by Linda Jaivin
Other friends, however, revealed that they were aware that the pair had been quarrelling on and off for years, over one thing or another. According to a mutual friend who lived in New Zealand, there was a constant tension between Gu Cheng's rustic romanticism and Xie Ye's more practical concerns, including those for their child. He was also intolerant of her desire to mix with people, to have a life of her own.
Their discord came to a climax in Germany. A Chinese man there had become infatuated with Xie Ye, and although she apparently did not encourage him or return his affection, the incident incited uncontrollable jealousy in Gu Cheng. Gu Cheng was wildly possessive of Xie Ye. He'd even been known to drag her away from meetings with female friends.
This was particularly ironic considering that he had already had an affair—an open and passionate affair—with another woman.
The woman was called Li Ying, nicknamed Ying'er—the very same Ying'er, it turned out, after whom Gu Cheng and Xie Ye titled their joint novel. She was a young aspiring poet who worked in the editorial office of China's main journal of poetry, Shikan. About a year after Gu Cheng arrived in Auckland, in early 1989, he went to John Minford with a request. There was a talented young poet in Beijing, he said, and he hoped John would invite her out to New Zealand; the way he expressed the request led John to think Gu Cheng scarcely knew Li Ying but had been most impressed by her writing. This put John in an awkward position, for he had already used department funds to sponsor Gu Cheng and Yang Lian out to Auckland. He could hardly justify inviting out a third Chinese poet, much less a complete unknown. He told Gu Cheng this.
A week or two later, Gu returned to press his case. He said money was no problem; he and Xie Ye would pay for Li Ying's plane ticket and look after her when she arrived. They just needed a proper letter of invitation from the university. Finally, John says, he ‘caved in’. She arrived in New Zealand in late 1989.
On Waiheke, Gu Cheng moved in with Li Ying. It became apparent even to friends who didn't know what was going on that Xie Ye and he were going through a difficult period. Even Gu Cheng's relations with his young son were becoming strained. In the end, Li Ying left. I'm not sure where she ended up.
The story of the triangular relationship, apparently somewhat idealised, is presented in the novel Ying'er. The novel may hold the key to the events that followed, and then again it may not. It would be hard not to jump to some conclusions. Although Ying'er is nominally a novel, from all reports it does seem to blur life and art. The main characters are even named Gu Cheng, Ying'er and Lei (Xie Ye's penname). The island they live on is called Jiliudao, or ‘torrent island’, a translation of the Maori word Waiheke.
I read an excerpt from Ying'er in an issue of Hong Kong's Mingbao yuekan (Ming Pao Monthly). It describes a scene in which Ying'er removes Gu Cheng's tubular hat, washes his face and massages it with oil. In the end, his face is so clean and white and smooth that he scarcely recognises himself.
‘Oh no!’ he exclaims. ‘Lei is really going to have it out with me now. I don't know what to do with myself.’
While in Beijing, I met up with a mutual friend who had known the couple in Germany. She told me that their arguments had there grown so fierce and his temper so violent that at least once the police had been called in by a neighbour. She said that several times when she met up with them at parties or friends' homes, Xie was covered in bruises; once, she even appeared to have trouble walking.
Another friend in common confirmed that it was pretty obvious that Gu Cheng was beating Xie Ye. ‘But we Chinese,’ he said, shaking his head, ‘we always counsel people to stay together, to patch things up. And that's what most of us did with them. We should have been telling her to run as fast as she could.’ He was very shaken by what happened. ‘I feel deep regret.’
KNOWLEDGE
You
Sometimes look at me
Sometimes look at the clouds.
I feel
When you look at me you are far away
When you look at the clouds you are very near.3
Two days before the murder-suicide, the manuscript for Ying'er had been sold in China's first book auction in Shenzhen for RMB23,000 (a little less than A$6000—a huge sum in the Chinese context). After the news broke, an anonymous bidder offered the first buyer RMB500,000 for it, and then donated it to the Writers Publishing House. It was rushed into print in a record five days and snapped up, in many cases, by people who'd never even heard of Gu Cheng's poetry. It was an instant bestseller.
Over the two weeks I was in Beijing in October 1993, the news of the murder-suicide spread. Gu Cheng's name came up constantly in conversation. Everyone was shocked. Many were titillated. Most wanted to know every detail. The press did its best to oblige.
Article upon article appeared in the Chinese media (overseas as well as in the mainland), analysing Gu Cheng's contribution to Chinese poetry, discussing the details of the murder, the relationship, the role of Ying'er, his mental instability (her parents were right), the novel… Friends reminisced, wondered, grieved. His distressed father tried to explain that maybe the axe ‘slipped, maybe he lost control’.
The propagandists, as always, found the message for which they were looking: according to the Beijing Youth News the cause probably lay ‘in an inability to adapt to a foreign lifestyle’. The Chinese press made much of the supposed poverty of their lives on Waiheke, painting a picture of Gu Cheng having constantly to move heavy stones—an image evocative of a labour camp—when in fact, John Minford informs me, the poet was simply laying crazy-paving and building a miniature Great Wall for the fun of it. Gu Cheng received a fine income in Germany, tax free. In New Zealand, he got a monthly pay cheque from the university.
Another big theme was the relationship between genius and madness, as if the first always excuses the second. In a refreshingly sane article published in Hong Kong's Ming Pao Monthly, the writer Zhou Duo excoriated his fellow intellectuals for merely regretting the tragedy and refusing to lay any blame on Gu Cheng for his actions:
We're constantly going on about ‘democracy’ and ‘equality’ and ‘humanism’, but every time we come across some concrete incident, our ‘democracy’ either turns into the tyranny of the majority or the indulgent worship of a few ‘geniuses’ or people of special status… In my opinion, the only hope for China is if we can have a few less sick ‘geniuses’ and romantic heroes and a few more healthy, rational and normal people.
Many ears were deaf to Zhou's voice. A new cult began to grow up around Gu Cheng in China.
The most chilling bit of information was this: Xie Ye apparently had had a strong premonition of what her fate might be. She'd tried several times to leave Gu Cheng, though she wouldn't go without Mu'er, and Gu Cheng made it impossible for her to take the boy away. A close friend of hers told a friend of mine that, on the basis of her conversations with Xie Ye, she didn't believe it was a crime of passion. It may well have been entirely premeditated.
The more I hear and read, the less I understand.
MISSING PERSONS
she sees her mouth falling to the ground
she sees bees flying up and diving down
there are many houses
grass above look down from above
she does not have her mouth any more
she knows laughter
belongs to the hearts of the dead
as sweet as the throat that has been examined
the dead
seldom walk off by themselves.4
If Gu Cheng slips in and out of focus now, Xie Ye is in danger of fading out of view entirely. It took ages for any reporter to think of interviewing her family. While there was a flood of reports on Ying'er, I don't know what's happened to Xie Ye's One Thousand Days on the Island. Was she in fact a literary talent in her own right? John Minford pointed me to the first major compilation of China's new poetry, an ‘internal’ publication of Beijing University from the mid-eighties. I found in it two poems by Xie Ye. This is one:
>
I want to love for a while
I want to walk on the border of life
to gaze upon the scenery of the coast over there
to see the roses, petal by petal, and sails
to pass by
I want to love for a while
just as the little green insect loves
the damp blossoms
to love for a while, I want
to drink the nectar till it's dry.5
If Xie Ye lived under Gu Cheng's shadow, her death seems to have been overshadowed by his as well. To twist a Chinese proverb, his death was as heavy as Mount Tai, hers was as light as a feather. It made me ill to read lines like this one from a Guangzhou newspaper, of Gu's suicide: ‘Perhaps this is precisely the ultimate spiritual choice of the pure poet.’
I'm not the only one who found this sort of comment distressing. An outraged commentator, Luo Changlu, wrote in the China Youth News: ‘The problem is that when he made this “ultimate spiritual choice”, he did so against the background of the murder of his wife—although the media seems to have “purposefully” forgotten this point.’ Luo quoted a woman poet in Beijing as having said, ‘Let's not disturb Gu Cheng any more.’ Luo then asked, ‘Who, after all, disturbed whom?’
Luo noted with relief that, at last, some other observers had begun to take a more sober view. ‘Gu Cheng didn't just murder his wife Xie Ye,’ another reporter reminded readers. ‘He murdered the woman Xie Ye, or rather, he murdered Xie Ye, a human being.’
A custody battle, meanwhile, broke out among the relatives of Xie Ye and Gu Cheng and the Maori woman who had cared for Mu'er most of his life. The stakes were high: the boy would inherit all the money from the sales of Ying'er. Last I heard he was in the care of Xie Ye's sister.
It is sobering to think how little we know about the people we know. It is terrifying to think how many of them suffer without anyone noticing or doing anything.
Gu Cheng was a great poet. In the end, however, he betrayed both his genius and his humanity. There can be no excuse for what he did; Xie Ye may have shared his dreams, but he had no right to make her or their son part of his nightmare.
Gu Cheng and Xie Ye are dead. RIP.
Today
You and I
Will cross this ancient threshold
Don't offer good wishes
Don't say goodbye
All that is like a performance
The best is silence
Concealment can never be counted a deceit
Leave memory to the future
As dreams to the night
Tears to the sea
Wind to the sails.6
1‘I Give You Each a Knife’ from Selected Poems by Gu Cheng, Seán Golden and Chu Chiyu, ed., Hong Kong, Renditions Paperbacks, 1990, p. 154.
2 ‘Who'd Have Thought?’ from Selected Poems by Gu Cheng, p. 101.
3 Gu Cheng, ‘Far and Near’ from Mists: New Poets from China, reprinted from Renditions Nos 19&20 (Spring & Autumn 1983), Research Centre for Translation of The Chinese University of Hong Kong, p. 211.
4 ‘Red Wheat’ from Selected Poems by Gu Cheng, p. 158.
5 Xie Ye, ‘Want’, trans, by Linda Jaivin.
6 Gu Cheng, ‘On Parting’ from Mists: New Poets from China, p. 210.
Rock n Roll Is Really Bad
It's a Saturday morning in Beijing and I'm having a coffee with Wang Feng, who I think may be the only member of the Chinese Communist Party with waist-length hair, an electric guitar and studded wristbands. I could be wrong. After all, China is changing faster than speed metal. We're in a fast-food outlet a few city blocks east of Tiananmen Square called Shammu shushu—'Uncle Sam's'.They were burning Uncle Sam around the time Wang Feng was born, in 1970, during the Cultural Revolution. Now, Sam sells burgers and, as far as many members of Wang Feng's generation are concerned, that's the way it should be. Rock n roll.
Rock n roll is really bad
Once inside you'll never get out
Rock n roll is really bad
Just like a girl who drives you mad
No way can I refuse that sound
It just turns my body round.
(He Yong, ‘Rock n Roll Is Really Bad’)
Rock n roll has been around in China long enough for some guy at Harvard to write a thesis on it (‘Like a Knife: Ideology and Genre in Contemporary Chinese Popular Music’ by Andrew F.Jones, 1992). It might have been around a lot longer had Lin Biao—Chairman Mao's ‘closest comrade-in-arms’ and chosen successor—not bungled his plot to assassinate the old man. Not that Lin Biao was much of a groover, but it's common knowledge that his son Lin Liguo, who was his chosen successor, loved the Beatles. So, as Chinese rock fans sometimes mischievously speculate over a few glasses of the local brew, if …and if …perhaps then …
As it turned out, most Chinese had to wait till the eighties before they even heard of the Beatles, whom they call Jiakechong (‘armoured-shell insects’). Even then, the Communist Party acted like the kind of fuddy-duddy that kids in the sixties in the West used to have as parents. Long hair? Loud guitars? Don't even think it, comrade. In the early eighties, the party issued a slim booklet titled How to Recognise Pornographic Music. If it makes your body move, it warned, turn off that turntable. Jazz was pure decadence. Rock was sex, drugs and incitement to riot.
Around that time I happened to be on a bus bumping along a country road in south-east China with a bunch of peasants and chickens and a few guys in dusty Mao suits when we were ambushed by a police patrol. Searching our luggage, they discovered several cassettes of sentimental Taiwanese pop music in one fellow's bag. They confiscated the tapes and detained him. I'd have done the same thing myself, purely on grounds of taste. They probably hit him with a whopping great fine, poor bugger.
By the mid-eighties, the party had finally come to the party, after its own fashion, promoting disco dancing as ‘healthy exercise for young and old’. They even allowed the production of cassettes with disco versions of revolutionary model operas like Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy. Rock was still suss, but pop ruled, OK.
Boys who learnt about rock from Voice of America broadcasts bought cheap guitars and figured out how to play them. Girls liked the music too but it was to take a few more years before they began to play it themselves. Copies of rock music cassettes from the collections of the capital's growing foreign population, meanwhile, leaked out into the Chinese community and circulated like secret documents.
Foreign students, journos and diplomats formed bands with names like the Beijing Underground or the Mainland. They gigged at small venues around town. Soon, not only were there Chinese fans bopping to the beat, but there were Chinese musicians on stage creating it as well. In 1985, the pop group Wham! staged China's first-ever rock concert. When excited punters stood up to dance, the police ordered them to sit back down.
Not long after that, an erstwhile trumpeter with the Beijing Symphony Orchestra in his mid-twenties, Cui Jian, emerged as China's first, genuine, certified boy-n-the-hood Rock Star. Pudgy-faced, elfin-featured, shaggy-haired, Cui played all his early gigs wearing an old-fashioned Red Army uniform with Attitude for epaulettes. His signature tune was ‘Nothing to my Name’:
I want to give you my hope
I want to help make you free
But all you ever do is laugh at me 'cause
I've got nothing to my name.
Party officials didn't know much about rock, but they knew what they didn't like. How could young people say they had nothing when they had socialism? Unable to come up with a coherent policy, they banned him, they banned him not, they banned him…
When not allowed to play the stadiums, Cui gigged at functions universally known by the English word ‘party’. Organised by foreign residents or entrepreneurial Chinese promoters, parties were held in parks, restaurants and bars. Other groups with names like Tang Dynasty and Black Panthers, and even an all-grrl band called Cobra soon came on to the scene.
The authorities began to thi
nk, if you can't beat it, try to co-opt it. Tentatively embracing rock music in the pages of the leading theoretical journal People's Music, they gave it a big hug with a positive write-up of Cui Jian in the party organ, People's Daily. By early 1989, Chinese rock was on a roll.
That same year, riffs of discontent were heard throughout the capital. By day, demonstrators took to the streets to protest against corruption and for democracy. By night, in Tiananmen Square, they rocked to the music of Cui Jian and others, including the punk rocker He Yong and his band May Day.
I caught a May Day gig at the time of the protests. They were playing behind the Ancient Observatory Tower that used to be part of the old city wall. He Yong is my favourite Chinese rocker, even if when you go out with him he smokes all your friends' cigarettes and seriously pisses off the waiters. A born punk, he doesn't sing so much as snarl and scream:
The place where we live
Is like a garbage dump,
We're all insects
Fighting and squabbling
We eat our conscience
And shit out our thoughts…
Is there anything we can do?
Nope.
Tear it down.
For a while there it was anarchy in the PRC. Then came the tanks, guns, massacre, arrests and repression.
But they didn't manage to kill rock n roll.
In 1990, a big night out at a Beijing stadium featuring nearly all the major local bands signalled that rock was finally coming up from underground—even if they weren't allowed to advertise the event as a rock concert. (They had to call it ‘modern Chinese music’.) By the early nineties, there was a thriving scene. Hong Kong and Taiwan producers began flying in to talk deals and contracts. Compilation tapes with names like China Fire appeared at People's Department Stores everywhere. A young film-maker, Zhang Yuan, even made an underground film called Beijing Bastards featuring local bands.
