Despite humble origin - both of his parents were peasants from the rural area of An Qing county, An Hui Province, a place basined in east China known for its poverty and migrant labors - Hai Zi achieved such fame that statistics shows in the past 30 years since his death he’s come to be the most quoted Chinese poet of modern days. His works have since become a national sensation that they are included in today's Chinese high-school textbooks complied by the most orthodox academic minds and almost everyone literate born after the 1960s can recite that renowned line "Facing the Ocean, Spring Warm and Flowers Bloom".
This created such an irony as loneliness and social isolation had always been the key theme of Hai Zi when the poet was alive. it was believed to be a main cause that eventually drove him to madness and suicide.
Personal tragedy aside, Hai Zi was a true genius. Aged 15 he was accepted as the youngest law student at Peking University, then lectured on Cybernetics, System Theory and Aesthetics in China University of Political Science and Law when he was just 19 years old. In his short-lived life of 25 years, 7 given to writing, he'd left behind over 2 million words of works including numerous short poems - sonnets, verses, pastorals, etc. and 7 long epics.
It was Larkin who once said that a crude difference between novels and poetry is that novels are about other people and poetry is about yourself. This theory isn’t beyond dispute – in fact many poets highly discourage the reading of their poems as personal documents – but on Hai Zi, this couldn’t be more the case. Some Hai Zi experts therefore suspected that it might be his literature obsession of death that had led to his despair. Whist the truth remained a mystery, this theory more or less had its ground, for the last 3 years of his life he produced significant volumes of poems concerning death and they were extremely original and candid too – no one could fake that well, though some of us are not sure if they were the cause or symptom.
The Poem of Death II
- A mini idyll to Van Gogh: the Operation of Suicide
That rustler in the raining evening
Climbed into my window
Plucked a sunflower
off my dreaming hull
Deeply dormant was I still
A variegated sunflower grew
and bloomed
On my dreaming husk
That plucking hand
A fine clumsy dove
among sunflowers’ field
That rustler in the raining evening
Stole me away
From the human shell
Dormant still
I was taken outside my body
Outside the sunflower
I was the universe’s first cow (The empress of death)
Beautiful I felt
I was dormant still
That rustler in the raining evening
Then pleased
turned himself into another variegated cow
in my dormant body
trotting cheerily
This poem was composed in 1986. On November 18th of the same year, he wrote in his diary: “I almost killed myself,……but that was another ‘me’ – another shell……I ended his life many times and in many ways so I could continue to live on. And I, again, survived in purity.” Purity is the key word here. According to Luo Yihe, another brilliant poet of the 1980s and one of Hai Zi’s close encounters, Hai Zi was “a character as pure as an infant” – a combination of sheer innocence and lucid imagination.
Writers like to elude their audience, lead them a bit of a dance. They take them down untrodden paths, disembark them in unknown land where they are charmed, bewildered, and have to ask for directions. Most of the successful poets do that, but not Hai Zi. Hai Zi was never up for games and public performance. He lived his work. Pure, innocent and sensitive as he was, he drew no distance and preferred no shield.
This is not to say that his poems are in any way more accessible –in fact it is often the contrary - although many of the verses do have an immediate appeal. Nonetheless, techniques aside, this was mainly achieved by their heartfelt sincerity – or perhaps “genuineness” is the word - through which they were able to form a particularly penetrating force, and what was most private becomes most common. these were not magic out of crafted showmanship, rather, they were bits and pieces of his own heart made of flesh, blood and explicit wit, however magical.
Love Poem
Sitting on the candle stand
I’m a wreath
Conceiving another wreath
Not sure when to offer up
When to place down
Unlike most of his poems, this little cameo is so limpid and clear that it’s almost impertinent to explain, but it is still Hai Zi’s language: taking upon the setting of a death rite to echo the end of a love affair, the pressing pain of loss, and the vulnerability of not knowing what course to take.
Hai Zi loved four women throughout his life. All four relationships ended in disaster. But the literature result was phenomenal. This one below is a group photograph:
The Four Sisters
Atop the desolate ridge stand four sisters
For whom alone all the winds blow
For whom alone all the days shattered
A stalk of grain swaying in the air
high above my head
standing atop this desolate ridge
I remembered my empty room, covered in dust
The four bewildered sisters I once loved
The four glowing sisters
On the pillow of books and the divine land I rest at night
Thinking of the four sisters in remote blue
O the four sisters I once loved
Much the way I loved the four poems written with my own hand
My beautiful four sisters coming hand in hand
Outnumbered the goddesses of Fate
Herding the pale cattle, to the moon-shaped peak
February, where do you come from
Spring thunders rolling across the sky, where do you come from
Not with the visitors
Not with the wagons
Not with the flocks of birds
Four sisters embracing a stalk of grain
Swaying in the air
Embracing yesterday’s snow, today’s rain
Tomorrow’s flour and ashes
It is the grain of despair
Please tell those four sisters: it is the grain of despair
And it will always be
Behind the wind is wind
Beyond the sky is sky
Beyond the road continues the road
The Four Sisters is also the name of a mountain in Sichuan Province where Hai Zi of course visited. The double metaphor naturally added another layer of uncertainty to the poem, a technique Hai Zi repeatedly used and was certainly good at.
A permanent paradox in art, however, is that an artist can be diminished by his virtues and one of Hai Zi’s virtues is ambiguity. This is perhaps why for a long time he was never properly understood. Although some of the most memorable moments in poetry occur when it isn’t exactly clear what the poet is talking about (and Hai Zi had many of those moments), it’s a simple matter of fact that most people still welcome clarity. For many unspeakable reasons, he is widely celebrated now, but he’ll perhaps never truly escape the fate of being nothing more than a “triumphant misfit” to the world. In a way, it’s a bliss that he didn’t have to live his celebrity.
Hai Zi was born in a village at the foot of one of the hills in An Qing and lived there until he was 15. The charm of rural landscape and the warmth brought by his fellow countrymen living in it stayed with him all his life and were where his inspirations were deeply rooted albeit he created a revolutionarily metaphysical and imaginative path towards what was home. Yet this also wasn't competely without distress. It’s said that Hai Zi’s father was even afraid of speaking to him because the humble illiterate farmer himself felt so intimidated and ashamedly baffled in front of his academia son. It must have been very painful to realize. And it’s perhaps this behind most of Hai Zi’s pastoral verses that gives them a persistent agony and sense of loss:
Asian Copper
Asian Copper, Asian Copper
Grandpa died here, father died here, and
so will I
You are the only burial ground
Asian Copper, Asian Copper
What loves to suspect and loves to fly is bird, what buries all is sea
But your master is the grass, living on its own slender waist, guarding the palm and secrets
Of a wildflower
Asian Copper, Asian Copper
Did you see? Those two white doves, a pair of white shoes Qu Yuan Left on the sandy beach
Let us – let us put them on, with rivers
After a drum roll of thumps, the heart dancing in the dark
Is what we call MOON
The moon is mainly made of you
On March 26th 1989, 2 days after his 25th birthday, Hai Zi ended his life by lying on the rail not far from Shan Hai Guan (He Bei Province). A bag with a Bible, a book of selected stories by Joseph Conrad, Walden by Henry David Thoreau and Kon-Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl was found beside his body. Heartbreakingly unfortunate as it was, it’s also hard not to see a somewhat poetic vision in the handling - youth, a glory that cannot last, a sunset light and death that’s just over the horizon, with only the best dying young.
Circulating his death, there have been varied interpretations, some suggesting it symbolizes "the sacrifice of China’s agricultural civilization” whereas others having touched upon more private, even characteristic matters - he seemed to have suffered from Schizophrenia. But really, how much would we as public know, to speculate and to judge? How much indeed would we know about the private thoughts in the mind of even the people whom we feel closest to? the only thing certain is that the genius who once dreamt of flying had hit the ground. Yet who is to affirm that this wasn’t another kind of flying?
At the end of the great <Apology> by Plato, Socrates turned down Crito's pleas to attempt an escape from prison and chose to meet his end. When the moment came, he said, “the hour of departure has arrived and we go our ways – I to die, and you to live. Which better God only knows. ”
