City Gate, Open Up is the lyrical autobiography of Chinas a memoir legendary poet Bei Dao. Exiled from Beijing in the wake of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, Bei Dao returned to his homeland in 2001 for the first time in over twenty years. The city of his youth had vanished: ‘I was a foreigner in my hometown,’ he writes. The shock of this experience released a flood of memories and emotions contained in City Gate, Open Up.
The poet recalls the Beijing of his youth, from the birth of the People’s Republic, through the chaotic years of the Great Leap Forward, and on into the Cultural Revolution. At the centre of the book are his parents and siblings and their everyday life together through famine and festival. Bei Dao’s autobiography is a memory palace of endless alleyways and corridors, where personal narrative mixes with the momentous history he lived through.
Bei Dao (the pseudonym means `north island) was born in Beijing in 1949. Educated into the beliefs of Communist China, his subsequent disaffection found its voice in poetry, for which he has been nominated for the Nobel Prize on several occasions. Since 1989 he has lived first in Europe, then in the USA, and finally Hong Kong, where he teaches at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His poetry in English translation includes The August Sleepwalker (1988), Old Snow (1992), Forms of Distance (1994), Landscape Over Zero (1998) and Unlock (2006). He has also published several collections of essays, including Midnights Gate (2007).
* Leading figure in the first generation of Chinese poets to protest against state-controlled literature* Part of the 1970s avant-gard Menglong Shi Ren, or Misty Poets, reknowned for their abstract poems* In 1989 Bei Dao was exiled from China for his perceived influence on the Tiananmen Square protests* This memoir documents his eventful life in the lead-up to his exile* Internationally acclaimed for his engimatic, minimalist poems about love, death, freedom and exile
The language of Bei Daos memoir, seamlessly translated by fellow poet Yang, is elegantly simple and guilelessly accessible....Winter white cabbage, vinyl records, pet rabbits, banned books, and first and last I love yous provide intimate glimpses that open up to reveal extraordinary, immediate testimony of challenges survived in a life intensely lived. Booklist of City Gate, Open Up (US edition, published by New Directions)This is a nuanced account of China in the era of the Cultural Revolution, seen through one young mans eyes. Since that young man became a poet, it is also beautifully textured, full of the sounds, sights, and scents of a Beijing that is no more. Publishers Weekly of City Gate, Open Up (US edition, published by New Directions)Praise for Bei DaoDaos first book-length poem transports us through the years, countries and memories that followed his 1989 expulsion from China (his poems were recited by students in Tiananmen Square). The restlessness of these 34 cantos, which dart between personal experience and historical moment, creates a vital expression of the exiles condition.
Maria Crawford, Financial Times This beautiful, harrowing, frequently astonishing and unsettling long poem, eleven years in the making, succeeding and deepening a prodigious body of accomplished earlier work, is ample evidence that the Nobel Prize for Bei Dao is surely somewhat overdue.
Carol Muske-Dukes Bei Dao is among the strongest poetic impressions of my lifetime. To me, his poems are the work of a genius, a genius of juxtaposing, of simplicity, of acceleration, of tunneling through emblem and image.
Michael Hofmann As with stereograms (magic-eye art), if we look at them long enough, a three-dimensional view of Bei Daos itinerant life in exile comes in and out of focus. From Beijing to West Berlin, Copenhagen to Hong Kong, the narrative thrust of this collection zigzags through his lifetime, while the 34 cantos themselves (in Jeffrey Yangs propulsive translation) are a nebula of worldly experience. Jack Hargreaves, China Book Review
