Thanks very much to Magnus Fiskesjö and to Louisa Lim, who wrote this very informative and revealing article. 1989 is an important reminder to a reality behind a day-to-day day dream, for people in China and in many other places. When I read about conscious efforts by LinkedIn and other media to censor voices from China and elsewhere talking about 1989, I thought of how the June 4th massacre in Beijing had been remembered or not remembered in Austria this year. The national channel ORF brought a film about the difficulties of making and selling Carinthian and Viennese cooked beef in China. On June 4th. Nothing else about China on the radio or on TV. We have a small email list that grew out of Vienna University’s Chinese Studies department. It has been rather dormant for a while, except for Confucius Institute announcements. There were heated discussions after Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace prize in 2010. On June 4th, 2016, there was an announcement for the TV program on Austrian boiled beef in China. I reacted saying that perhaps such an announcement, as well as the boiled beef documentary, was inappropriate. Especially if there was nothing else on the list or on TV etc. from China on that day and indeed for a while. The person who made the announcement said I was right. But there were several people who got very angry about my suggestion. Politics invading, disturbing the peace. Oh my.
This year has been a year of nothing but politics in Austria, and it isn’t over yet. On October 2nd, we should have been required to vote on a president for the third time in half a year. But now there has been another scandal, and the second run-off to the vote in late April will be held on December 4th. They just had a big election scandal in Liaoning. Wonder if the NPC poem about an election two weeks ago was timed to appear so as to comment on Liaoning. There was another poem on what happens to voting IDs after y die, although in China most people aren’t interested in voting at all, for well-known reasons. NPC is Yi Sha’s 新 世纪诗典, New Poetry Canon for the new millennium, instead of National People’s Congress. Yesterday I translated a poem by Li Yi 李异 about his grandfather on Hainan Island, who was beaten to death in 1966 for seeing mer-people, according to the poem. It sounds autobiographical, although I think Li Yi wasn’t born yet in 1966, so his grandfather cannot have told him the story himself, like it says in the poem. Or have I missed something?
1989 is remembered and comes up quite often in poetry circles. Sometimes someone says it is too hard to write about this topic, as if the problem wasn’t the censorship and political control, but rather how to make a good poem. It does help when outsiders express interest in texts that mention 1989 or Tian’anmen, and also in a poem about the fear of being arrested, for example, for various reasons. Shen Haobo 沈浩波 has a great poem on this latter topic. I translated it into German last year. He has another small poem, rather like a note, from June 3rd in Beijing at Tian’anmen from this year. Here it is on my blog. I think the original is still online on Weibo, you just have to be within the right circle to be able to see it.
It is much easier for outsiders to write about what happens in Austria or in China, than it is to mention even the most glaring things in the media or in public in these two countries. No, I’m not being sarcastic. I know the political system is very different.
When I was in China last year, Yi Sha 伊沙 translated my poem IMAGINE. I wrote it from the experience of living in Beijing. I showed him the poem in 2014 already, but he didn’t dare to translate it immediately, although we were in America then.
When I was in Stockholm last month at the great China Dream conference, I talked about a different poem from China also called IMAGINE, and also inspired by the John Lennon song. I included a link in my last post on this list. And you can find it via Astrid Möller’s report from the literature panel of the conference.
Now Yi Sha’s first book in German and my own book of poetry have both been published here in Vienna. Yi Sha’s book is bilingual, mine is multi-lingual and includes many poems in English and Chinese, some of them translated by Yi Sha. The books are available in any book store in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, as well as via Internet portals that stock books from these areas.
We have an Ai Weiwei 艾未未 exhibition here in Vienna right now, close to where I live. Well done, with very informed guides, activities and speeches and so on. And of the books just mentioned that have newly come out, at least one is somehow related, because Yi Sha published in First Line 一行 in 1988 and continued to illegally distribute the magazine in Xi’an in the 1990s as long as it lasted. First Line was founded by Yan Li 嚴力 and Ai Weiwei in New York. So Yi Sha does have a very strong connection to Yan Li, and therefore in extension to Ai Weiwei and to where Ai Weiwei comes from.
Yi Sha participated in the protests of 1989 in Beijing and graduated from Beijing Normal University in 1989 after the massacre. He doesn’t advertise this experience, apart from his writing. And you do have to look rather closely to find it in there. But 1989 certainly is remembered in China.
Martin Winter <dujuan99@gmail.com>