Overview

In 2001, to visit his sick father, the exiled poet Bei Dao returned to his homeland for the first time in over twenty years. The city of his birth was totally unrecognizable. ""My city that once was had vanished,"" he writes: ""I was a foreigner in my hometown."" The shock of this experience released a flood of memories and emotions that sparked Open Up, City Gate. In this lyrical autobiography of growing up-from the birth of the People's Republic, through the chaotic years of the Great Leap Forward, and on into the Cultural Revolution-Bei Dao uses his extraordinary gifts as a poet and storyteller to create another Beijing, a beautiful memory palace of endless alleyways and corridors, where personal narrative mixes with the momentous history he lived through. At the center of the book are his parents and siblings, and their everyday life together through famine and festival. Open Up, City Gate is told in an episodic, fluid style that moves back and forth through the poet's childhood, recreating the smells and sounds, the laughter and the danger, of a boy's coming of age during a time of enormous change and upheaval.

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9780811226431

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Reviews

A nuanced account of China in the era of the Cultural Revolution, seen through one young man's 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. -- Publisher's Weekly Bei Dao uses words as if he were fighting for his life with them. He has found a way to speak for all of us. -- Jonathan Spence - The New York Times Book Review Bei Dao's writing provides ample evidence of the written word's potential to effect political change... Few living writers possess a voice as elegant. -- Andrew Ervin - The Philadelphia Inquirer With precise lyricism, Bei Dao resurrects a vanished city and time in China, creating a rich literary-cum-historical record of the world's greatest national transformation. But this tender memoir by a great poet also describes the poignant longings, small joys and sorrows of all of us who grew up in places called 'underdeveloped.' -- Pankaj Mishra The soul of post-Mao poetry, Bei Dao reveals in this intimate, lyrical memoir a China that still haunts us with its brutal past and aching humanity. Like Balzac's Paris, Dickens' London, and Pushkin's St. Petersburg, Bei Dao's Beijing is a microcosm caught in a time warp, forever titillating our imagination. -- Yunte Huang, Editor of The Big Red Book of Modern Chinese Literature Intense, elegant and impressionistic. -- Dwight Garner City Gate, Open Up holds a vertiginous, intimate kaleidoscope of vignettes and portraits, in which a changing city, family, community, and country are presented as quick life-drawings, sketched from within. The drama of famine becomes a few candies in the mouths of half-starved boys scouring fields for weeds; the Cultural Revolution, an attic-hidden library of pre-war movie magazines, anatomy, and fiction carried into a hutong courtyard's fire for burning. Soon after, the author builds a traveling bookcase backpack, holding only the works of Mao. One local official's suicide abuts his successor's ferocious skill at ping pong; a son discovers, as inner cultural inheritance, his father's little tyrant, then struggles for tenderness as time rearranges their relative power. From its haunting opening description of Beijing's early light bulbs, their rarity and weakness, this book's jump-cuts of memory move backward and forward in time. These pages illuminate, obliquely and acutely, the story of a now-famous dissident poet's rebellious emergence and survival, within the story of the intelligentsia's larger harrowing amid the Chinese Revolution's whiplash unfoldings. -- Jane Hirshfield

Bei Dao uses words as if he were fighting for his life with them. He has found a way to speak for all of us. -- Jonathan Spence Intense, elegant and impressionistic. -- Dwight Garner

Author Information

Bei Dao, born in Beijing in 1949, has traveled and lectured around the world. He has received numerous international awards for his poetry, and is an honorary member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters. Bei Dao, now a U.S. citizen, is currently Professor of Humanities in the Center for East Asian Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Jeffrey Yang is the author of the poetry books Vanishing-Line and An Aquarium. He is the translator of Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Liu Xiaobo's June Fourth Elegies and Su Shi's East Slope, and the editor of Birds, Beasts, and Seas: Nature Poems from New Directions. He works as an editor at New Directions Publishing and New York Review Books.

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