Sun, Jul 30, 2000 page18

• Wang Dan's bitter road from student rebel to poet

  As former Tiananmen Square student leader Wang Dan tours Taiwan, he talks about his recent collection of poems amd the dark days of imprisonment that inspired them

  • By Yu Sen-lun / STAFF REPORTER
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  Motherland, I am a river　

  (祖國我是一條河)

  Oh Motherland, I am a river

  The flip of the yellow book pages

  Is the sound of my moans

  Along the sailing routes covered with cordite

  Was the moment I started

  flowing

  Bones of the dead dance in the caverns

  At the foot of the mountain

  Seeing your beard of white and

  Eyes of spring

  I feel an impulse

  Do you hear the cry of the cuckoos yet?

  Oh Motherland,

  I am the river whence the

  "Yong-le Canon (永樂大典)"

  flowed out

  I, oh Motherland, am a river

  I can see you

  The tremor behind the airport runway

  Sometimes terror will thicken into blood

  In the red twilight oh Motherland

  Do you feel the multitude of snakes crawling

  Trapping you in the eve of dawn

  Yet I am a river that seeps out of the searchlights

  And so have no hunger, no thirst, for the riverbed

  How time

  Mutates into the shapes of banners

  My breath

  Becomes the harvest that

  followed the breaking of the

  reservoir

  You don't need to show me the way with your bosom

  On the strings of the old guitar covered with dust

  Motherland

  I am a silent river

  "Writing poems is a weapon for me to fight with reality," says Wang Dan (王丹), a former leader of the 1989 Tiananmen Square student movement. This is a new face for Wang, that of a poet, but it fits him well. His new book of poems, Travel in Cold Alone (我在寒冷中獨行), is a collection that he wrote during his imprisonment and has been promoting on a tour of Taiwan.

  The 31-year-old is usually known these days in the political realm, in speeches and democratic campaigns. As a high-profile survivor of the massacre at Tiananmen, he is a symbol for the human rights and democracy struggles in China and the "last conscience of the June 4th incident." He was imprisoned for almost a decade for his role.

  Wang looks much different nowadays. Having gained a few pounds, tanned and chosen baggy clothes and Nikes as his fashion, Wang no longer resembles the pale, rebellious student on the square.

  He has made a much similar transition in his book. Highlighting his romantic and naive traits, Wang sublimates his political protest into lyrical poems. Most of the poems seem to be "love poems", with a few exceptions, like "Motherland, I am a river," which shows obvious political implications.

  For You (致你)

  Perhaps all four seasons would be frozen

  Time passes by and a long scar carves

  Perhaps the beauty of youth

  Has tumbled and turned into a gray nightmare

  Perhaps we've never had dawns

  All one can see is the eternal dusk

  Then would you please

  Please believe

  Not every dark spot is ugly as the morass

  Not every love is attached with willful pursuit

  Then would you please

  Please hold my hands

  Hold my gentle hands that are soft as the still water

  Memory, imagination and expressing emotion are the three main elements of the 60 poems in the book, Wang says. "In the dark gray cell of prison, I always remember my green days as a Beijing University student before the incident." Every night, Wang remembers, he used to take a walk with classmates along a lake on the campus, forgetting about the 11pm curfew as they talked about their ideals and passionate concern for China's future.

  In the many sleepless winter nights in prison, Wang wrote poems of those youthful days and his friendships. "For me, writing poems was therapy, a method to reach a spiritual balance during those lonely days," he says. "For eight months I was locked on a floor where I could not hear any sound, which was frightening, so I had to make sound myself." The poems helped, in a small way, to infuse sound and color into those bleak days, marked by despair as his youth drained away in a prison cell.

  The suffering of imprisonment often nurtures the growth of literature. In the preface for Wang's book, Cheng Cho-yu (鄭愁予), a poetry scholar and poet, compares Wang with two eminent "prison poets", Russian Osip Mandelstam and Chinese Ai Ching (艾青). "They all expressed their openness and honesty in life," he wrote .

  Wang also found himself influenced by Taiwanese poems. "His poems read like Taiwan's modern poems and folk songs in the 1970s, very pure and fresh," says poet Chen Ke-hua (陳克華), who introduced Wang's poems to his publisher, Chiuko Publishing.

  "I grew up in an environment where almost any literature has a purpose. So when I began reading Taiwan's poems in the mid-80s -- the aftermath of Cultural Revolution -- I felt a cultural shock from the clear and bright souls of those Taiwan poems," Wang says.

  His knowledge of Taiwan literature surprises Chen and other Taiwan literati. His favorite Taiwanese poets are Lo Fu (洛夫), Lo Chih-cheng (羅智成) and Cheng Cho-yu, who is also a favorite poet of President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), whom Wang met during the inauguration.

  On this trip, Wang has met and befriended another of the DPP's stars, a man as much a romantic revolutionary as Wnag himself. DPP legislator Shih Ming-teh (施明德) hosted Wang for a night of drinking and storytelling, during which they were joined by Wuer Kaixi (吾爾開希), another student leader from Tiananmen who now lives in Taiwan.

  As a leading member of the Kaohsiung Incident, and a politician noted for his romantic revolutionary remarks as well as his frequent romances, Shih seemed to have a lot to share with Wang, who said he would include Shih in a study of "romantics and revolutions".

  "When I see Shih, who spent 25 years in prison, still holding his romantic ideas and passion for Taiwan's society, I feel inspired and enlightened," Wang said.

  Poems translated by Francis Huang.
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