai Youjun. Repeated

mass denunciations and criticism were also part of the regimen. At one such session, the leader said, “Give him to the masses,” whereupon some of the workers stripped him, hung him from the ceiling with his arms painfully bent behind him, and beat him with sticks. They then let him drop to the floor, continuing to beat and kick him while shouting, “Kill the son of landlords; kill the son of a reactionary general.” In doing this they broke off a tooth, bloodied his face and body, broke bones in his left hand and ruptured a blood vessel in his foot; lying unconscious, he would have bled to death, had not a couple of friends come forward to stanch the bleeding. He had this beating specifically in mind when he wrote the poem “Wild Beasts” three years later, and it troubles his dreams even today.

Mao Zedong’s Great Cultural Revolution began in 1966. It reflected fac-tional tensions within the Communist Party that developed even before the founding of the Peoples’ Republic. Mao and his idealistic cohorts favored the institution- alization of a true and pure communism without regard for the human and economic costs, while another faction was more inclined to determine policy in pragmatic fashion. Following the disaster of the Great Leap Forward, the pragmatic faction reduced Mao’s capacity to do further damage to the economy, partly by making pragmatist Liu Shaoqi second in national authority as Mao’s heir-apparent and President of the country. When the Cultural Revolution began, Liu was one of the first targets of the Maoists, and died in 1969 in abject desolation. The Red Guards, having been told that they were the true revolutionaries, arose and rampaged across the whole country, attacking everyone and everything they perceived as old, bourgeois, western, and counterrevolutionary. Even supposedly corrupt party bureaucrats were proper targets. All educational institutions above the primary level were closed indefinitely for reform.

When the Cultural Revolution eventually reached Meitan, discipline and order broke down. At a mass meeting the workers exonerated all of their number who had been accused of counterrevolutionary activities and burned their damning personal files. They then formed a “Red Workers Regiment” and with Huang Xiang a member set off on an expedition to several cities and towns around the province to participate in the general mayhem. Upon their return to Meitan, they found that most of the other workers had simply departed, although Ai Youjun was still there. She and Huang then went together to live with her parents in Zunyi, where they found work at odd jobs and Huang wrote poetry, including “Wild Beasts.” The house was too small for four people, however, so after two months they returned to Guiyang. At the Reeducation Committee of the city police Huang, with his usual brashness and the vociferous help of others waiting in the same line, was able to hector a beleaguered functionary into giving him a certificate stating that he had been formally rehabilitated. Cleverly forging a wholly new personal file devoid of any unfavorable reference to his family background, Huang then went to his former metals factory and obtained a job. Officials there, all too new to remember him, were duly impressed that he was carrying his own personal file, quite contrary to the standard practice of transfering files through official channels. Ai obtained a job in the day nursery of a textile mill, and Huang Xiang soon secured permission to work there as a boiler tender. They married in Guiyang, but for living quarters could find only a miserable unheated garret.

The Fire God Years

In 1967, Huang Xiang was on the verge of entering a new phase of his life, beginning to write the serious poems that survive and mark him as a man of ability, perception and courage. It is relevant for us to pause here, to look back on his life up to this point and to note the traits of character that have emerged.

Now aged 25 years, he has traveled the country from the deserts of the west to the seacoast in the northeast. He is highly literate and well read, to an extent rarely attained by anyone in the Communist years, and is in a love relationship that will last in spite of strains for nearly two decades. His character we readily see is romantic, restless, questing, intense, independent, even feisty. Mentally he is inward looking, not in the sense of introversion, but rather able to take creative flights of the spirit, going deep into himself for momentary escape from bad circumstances. Personally he is good-looking, quick-witted, athletic and quite able to defend himself. On the other hand, he bears the curse of his origin as a class enemy, to be despised and brutalized by the masses, who may freely deny him food and shelter, the means of making a living, his personal freedom, even life itself. At this young age he has already experienced public humiliation, arrest and incarceration, hard labor, physical abuse, hunger and at least two close brushes with death itself, always responding undaunted with an irrepressable will to continue expressing his observations and beliefs.

Other people, millions of them, suffered similar life-threatening difficulties and perished, their stories lost forever. Those who survived these hardships must have possessed extraordinary physical and inner strength, and the ability to suppress their own thoughts and natural instincts. How many of these dared even to think of human rights and personal freedom, much less advocate them, during the first thirty years of the Peoples’ Republic is a question that cannot be answered; many people who spoke out during the One Hundred Flowers period in 1957 were forcibly silenced, and provided a grim lesson for those who came later.

We may well consider the nature of a man who suffered these atrocious attacks on his body and soul, yet survived, undaunted, to the beginning of adult maturity, still thinking clearly and ready to hazard his life on behalf of the Rights of Man. One may also speculate on the forces that enabled Huang Xiang to survive. Was it mere luck? Constant assistance from some Guardian Angel? Or some extraordinary congeries of qualities that produce true heroism? Let us continue our examination of the man and his life.

Now married and settled in Guiyang, Huang and Youjun were subjected by the police to at least weekly searches of their quarters for forbidden writings. These troubled Ai, and she repeatedly implored Huang to stop writing his poetry, but he could not. As a partial solution, he broke into an abandoned Catholic church and converted an empty room on its third floor into a study/retreat where he could read and write undisturbed. A skylight allowed him to climb out onto the roof and contemplate the surroundings. Kindred spirits soon learned of his presence there and took over other rooms; they were artists and musicians mostly trained in western modes and all tired of the artistic straightjacket imposed by the Communist regime. Through them, Huang was introduced to two men who would become fast friends and figure importantly in his life. One was Li Jiahua, a poet who used the pen name Lu Mang; he would accompany Huang to Beijing in 1978 to post big character posters on the Democracy Wall and participate in the founding of the Enlightenment Society. The other person was Wu Lixian, a member of one of the wealthiest commercial families in Guiyang; unlike his several brothers who were all businessmen, he was a school teacher/administrater, and also a poet and writer of literary essays and criticism, under the pen name Ya Mo. In the Wu’s family compound a clandestine literary salon met frequently, taking its name “Yeya Salon” from the locale where Ya Mo lived and worked. Huang was soon a regular participant. The members shared their talents and knowledge, mostly in perfor-mances of western classical music, discussions of western political philosophy and art, and recitation of poetry, much of it original. A major topic of concern was China’s backwardness in point of technical and industrial development com-pared to the West, and the utter lack of personal freedom and civil rights.

In 1968 Huang wrote the first of his major political poems, “Wild Beasts” and “Dry Bones,” which were well received by the salon. He also compiled “Reading Notes Left on a Star,” a collection of prose aphorisms concerning poetry and its philosophy that will be published later. On a day in August of 1969, Huang was particularly offended by one of the frequent parades of demonstrating Red Guards and suddenly felt himself consumed by an “inner fire, like an animal trapped by flames” that made him feel “crazy, excited, yet dying of anguish.”

The next morning the same powerful feelings returned so he covered the window of his study and in a blaze of inspiration penned the hundred lines of “Song of the Torches” all without a stop. The poem centers on a God of Fire who is descending to earth to end Communist oppression and transform society. In his draft auto- biography Huang says,

“It seemed to me that there was nobody else in the church, nor

in the city, nor in the whole world. The sky was my paper,

and I was holding an immense brush to write on it. Each

character became a fire, every line a flaming torch. All the

world was full of torches, all burning with real life. Life itself

was afire in order to challenge and revile the contemporary autocrat.”

Huang remained highly excited by the poem, and for some weeks recited it everywhere he went. At one point he began reciting it in a city intersection, com- pletely forgetting that the meaning of the poem (overthrow of the Communist regime) could have gotten him a death sentence if the authorities discovered it. Only when a friend, unable otherwise to get his attention, kicked him hard in the backside did Huang realize that he was right in front of the local police station! Fortunately, no one there had heard him. Huang’s recitation of this poem at a session of the Yeya Salon was a highly emotional experience for the many people in attendance. Huang himself fainted when he finished. Ya Mo declaimed im-promptu:

“ You are not a poet,

You are a tough;

You are not reciting a poem,

You are a cry from the soul;

Writing in a man’s ink-blood

The eternal yearnings of mankind.”

“Song of the Torches” forms a true milestone in Huang Xiang’s life, for it sets the dominant tone of his writings and activities for the next decade, activities that would culminate in the postings on the Democracy Wall that earned him momentary world fame, and also his third stint in laogai.

Huang’s next significant poem was “I See a War,” an indictment of the Cultural Revolution. Written the same year, the suite “Cobblestone Reflections” is a collection of short reminiscences and observations from his youth, the major ones included herein; although in prose, they are poetic in their haunting sensitivity.

In 1970, Huang again found himself in difficulty with the authorities. His personal file, always in central hands, had not really been destroyed at Meitan. It had caught up with him in Guiyang, so that his true background was known in his place of work when the “One Suppression, Three Antis Movement” began. Its targets included former capitalists, landlords, and Guomindang officials, as well as suspected spies and past counterrevolutionaries, all labeled “Black Sorts, Monsters and Demons.” Huang Xiang of course found himself among them; he and many others in the textile mill were forced to do hard labor, and were sequestered at night under guard, compelled to study political treatises. Huang was singled out for harangues every morning before the assembled detainees, and subjected to frequent mass criticisms and denunciation. One morning before dawn he had to make a trip to the toilet, where there was never any toilet tissue. In the dark he tore the corner off a poster, which act an alert fellow detainee observed and immediately reported; the poster bore a quotation, and the corner that Huang had torn off and used bore the name of its author, none other than Chairman Mao himself! An angry supervisor woke up all the detainees for a mass meeting, at which Huang was criticized and denounced; moreover, the used toilet paper was retrieved and smeared upon his face. He then received a severe beating.

In January, 1970 Ai Youjun had given birth to their first child, a son, whom they nicknamed “Yingzi,” meaning “eagle” and symbolizing freedom. That fall when cold weather set in, the baby suffered from lack of heat in their tiny quarters, and shivered in his thin clothing as Youjun carried him on her daily forty minute walk to her job. Yingzi contracted a severe cold and cough, but Huang was denied time off to take him to the hospital for attention because of his sequestration. When Yingzi soon developed a high fever, Youjun took him to a hospital, but he was refused admission because of his father’s problems. Youjun then tearfully implored the Revolutionary Committee office where she worked to grant approval for hospital care for Yingzi. Thanks to vocal support from fellow workers who were present, the Leader relented and issued written permission for the care. Yingzi was admitted, but as the hospital had no central heating he soon developed pneumonia despite being in a sort of incubator. Huang Xiang sought permission to visit but it was again denied by the Revolutionary Committee. He argued with the Leader, and was subjected to criticism and denunciation; when he refused to bow his head to the mob, they hung a heavy weight from a wire that cut into his neck and drew blood. Soon Huang received a Notice of Death from the hospital. Exploding in a frenzy, he bolted shouting from the compound and ran to the hospital. Finding the incubator empty, he was directed by an utterly indifferent doctor to the morgue. After opening several crude coffins, he spied one in a corner partially broken; as he approached, a rat jumped out and ran away. Opening it, he found his son, with a needle still in his arm and tubes in his nose, mouth and rectum. Part of his ear had been bitten off, and he was still bleeding from his eyes, nose and mouth. A finger moved. He was not even dead!

Huang carried the small body to the main office, and was assigned a room for the night. Youjun joined him there, and within hours Yingzi was indeed dead, having lived only nine months. Huang was not at all silent in his anger and grief. The hospital informed the mill of Huang’s whereabouts, and an official came, only to berate Huang loudly for crying and disturbing the revolutionary order in the place. The next day Huang carried his son’s lifeless body up a hill, and after sitting with him for some hours in a state of deep grief, buried him on a sunny slope above the city which he and Youjun would be able to see from their garret. Still feeling his son’s presence, Huang fell into a deep sleep, only awakening that night under a starry sky; his disoriented wonderings in those devastating circum- stances are set forth in “Song of Life,” dated October 29, 1970.

Returning home, Huang became enraged and determined to take revenge on the hated Leader, Zhang, who had denied him permission to go to the hospital. Sneaking out of his home carrying a knife, Huang set out for Zhang’s house, albeit followed by an anxious Youjun and a couple of neighbors she had summoned. Huang beat on Zhang’s door and shouted for him to open up. Terrified, Zhang called out his window that Huang wanted to kill him. Two policemen arrived, but Youjun and friends, having gotten Huang under control, told them that Zhang was drunk and was threatening to murder a cop. The cops of course immediately went to apprehend Zhang, while Youjun and Huang stole away, still able to hear Zhang’s protests that he was the intended victim of a class enemy and not the criminal. Huang Xiang was not free, however; the mill authorities learned what had happened and committed him to an insane asylum, where he languished for some months often under heavy sedation. He was extremely fortunate in that he was neither held there for the rest of his life, nor charged with a capital offense when he was released. He was equally fortunate to then be granted a small disability stipendium because of his ‘illness.’

1971 is the year in which Lin Biao, Mao’s designated successor, died in a mysterious plane crash following what Mao claimed had been a plot to displace him. In the same year a daughter was born to Huang and Ai; they named her Huang Ai, and nicknamed her Xizi (“expectation of dawn”). The expanded family obtained formal living quarters in a courtyard on Ruijin Street in the city. There they were watched by an elderly couple who lived across the hallway, both ardent revolutionaries, but in spite of them, Huang continued to attend the Salon. At this time he wrote the poem “Great Wall’s Apologia,” in which Mao Zedong in metaphor speaks of his very own decline and impending demise, a gross irreverence that would have brought the severest of consequences upon Huang if discovered. Since his home was subjected to frequent searches during these years, he resorted, like other dissident writers, to ingenious hiding places for his forbidden writings, the cleverest being to cast the rolled-up texts inside homemade candles.

U. S. President Nixon’s visit to China in 1972 brought a ray of hope for

change among Huang and his friends, but no immediate result. The following year he wrote “Earth Exits Its Bath in a Storm,” once again describing the termination of the Communist regime in allegorical terms.

In the mid-1970s China’s economy was still in poor condition due to the continued dislocation and disorder of the Cultural Revolution. Agriculture was particularly troubled, despite augmentation to the workforce with several million city people “sent down” (xia fang), to learn from the peasants and to suppress their Red Guard mayhem. Deng Xiaoping, the arch pragmatist, had recently been ousted by Mao and his faction, when Zhou Enlai, a man widely respected for his own pragmatic stance, died on January 6, 1976. Huang immediately wrote the poem “Fire God,” on a theme similar to that of “Song of the Torches.” In Beijing what began as the annual memorial celebration on April 8 quickly turned into a mass demonstration of respect for Zhou, with an implicit plaint by farmers and peasants for better conditions. The crowd was forcibly dispersed by the authorities and some deaths resulted, in what is now known as the 4/5 Movement. Huang Xiang wrote of it in the poems “No - You Have Not Died” and “ China, You Can’t Remain Silent.” The ultimate event of the year was the death of Mao Zedong himself on September 6. To this happy news Huang immediately responded with the lengthy obituary “Fallen Idol,” in which he catalogues the evils for which Mao was deemed responsible.  He also penned “Revived from the Dead,” the first poem in which he utilizes a construct that recurrs in his later poetry; he speaks with the voice of a soaring spirit that, from a cosmic perspective, identifies variously with the Earth, with various physical aspects of it and natural life upon it.

By 1977, the “Gang of Four” and most of their radical supporters had all been driven from the scene and Deng Xiaoping rehabilitated. The Cultural Revo-lution had ended with Mao’s death and order was being restored to all aspects of civil life, in particular the educational system, which faced the daunting task of educating millions of young people who had been denied schooling during the previous decade. This year must have been fairly orderly even for Huang, for his writings were more about love than politics. It may be that Youjun had al- ready begun the intermittent abscences that reflected their deteriorating relationship, for Huang mentions a dalliance with a young woman named Hu, saying that it was she who inspired him to write the poem “Youth - Hear My Despairing Song” (voiced by one who chases fruitlessly after a youthful goddess of love), and also the suite “My Sonata,” several wistful poems in which love and nature are the themes.

In 1978, Deng Xiaoping succeeded Hua Guofeng as effective leader of the government; Party policies were thenceforth to be measured specifically by results, rather than set by doctrine as they had been under Mao. This alone may or may not have had any direct influence on Huang Xiang, but there was probably a palpable leavening in the prevailing atmosphere, a feeling however slight that it was possible to express oneself in public with a diminished fear of retaliation by the authorities. Wall posters, the so-called ‘big character posters,’ had long been a means of publicizing grievances and were being posted widely, mostly to air grievances suffered during the Cultural Revolution. This mode of expression was specifically sanctioned in the constitution of the country, although one still had always to be circumspect as to subject matter.

In October, Huang was feeling restless and one day was moved to take out of concealment the political poems he had written during the Mao years. He then conceived the plan of going to Beijing to post them so that people could see them, in spite of the danger still inherent in their anti-Mao sentiments. Word of Huang’s plan got around in his circle of friends and soon three of them volunteered to accompany him, Mo Jiangang, Li Jiahua and Fang Jiahua. Ai Youjun was pregnant at the time and begged Huang not to go, but he was resolute. The four brushed as big character posters the poems comprising the “Fire God Symphony;” they also mimeographed the poems and some explanatory articles by Li Jiahua under the title Enlightenment (Qi meng). Cognizant of his plan’s inherent danger, Huang Xiang asked Ya Mo to take care of his family in the event he was arrested and did not return, left copies of his writings in custody of his friend and said a few very serious good-byes. The four then departed on the 1,500 mile trainride to the capital, arriving there on October 10. Huang’s own trepidation at that time is tersely expressed in the poem “Me,” penned on October 11, in which he equates himself to his own death notice.

That same day, with a bucket of flour paste, the cohort proceeded to an alley off Wangfujing Avenue in downtown Beijing near the offices of the Peoples’ Daily, and began to glue up the hundred-odd sheets. A curious crowd gathered, and soon spilled out onto the avenue, creating a traffic jam. Sympathizers linked arms to protect the four from the press of the crowd. Huang Xiang, called on by the people, recited all of the poems from memory (some six hundred lines). In tremendously high spirits he recklessly asked the crowd “Shall we break the new idol? Shall we shake off the yoke?” Already highly emotional, the people collecively shouted “Yes!” Someone whom the crowd took for a plainclothes policeman was roughed up and driven off. Later that day, as the issues of Enlightenment sold out, Huang recited the poems again for a large crowd in Tiananmen Square, following which the four men urinated on a picture of Mao Zedong in the Square at the front of the Great Hall of the People. That night people still crowded the alley, trying to read the poems by torch light. Plainclothes policemen appeared in the street outside the house where the four were staying, and would not let them go out. They later learned that the Central Committee of Communist Party had met that night because it feared that a Hungarian type rebellion was breaking out and had ordered their personal files flown to Beijing by jet from Guiyang. The four were, however, allowed to return home unimpeded.

Back in Guiyang, they posted the same poems in big character posters and planned a second trip to Beijing. After mimeographing and brushing another collection they left again in late November, with eight men going in all. On the 24th, they posted big character posters on seventy yards of fence near Mao Zedong’s mausoleum in Tiananmen Square. Huang then brushed two huge banners on the spot, one proclaiming “The Cultural Revolution Must Be Reevaluated!” and the other “Mao Zedong Must Be Reassessed as Three and Seven!” 4 both absolute heresies even two years after his death. These astonishing statements, in full sight of the usual line of people waiting to enter the mausoleum, created a sensation. Promptly at noon they announced the foundation of the Enlightenment Society, whose purpose would be to advocate the freedoms enshrined in the country’s constitution but long denied by the Party. The issues of “Enlightenment” magazine were quickly sold out. Foreign reporters arrived on the scene to observe and photograph the posters and interview the group.5 Huang’s comment that “The death of an emperor is the death of a rat” spread across the city in an instant.

The following day, a number of people came together in Beijing in what became known as the “November 25 Discussions of Democracy.” Within a very short time dozens of associations similar to the Enlightenment Society burst into existence, among them “China Human Rights League,” “Exploration,” “Today,” “April Fifth Forum” and “Thaw,” as well as several branches of the Enlightenment Society itself. As Huang and political scholars have pointed out, the Enlightenment Society was the first wholly independent association formed without government approval since the founding of the Peoples’ Republic. The courageous and outrageous posters and recitation of Huang’s poems broke a dam and loosed a national flood of political expression that ranged from the program of measured progress towards full civil and human rights favored by Huang himself, to the more extreme anti-government and pro-democracy views that Wei Jingsheng soon published.

During these winter months of 1978 - 79, known later as the Democracy Wall Movement, Deng and the pragmatists effectively shifted the balance of power in the government. Still, the radical faction succeeded in pressuring Party Chairman Hua Guofeng into ordering that no official publication carry any of Huang’s writings, although the other free societies were allowed to go on publishing for a few more months. Huang Xiang and friends returned to Beijing a third time, on January 1, 1979, at which time Huang posted his suite of poems “My Symphony,” mainly on the theme of people in love in nature. More audacious and upsetting to the authorities was the public letter that Huang addressed to U. S. President Carter, in which he calls attention to China's suppression of human and civil rights and recommends that the U. S. and other nations make this failing an agenda matter in the conduct of their relations with China. Nevertheless, Huang was still allowed to travel freely, he and friends returning to Beijing in late February, and again in late March. On the last occasion, Huang posted “In Praise of Democracy Wall” to general acclaim, at the same time that Wei Jingsheng was publishing his pointed essay “Democracy or New Dictatorship.” Wei was arrested in April. Shortly following, Huang and the three other key members of Enlightenment were also arrested and sent to jail in Guiyang. Li Jiahua, who had earlier left the Enlightenment Society to found the more radical Thaw, was arrested in Chongqing and brought to Guiyang to be locked up with the others.

After a short period, the men were sentenced to laogai, Huang Xiang for the third time in his life. They were first held in Caigowan, a Guiyang “collection and investigatioin facility” rather than a formal prison. Huang, after weeks of solitary confinement, was placed in a cell with his Enlightenment colleagues. They were made daily to study the works of Mao Zedong, to which they of course devoted minimal attention. Treatment by the guards was typical, in that the food was barely adequate to sustain life and most prisoners were never allowed outside their cells; many women were beaten up and raped. A hunger strike by Huang and others brought some improvements. Later in 1979, Huang was transferred to his former work unit at the mill, for more months of confinement and close supervision. Toward the end of the year the members of the Enlightenment Society were ordered to come to Beijing by Hu Yaobang, General Secretary of the Party’s Central Committee, ostensibly to explain to newspaper reporters from around the world what the purpose of Enlightenment was, but really in the hope that they would adopt an orthodox position and redeem themselves. Huang was requested to write an article in which the authorities expected that he would speak out in favor of Deng’s “Four Upholds.” Undaunted as usual, Huang presented a lengthy essay entitled, “I Stand to Speak at China’s Gate,” in which he advocated democracy outright. The meeting was cancelled of course, and the mill authorities took away his pencil!

Huang was released late in 1980, after eighteen months of confinement. During this time, Ai gave birth to another child, a son named Huang Shuo, and moved out of their apartment. For a few months after his release, Huang Xiang had to share the apartment with a guard instead.

The 1980s: Rebelling

After his release, Huang Xiang immediately resumed his literary activities, in the vibrant milieu that prevailed in Guizhou at that time. Folk literary publications were numerous, among them Breaking Ground, Subway, Horizon, Poetic Spirit and Modern Poetry. Huang mentions several poets then active: Ya Mo, Li Jiahua, Long Jun, Wang Qiang, Wang Fu, Tang Yaping, Huang Xiangrong, Amen, Wu Ruohai, Nong Fu, Zhao Yunhu, Li Yihua, Yang Zhonghua, and Zhang Jiuyun. With Zhang Jiayan and Wu Qiulin Huang founded the periodical Rising Generation, with Huang only a contributor rather than its official editor, in the hope of avoiding official attention. A brief essay by Huang entitled “Poetry Roots Man” was the feature article of its first issue.

At an early editorial meeting, Huang suggested that they issue a challenge to Ai Qing, a respected poet who earlier had been critical of the communist regime but had become a conformist. The stated purpose of the challenge, set forth in their second issue, was to convince Ai Qing to resume his long-abandoned denunciations of social darkness and lack of freedom, and also to continue the progress they thought was being made towards cultural individualism and freedom. Ya Mo and other writers also participated. Reaction to the challenge in official literary circles in Beijing was distinctly negative. Ai Qing’s interpretation was that the young Guiyang writers wanted to debase him. Huang actually held Ai in great respect, visiting him many times towards the end of his life; the poem “Ai

Qing,” written later in 1989, reflects this respect.

By the spring of 1983, Huang’s marriage with Ai Youjun existed in form only. She had long been troubled by the frequent police searches of their living quarters for forbidden writings, and they had lived separately off and on. They were unwilling to contemplate divorce out of fear of the consequences, and out of concern for their two young children, daughter Huang Ai and son Huang Shuo, now aged 12 and 4. Another reason that Huang gives for remaining in the marriage was that a true soul partner whom he could love completely and totally had not yet entered his life. This situation changed suddenly in May of the year, when a new freshman at Guizhou University, Zhang Ling by name, was present at an informal poetry reading that Huang was giving. He perceived that although she was shy and quiet, even protected by the older students, still she seemed to have an adventuresome side, and he found her quite attractive. As they came to know each other, Huang learned that she had heard of him some months earlier, and already read issues of both Enlightenment and Rising Generation, experiencing a strong emotional response to the several poems of the “Fire God Symphony” not unlike Huang’s own burning sensation as he wrote and recited the first one of that suite, “Song of the Torches.” Even before they met, she realized that her destiny was to form a classic romantic relationship with a poet, to take responsibility for him and protect him.

Following their meeting, Zhang Ling became a frequent visitor to the Huang household, spending many weekends as a guest, and indulging with Huang in their mutual love of poetry. When this began, Huang was completing a suite of poems entitled “Portrait of Weakness,” on unhappy and nihilistic themes reflected in the sign saying “Mortuary” that hung on the door of his study. Many short pieces, some in prose, comprise this suite; only three poems, “Feeling Sculpture,” “Earth” and “Wailing,” are included here. Zhang Ling’s presence transformed Huang’s mood completely, into one of vibrant positive energy. Thus inspired, he conceived a suite under the title “Howling Blood,” and immediately turned out its several poems, of which “I Have Faith,” “Naked Woman,” and “Maternal Instinct” are translated. Then in short order he drafted a larger suite of poems entitled “World - Your Body Naked and Concealed” containing twenty-two poems, of which sixteen are included herein, “Stone Curtain” through “Gateway.” (The original version of this suite was lost to confiscation by police the following August; Huang rewrote it in 1985, hence the dual dates at the foot of the poems.)

Both Huang and Zhang realized that in each other they had found their soul mates, and their spirits soared; inevitably, by some time in 1984, their relationship had progressed to real love and physical intimacy. Although they managed to conceal this development for a time, Ai Youjun of course realized what had happened, and took measures. She first called in Zhang Ling’s parents to try to persuade Huang to sever the relationship. When this failed, she beseeched the University authorities to do something. An article they published condemning Huang created a sensation among the students, most of whom supported Huang and Zhang Ling in their “free” love relationship. The University soon turned the matter over to the police.

This came at a particularly unfortunate time, for a crackdown on crime ordered by Deng Xiaoping was then in progress. Supposedly directed against real criminals and miscreants, the campaign was used by the authorities in many places to enforce a strict communist morality that forbade such socially “unsettling” things as intimate western-style dancing by couples, and sexual relations between unmarried people. A common practice was for the police to arrest a woman and bully her into confessing that she had engaged in sex with someone; the hapless man so named was then accused of rape, and after the barest parody of legal proceedings put to death, often in a mass execution by machine gun in a crowded stadium.

Unknown to Huang Xiang, the Police arrested and jailed Zhang Ling, and tried to coerce her to sign a rape accusation against him. They found it hard to believe that an eighteen year old daughter of good Communist parents, herself a former member of the Communist Youth League, could actually love a forty-two year old married man the father of two children, as well a black-listed member of the evil landlord/military class. Zhang Ling courageously resisted all this (as many did not), insisting that their love was pure and true, that Huang Xiang was not a “hereditary” class enemy, and that neither of them had committed any wrong. Despite three days of privation, blandishments and threats, and use of stun guns on other female prisoners within her hearing, she stood her ground and refused to sign the indictment. Upon her release an hour after midnight, she hastened directly to Huang’s house to see if he was all right. Before leaving in the early dawn, she bit her finger and wrote in her own blood:

Paper full of silly words

Two streaks of red-eyed tears

Words bespeak the writer’s folly

Who can know their inner sense.

Huang was arrested in June and remanded to the Fifth Railway Detention Prison, a place unknown to any of his family. Although held for some time on death row and told that he would not walk out alive, after interrogation and several weeks in isolation, he was ultimately released for lack of evidence in December. Zhang Ling had just been temporarily suspended from the University and taken home by her father to Zhengzhou in far-off Henan Province.

Huang and Ai Youjun obtained a formal divorce in January, 1985; his daughter Huang Ai stayed with Youjun, and Huang Shuo with Huang. Experiencing the break-up of his family and having been without his new love for many months, Huang Xiang felt desolated. Later that month, however, things took a turn for the better. Opening his front door in answer to a knock, he was flabbergasted to find Zhang Ling herself standing before him. Although ordered to stay home, she had climbed through a window, borrowed a few yuan from her cousin, and made the two-day train ride back to Guiyang. Since Huang was now single again, they could apply for a marriage license, and having obtained it, went to live with Huang’s grandparents in Guidong, Hunan Province. There Zhang Ling obtained a job teaching in a suburban commune, which provided them a humble one-room living accommodation. Although life there was simple and hard, both were happy. Huang set about reconstructing from memory the suite of poems “World - Your Body Naked and Concealed,” which the police had confiscated in 1983. They there decided to modify Zhang Ling’s pen name; to the original “Qiuxiao” they added “Yulan,” the full name now meaning roughly “Fall clearwater Rain orchid.” Zhang Ling’s mother unfortunately soon traced them to Guidong, and had the marriage license invalidated; although Zhang Ling stood up to her mother’s demand that she return home, she and Huang realized that they had to return again to Guiyang to distance themselves from further parental efforts to separate them.

Back in Guiyang they learned that Zhang Jiayan, a former editor of Huang’s magazine Rising Generation, was on the organizing committee of the first “Literature and Art Festival” at Beijing University where he was studying. He invited Huang and Ya Mo to participate in the festival. Typically opportunistic, Huang determined to bring several other Guiyang poets with them. The group planned to create a veritable explosion under banners proclaiming “Celestial Poets’ Explosion of Celestial Star-cluster Chinese Poetry.” They would fly the banners, distribute leaflets, deliver impromptu speeches and recite poetry at the opening ceremony, proclaiming poetry - their poetry - to be a vital and vibrant expression of the basic nature of man. The authorities got wind of their intentions, ordered the uninvited poets home, and cancelled the speeches at the Festival that Huang and Ya Mo were scheduled to give. Appeals to various authorities including Hu Deping, the son of Hu Yaobang, were of no avail, so the disappointed poets suggested that Huang lead them in a true “Explosion” at all the main universities in Beijing. They immediately set out and visited in succession Beijing University, the Lu Xun Institute, Beijing Teachers College, the Chinese Peoples’ University, and finally the Central Institute of Arts and Crafts, everywhere reading poems and proclaiming “free poetry, the philosophy of nihilism, art as life, etc.” Zhang Ling created a bit of a stir in reading the rather risque poem “Naked Woman.” One over-enthusiastic local poet who exclaimed “Overthrow the dictatorship . . . .” was subsequently sentenced to three years in jail. Huang was not arrested, but the Party Central Committee directed the authorities in Guiyang to investigate him for possible prosecution as an active criminal.

In the following year, 1987, Huang produced some prose but only a little poetry, principally the suite “Sunset of Life,” a few poems of which are inclu- ded here. Huang and Zhang Ling were busy turning a small partially-finished house into a livable home, but this ended when Huang was arrested for his par-ticipation in the Beijing Explosion of 1986. On charges of creating social disturbturbance and inciting student unrest, he was sentenced to three years in laogai plus one additional year of deprivation of civil rights, in an administrative proceeding that was devoid of real evidence.

In his place of incarceration, Wang Wu Prison in Guiyang, Huang somehow found ways to write, despite the usual prison interdiction against it. Under a blanket at night, using a small pocket flashlight, he produced all the poems in the book section entitled “In Jail,” including the suite “Pure Love.” These were all written on scraps of paper (including toilet paper) and smuggled out of the prison by Zhang Ling inside her clothing or stuffed in the pockets and lining of seasonal clothing that she was permitted to bring in and take out. They are a true compendium of a prisoner’s thoughts and emotions; thanks to Zhang Ling they survived, unlike so many written in other places where Huang was incarcerated. Around the time of the June 4th Tiananmen protests in 1989, Huang composed the poem “Statue of Liberty” for Zhang to circulate among the protesting students. A guard discovered the poem as Zhang Ling tried to smuggle it out, and Huang was placed in strict solitary confinement for three months with no more visits. During these three years without Huang, Zhang Ling managed to eke out a living doing laundry by hand while caring alone for Huang’s son Huang Shuo; her difficulties were aggra- vated by frequent harassing visits from various municipal bureaus and agencies.

The 1990s: Changes

When Huang was ultimately released in 1990, the frustrations of his im-prisonment burst forth. The first poems he wrote all embody intense emotion, in a novel and variegated format; “Nietzsche” (not translated) was quickly followed by “Van Gogh,” and “ Duncan,” perhaps the most intense of all the poems here included. He wrote “Van Gogh” all at once over several hours, furiously brushing large cursive script on a huge roll of paper on the floor behind a locked door, leaving Zhang Ling to wonder whether he remained in command of his senses.

The house that Huang and Zhang Ling had occupied for several years in Guiyang had against its rear wall a large open drainage ditch that also served as a sewer. In 1991 there occurred a flood so great that the ditch overflowed its wall and water surrounded the house almost up to its windows. The authorities of the mill where Huang had previously worked decided that they now had a pretext to raze the house, simply in order to harass Huang and Zhang. A bulldozer arrived on the scene and without the slightest warning began to push against the house, with its two occupants still inside. Zhang Ling rushed outside to implore the workers to stop; when they refused, she went and got the mayor, who came to the place and halted the destruction. Zhang Ling was menstruating at time, and now began to bleed profusely; Huang conveyed her to the hospital on his rickety bicycle, but she was denied attention because she did not have the cash needed to pay in advance for treatment. Huang brought her home, already pale from great loss of blood and in danger of bleeding to death; fortunately, Ya Mo’s wife Xiao Chengqing obtained an herbal remedy that finally stopped the bleeding.

In the half of the house that remained, Zhang Ling set up a barbershop, on which the family subsisted for a short time. She hired a couple of employees to help her, leaving Huang free to write. One of the regular customers was an officer of the Guiyang Committee of Science and Technology. He had rented a small property outside the city that included a two-story house and several fish ponds and wanted a responsible tenant to monitor them; fortunately, he suggested that that Huang and family sub-let the place. Located in a lovely semi-rural setting on the bank of the Huaxi River that flows through Guiyang, this place was a veri- table heaven compared to anything Huang had occupied in all the years since his childhood; Zhang Ling christened it their “Dream Nest.” Living here in truly delightful circumstances, Huang Xiang penned “Scenery” and the poems grouped under “Meditation.” Here he also wrote many other short poems, anecdotes, short essays and philosophical observations, all of them interesting or charming; they are collected in the book entitled Meng Chao Sui Bi ( Dream Nest Jottings), which currently awaits translation as do virtually all his prose writings.

In the year 1992, Huang Xiang and Zhang Ling were at last formally married. A year later Huang was invited by the International Biographical Centre of Cambridge, U.K., to recite poetry at its annual literary conference, held that year at Harvard University in the U.S.A. He needed first to obtain permission to leave the country, and to his surprise, two officials in Guiyang who had been among his principal tormentors now seemed to have considerably softened their attitudes toward him, supporting his application for a passport. At this time, China had relaxed its policy respecting foreign travel by dissidents, hoping that they would stay abroad, as part of a plan to gain a favorable response to its quest to be the site of the next Olympic Games. He received a passport but one for Zhang Ling was refused, she being treated as a sort of hostage for his behavior overseas. She encouraged him to stay in the U.S., even if it entailed a long, lonely and possibly permanent separation.

Huang’s reaction to the U.S., actually to New York City, is vividly and negatively reflected in the poem “Animal Age.” Americans in his eyes generally appeared like animals in a huge park, all unresponsive. The intellectual climate at Harvard seemed dead, the poetry sessions only attended by oldsters more interested in the free lunch that followed. Although the reaction of some young people at a later dinner was more open and positive, even the expatriate Chinese intellectuals whom he met in New York seemed to him like “trees dying in a harsh environment with their roots exposed.” Unable to obtain nourishment, they appeared out of their element, incapable of either returning to their homeland or making a serious mark in their new land, and uninterested in what Huang Xiang had long been saying and doing at great personal risk. He returned to China with no regrets.

Huang’s reception at Beijing’s airport was a close interrogation by the authorities, who apparently suspected that he had returned only for the purpose of renewed anti-regime agitation. However, lacking any evidence, they let him join Zhang Ling and some friends who were waiting outside the airport. Huang and Zhang then took up temporary residence in the Beijing Arts Village (located in the former Summer Palace), where artists, poets, rock musicians and Sinologists congregated. Huang recited poetry there, but because the police were frequently present, he was circumspect in selecting poems for recitation and topics for con-versation. In 1994 the organization Human Rights in China selected him for an award from the Lillian Hellman/Dashiell Hammett Fund for writing under adverse conditions.

Huang had earlier prepared for publication a sizable volume of his poetry and prose under the title “Huang Xiang - Kuang Yin Bu Zui de Shou Xing,”7 which the Writers’ Publishing House agreed to publish. The entire first run of the book as well as large colorful advertising posters for nationwide distribution had already been printed, when the State Publications and Press Administration ordered Writers Publishing to withhold distribution and destroy all copies of the book. Huang’s audacious reaction was to treat this as a breach of contract and sue the Writers Publishing House, an action reported in the world press. He, Zhang Ling and twenty other persons also petitioned the National Peoples’ Congress to rectify the violation of basic rights inherent in the still-extant ban on publication of his writings, but the effort obtained no success.

Huang and Zhang engaged in the overt advocacy of reforms and participated in the U.N.-sponsored Year of Human Rights. The authorities apparently took these activities as excessive, for one night, several policemen burst into their bedroom while they slept and arrested them. Word of the arrest was somehow communicated by neighbors and reported within only four hours by the Voice of America, but this helped them not at all. They were held for twenty-four hours without food in a police station and separately interrogated, then transferred to the Changping Detention Center outside Beijing. There the prisoners had no beds, nor any eating utensils. Food was no better than pig slop and served in a tub on wheels, so that the prisoners had to put their faces in it to eat; drinking water came out of the same hose that was used to wash the latrines. Zhang Ling went on a hunger strike, and they both became so weak that they “nearly died.”

A month later, after the June 4th anniversary of Tiananmen, they were escorted back to Guiyang, where the Security Bureau was ordered to imprison them. However, one of its now relatively well-disposed officers simply sent them back to their Dream Nest, subject to the restrictions that they must not leave the city of Guiyang without permission, and that they absolutely not go to Beijing. To their horror the Dream Nest had become a nightmare. Liu Zhenwei, wife of the provincial Party Secretary, had chosen the location as the site for a personal villa; bulldozers had razed the house and were tearing up the landscape. (For this blatant act of corruption, she was later executed.) Furthermore, Xiang’s absence from Beijing made it impossible to pursue his suit against the publisher, and it was consequently dismissed.

Later in 1994, Huang Xiang learned that one of his uncles had located his mother, whom Huang had not seen for five decades. She had determined on a house in the country near Jiujiang, Jiangxi Province, which Huang and his sister Huang Wanzhu together purchased. Huang Xiang and Zhang Ling moved there in 1996. The place was even better than the Dream Nest, with its own courtyard and pond, and pleasant views of Lushan Mountain. When the local police received the personal files of Huang and Zhang, they became afraid of trouble and placed them under surveillance by telescope from a nearby hillside. Then a succession of officers from virtually every municipal department and agency came visiting, with the clear intent to harass them. Most blatant perhaps was the visit from the family planning agency whose agent ordered Zhang Ling to undergo a tubal ligation or else be compelled to leave the house, even though it was known that she was unable to conceive. It became clear that the local authorities regarded Huang Xiang as a “time bomb” capable of exploding at any time, one who made them very nervous. After six months of this unsettling existence, the authorities finally forced the previous owner of the property to rescind the sale and refund most of the purchase money to Huang and his sister.

The return to Guiyang was sad, but it quickly turned to fear, for Huang immediately learned that he had been named as the leader of an “active counterrevolutionary clique” and was in danger of arrest and imprisonment once again. He and Zhang at that point had no choice but to leave the country and come to the United States. In February, 1997, Huang had received an invitation from the Association of American Publishers to come to the U.S. to recite poetry. He accepted and both he and Zhang Ling were allowed to leave, thanks to the continuing policy of allowing dissidents to depart; they arrived in New York on July 13, 1997. A few days later, feeling stifled in the small basement room they occupied, Huang wrote “Refusing Exile,” a lament expressing his negative reac- tion to exile in New York, and his attachment to China undiminished by the harsh treatment he had received there.

The U. S. and the Future

 Later in 1997 Huang and Zhang Ling were fortunate to meet Ms Judy Manton, who is an activist with Human Rights in China, an Adjunct Professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University, and a teacher of English both in China and to newly-arrived Chinese immigrants in New York City. Upon learning of their difficult circumstances, she invited them to take up residence in her home in Tenafly, New Jersey. As always, it was Zhang Ling who found employment and has been working hard and long hours for their support while learning the English language, true to her purpose in life of making it possible for Huang Xiang to write unimpeded. In the meantime they searched for someone willing to translate Huang’s works into English, a quest continually frustrated by the demands for fees, which they could not afford. At a party at Ms Manton’s house later that year they were introduced to Andrew Emerson, a business man with an interest in China who expressed a willingness to translate gratis. They were at first skeptical of one who had learned the Chinese language in the military, but when his wife assured them that he had the soul of a poet they accepted him. Translation immediately began, and so also a relationship that has developed into a firm friendship.

The Chinese-speaking world outside of China is slowly coming to know Huang Xiang through his public appearances, articles about him and books in Chinese that he has published since leaving China, the latter all listed in the Bibliography. He has been invited by foreign scholars and editors to Australia, Japan, Taiwan and Sweden to lecture and recite. In the U.S. he also receives invitations to recite, sometimes in tandem with someone else reading these English translations in alternating verses or passages. He has written poems here on diverse topics and chosen nearly all of them for inclusion in the book. However, most of his time has gone into writing a massive fictionalized story of his life, entitled “Blood of Freedom” (Ziyou zhi xue), published in Chinese in mid-2003 (see Bibliography) and to be translated into English in 2004 ; it as a comprehensive picture of China’s Twentieth Century history, social practices and communist rule, as reflected in his personal experiences. Only when more poems and a substantial number of his prose essays and commentaries have been translated and published will the world be able to see Huang Xiang in totality and to regard him in the same light as the few who already know him: a poet-philosopher worthy of world recognition and respect.

In closing, we revert to the original premise, that it takes a type of heroism to withstand public shaming, police harassment, incarceration and brutality, all the while maintaining devotion to one’s ideals and the ability to create, without becoming unbalanced or vengeful. No doubt there are many who have experienced some of these things in their lifetime. Huang Xiang is certainly one of few who can claim to have done them all.

1 Like many of his early works, these poems have not survived.

2 Dialogues from this and similar situations are detailed in Huang’s autobiographical works.

3 Activities of the Salon are described in my article “Undercurrent Literature;” see Bibliography.

4 Meaning “three-tenths bad and [only] seven-tenths good.”

5 Roger Garside’s book “China After Mao” describes Huang’s role well; see Bibliography

6 This poem is taken, with minor changes, from the classic novel “Red Chamber Dream.”

7 The book’s title after the words “Huang Xiang” is taken from his poem “Buddha of the East;” it means “Beast Drinking Wildly Not Drunk.”

Last Updated: July 30, 2004