The Phoenix Years

by Madeleine O'Dea

  Finally he could really see how to paint. It wasn’t about mixing colours in the Russian way, blending them to a heavy darkness. It was about building up texture and depth, capturing not just the subject but the mood. It was about touch.

  Thirty-five years later, Huang Rui laughed when he described this to me and clapped his hands. The joy of that first moment of recognition was still in his voice. He had found what he had been looking for—independence, beauty, texture, touch—and he would never forget it.

  A few weeks later Huang Rui crouched over his bicycle on the outskirts of the city, breaking the law again. In those days every bicycle in the country was registered and could be linked to its owner by a number plate. Huang Rui was furtively altering the number on his plate to cover his tracks, and with him were two friends who had done the same. They were Bei Dao and another poet, Mang Ke.

  Over the previous three days and three nights, they had laboured with four other friends in a rundown house on the fringes of the city, printing out the first issue of a magazine. Under a dim light with the windowpanes shrouded with cloth, they had cut wax stencils by hand. Painstakingly they had etched words and drawings in the wax, and then placed the stencils one by one into a levered mimeograph machine. They had squeezed the ink through the stencils, printing sheet after precious sheet, until the stencils disintegrated and the pages became illegible. Finally, they had bound 300 copies of their magazine by hand, 60 pages in total, under a blue and white cover. The title of the magazine was Today.

  The publication was unlicensed by any ‘proper authority,’ and so illegal. Now, on December 23 1978, they would publish it on the streets of Beijing. Just weeks before, they had still been passing their poems and stories within their group in handwritten copies, to be shared and discussed within the secret world they had created for themselves during their teens. For years they had been used to hiding in plain sight, playing the role of revolutionary youths as their cynicism deepened. Now they were going above ground.

  What had happened in Tiananmen Square at Qing Ming in April 1976 had been a turning point for all of them, yet, since the fall of the Gang of Four that same year, it felt like they had been holding their collective breath. Now the Beijing spring had finally arrived. What they were seeing at Democracy Wall spurred them on. Fresh ideas, free ideas, were being posted up every day, and ordinary people were jostling to read them. And no one was stopping them!

  For years the only truth these three had held to was that which they found within themselves. Now their magazine’s editorial almost shouted from the page: ‘History has finally given us the opportunity to sing aloud the song that has been buried in our hearts for ten years . . . The difficult task of reflecting the spirit of the new era has fallen onto the shoulders of this generation . . . What is past is already past, the future is still distant. To our generation only today is today!’

  Now they were ready to launch. The only way to do it was to travel Beijing and paste the magazine up page by page at key points around the city. The only transport they had was their bicycles: hence the spy craft with the number plates. They had debated whether to carry out their mission by day or by night and had finally agreed that daytime was safer. In the dark night of a Beijing winter it seemed more likely that one or all of them could simply be made to disappear.

  Despite the bravado of their editorial and the consoling light of day, they embraced each other in farewell before they set off.

  On that freezing winter day, Huang Rui, Bei Dao and Mang Ke rode through Beijing, the ancient capital where they had grown up, pasting up copies of their magazine. They rode from the far east of the city where they had printed their precious copies, to the far west where Beijing’s most prestigious universities spread their campuses towards the Old Summer Palace. They rode through a city that was almost free of cars, where snow formed drifts capped with coal dust, where they could see their breath and hear the creak of their bicycles alarmingly loud on the city’s flat grey streets.

  From the university district they circled down to join Chang’an Avenue, and riding east towards Tiananmen Square they stopped on the corner of Xidan to post their magazine on Democracy Wall. Finally they arrived outside the offices of the People’s Literature Publishing House. It was the monolithic state institution which for 30 years had set the agenda for published literature in China. Today was the first unofficial literary magazine to appear in the country since the founding of the People’s Republic.

  The next day passers-by could read mimeographed notices standing out cheekily against the stolid grey concrete pillars of the Publishing House, announcing the publication of Today and directing interested readers to Democracy Wall.

  A few days later, when the three friends rode their laden pedal carts up to Democracy Wall, the entire edition of 300 copies sold out immediately.

  Through the last days of 1978, Bei Dao, Huang Rui and Mang Ke crisscrossed the capital, checking all the places where they had posted Today. Everywhere they found knots of people crowded around their pages, discussing them aloud. They had put up extra pages so people could leave their comments anonymously if they wished, but there had been no need: people talked openly because—miraculously—for those few brief months they were no longer afraid.

  It was the first time they had heard their words in the mouths of strangers. It was exhilarating. For more than ten years they had held on to the sound of their real selves, the voice deep inside of them, even as they were forced to chant slogans day after day. Theirs was the generation that had plunged from the heights of idealism—of a fervour perhaps only a teenager can feel—to the depths of disillusion. Cynicism ran through them like a scar. And yet somehow they had protected inside themselves something real. This is what they offered up in the pages of Today.

  When these three had sat down to choose what they would publish in the very first issue of their magazine, they knew they had no right to expect it would last beyond its first printing. It was possible that they would be arrested before they ever printed a second issue. And so for that first—and possibly last—edition, they each chose a kind of personal manifesto.

  Huang Rui’s was a manifesto in colour. He knew he was an artist, not a poet, and his statement was the cover of Today: an image of two young people breasting the tape in a race for a new world, an image rendered in the colour of the boundless sky.

  For Mang Ke, his manifesto would come in the form of a poem about the transformative power of poetry itself:

  I am a poet.

  I am a rebel shadow

  Let it be ripped to bits,

  So the blood dripping down can reflect a patch of light.

  I am a poet.

  I am the sheet of blood-stained paper.

  Let it be passed around and read

  So that hearts are closely linked

  . . . I am a poet,

  I am history’s witness.

  Bei Dao’s poem, ‘The Answer’, was destined to become one of the most influential in contemporary Chinese history. Ten years after it first appeared in Today, its lines would be emblazoned on students’ banners as they rallied in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Bei Dao had written it soon after the events of Qing Ming 1976.

  The most famous stanza of ‘The Answer’ reads:

  Let me tell you world,

  I—do—not—believe!

  If a thousand challengers lie beneath your feet,

  Count me as number one thousand and one.

  It was a whoop of defiance that would become an anthem for a generation. His confidence in the face of the crackdown on the Qing Ming demonstrations in 1976 would echo again ten years later, even as the tanks patrolled the streets of Beijing after the bloody crackdown of June 3–4 1989. It proclaimed a belief that, in the end, however long it would take, history was on their side, on the side of youth and those who opposed, not those who oppressed. His poem assured them that it was they who were the inheritors of China’s long history, not those who ruled from inside the red walls of th
e New Forbidden City, Zhongnanhai:

  A new conjunction and glimmering stars

  Adorn the unobstructed sky now:

  They are pictographs from five thousand years.

  They are the watchful eyes of future generations.

  When the authors of Today were later denounced, their work would be condemned as ‘incomprehensible’, ‘misty’ and ‘spiritually polluting’, lacking in the patriotic flourishes that the authorities deemed ‘realistic’. What the authors’ critics really hated, of course, was how realistic the work actually was, how recognisable to their generation.

  During the Cultural Revolution some seventeen million urban youths had been sent away from their homes to learn revolution from workers and peasants in the countryside. What they learned instead was how much they had been lied to. There was no socialist utopia out there, there were no farms and factories full of apple-cheeked smiling souls serving the revolution. Instead there was poverty, exhaustion, frustration, and the all too fresh memory of famine.

  It was 1969 when the teenaged Bei Dao, Mang Ke and Huang Rui left Beijing to be ‘re-educated’. At the time they knew nothing of each other and they were bound for different places. Huang Rui travelled north to the bleak expanses of Inner Mongolia, while Mang Ke hitched a ride on a horse cart south to the marshlands of Baiyangdian Lake in the neighbouring province of Hebei. Bei Dao travelled further south to work construction on an electrical generation plant some 300 kilometres from Beijing. But while they were away each began to write poetry—even Huang Rui, who later gave it up for art instead. And it was through writing that they would find each other.

  So who were they, these three who made history in that brief Beijing spring?

  Bei Dao was the ‘aristocrat’ among the three, tall, thin and naturally serious. His upright carriage could even make his Mao suit look smart. He had grown up within a charmed circle in Beijing, his father high up in administration, his mother a doctor. His parents had sent him to the best schools in the capital, where he rubbed shoulders with the children of the political elite. Yet as a teenager he chafed against his privilege. He found his prestigious school stifling, and was hopeless at the subjects like mathematics and science that they prized.

  When the Cultural Revolution began in 1966 he needed no persuading to become a Red Guard. He escaped school and ran wild for the next three years with his Red Guard troop, as they scrapped with other factions and rampaged through the city. He led raids on public libraries and on the homes of people who had—only a short time before—been part of the honoured elite.

  At first he and his friends followed the correct Red Guard line: they were there to destroy books that smacked of ‘bourgeois liberalism’. Art, poetry, foreign and ancient literature, all of these should be rooted out and burnt. If they must carry things away, they should loot only books on war and revolution, choosing the kinds of titles they thought likely to meet with the approval of Chairman Mao himself. But soon Bei Dao and his friends found themselves searching instead for what was forbidden—Western literature in translation or Chinese classical culture—building a secret library that they would draw on in the years ahead.

  Bei Dao was only nineteen when he was sent away, and he was almost thirty by the time he broke cover with his writing in Today. But in the intervening years he had devoted himself secretly to the vocation that he discovered almost as soon as he arrived on that desolate construction site 300 kilometres from home in 1969—to honour the experience of his generation as a writer.

  Mang Ke was born to wear a leather jacket. Unlike Bei Dao, who wore his Mao suit with scrupulous correctness, Mang Ke slouched into his, pushing his hands deep into his trouser pockets till his jacket bloused up around his waist, like Bob Dylan making his way down a windy street in New York on the famous album cover.

  And like Dylan, Mang Ke was a boy from the North Country. He had been born in the industrial city of Shenyang, deep in that part of China once known as Manchuria. At the age of six his family moved to Beijing, but he carried with him ever afterwards something of the toughness of his home town. Shenyang remains the capital of China’s heavy industry, and it was once a real capital as well, the last base of the Manchus before they crossed the Great Wall to take Beijing and found the Qing dynasty in 1644. Mang Ke is not a Manchu but he has never lost the air of an outsider nor the glamour that allowed him to wear a Mao suit coat as if it was a flying jacket.

  In the Baiyang marshlands, where he went in 1969 at the age of eighteen, he quickly gathered around him a group of exiled youths who, like him, aspired to write. Over the following years, even as they remained underground and unpublished, the poets of the Baiyang marshes became famous within a secret network of youngsters throughout the country who circulated poems and stories in handwritten copies.

  Bei Dao sought Mang Ke out in those years in the marshlands, as did their contemporary Chen Kaige, who would later become one of the great filmmakers of the new generation, directing Yellow Earth and Farewell My Concubine, and winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1993.

  In those years all sorts of forbidden books circulated, many in translations that had—bizarrely—been authorised for private study within the Communist Party by Madame Mao herself. They were meant to stay within this charmed circle of cadres, but inevitably they leaked out, were pirated and passed from hand to hand.

  Of all these books perhaps the most important to these exiled youths was a translation of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. And of the three friends, it was Mang Ke who best embodied the spirit of that counterculture classic. While Bei Dao was a natural writer and Huang Rui an aesthete, Mang Ke was a born bohemian. He was the only one among them who seemed to have found something truly beautiful in exile, discovering a rough beauty in the marshlands and the villages that spoke to his native sensuality. Years later when he wrote a novel about his experience, he called it Wild Things, puzzling readers long inured to bitter descriptions of Cultural Revolution exile with his accounts of a bucolic world of sex and misbehaviour. He has never lost that slouching walk, even now when he’s had a real leather jacket for more than 30 years and his hair is completely grey. His hooded rather languid eyes have never faded, nor his outsider glamour.

  Huang Rui, on the other hand, would have looked like an intellectual no matter how he wore his Mao suit. Tall and thin, with studious glasses and a soft-covered book rolled into one of his coat’s patch pockets, his suit drooped like a scholar’s robe. He was the youngest of the three. He was only sixteen when he went to Inner Mongolia, full of dreams of art, literature and music.

  Huang Rui’s dreams were secret ones that would have scared his parents. His father had studied engineering on the campus of what is now Peking University. He had had dreams, too, founding his own factory in the year Huang Rui was born in 1952 when the People’s Republic was young. But in 1956 the factory had been compulsorily acquired, along with all the private property in the nation, in the year every Chinese school child knows as the date on which capitalism (supposedly) died.

  Gradually, Huang Rui’s father was stripped of authority until in 1959 he was reduced to the status of a simple worker in the factory he had once owned.

  If ever there was a Chinese generation who was destined to dismiss the experience of their parents, it was Huang Rui’s. For all that he respected his father, he would be looking for guidance elsewhere. He would seek it inside himself, in the books he discovered secretly and in the friends he would share them with. Meeting Bei Dao two years after he was exiled from Beijing would be a turning point. In the older and more confident young man, already committed to his life as a poet, Huang Rui would recognise something of himself. They would be friends for life. And through Bei Dao he would meet Mang Ke.

  At the time, none of the three could imagine how influential they would become. Years later, when China’s most famous dissident Liu Xiaobo, winner of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize, was writing about what influenced him most deeply in his formative years, he cited the poetry of Be
i Dao and Mang Ke and the art of Huang Rui.

  Despite all the ways in which they differed, on that day in 1978 when the three of them posted the first issue of Today on the grey walls of Beijing there was one thing they were all agreed on: they wanted nothing to do with politics. Their revolution would be personal. They had spent years burrowing inside themselves to find what, despite years of indoctrination, was still real. They didn’t want to follow leaders any more, they wanted to put their faith in themselves.

  And yet, for all that they tried to avoid politics, it would run through everything they did. Because to even attempt to avoid politics in those days was a political act. And however much they wished to avoid it, politics would find them in the end.

  But that was a realisation that lay ahead of them. In their first editorial, they wrote: ‘As the dawn rises from the bloodshed, we need colourful flowers, flowers that truly belong to nature, flowers that truly blossom in people’s hearts.’ Flowers might seem an odd preoccupation for three harbingers of the avant-garde, but these were people whose whole lives had been dominated by propaganda: literature and art had been harnessed to it. The idea that a flower could just be a flower meant everything to them.

  Politics had destroyed so much of what was beautiful and splendid in their country, and, even in their short lifetimes, it had killed millions of people. Politics had sent them away from their homes in their teens, had made reading and writing dangerous pursuits, had twisted people’s brains so much that they hardly knew how to recognise what was real. Today would stand against politics, because the cold fact was that politics had made a mockery of their idealism.

  When they had gone to the country in 1969 they had still believed in Mao and his revolution. Even Huang Rui, who nursed secret doubts, had been captivated as a child by his country’s revolutionary imagery of rockets heading for the skies and trains decorated with red flags steaming into the future. All three had been Red Guards—even Huang Rui had gone to Tiananmen Square to be ‘blessed’ by the chairman in the summer of 1966. They had stood in the square under the August sun, beating the sky with their Little Red Books. They had swayed in a sea of teenagers all dressed alike, as Mao celebrated their role in his Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Whatever they felt over the next three years of that revolution, of the pitched battles, the looting and destruction in the capital, they still went to the countryside trusting that once there they would find the socialist paradise they had been told so much about. But they only discovered that politics had made fools of them.