By Tao Min, Associate Lecturer in Chinese at the University of Tasmania, 2005.

Copyright held by the author; this draft was a conference paper and the references have not yet been completed.

Three fictional works which appeared in the new millennium will be discussed in this essay, namely Chicken Poets (2002), a film by leading avant-garde dramatist Meng Jinghui, Yuyang (2002) a novella by Bi Feiyu, a former avant-garde and now a leading new realist writer, and Chengdu Fenzi (Chengdu Beauty), a novel which first appeared on the internet in 2003 and then formally published in 2004.

Through the analysis of the images of poets in these works and the attitudes of writers, I will explore how the poetic utopianism of the 80s university campus shaped the world view of campus writers? view and how their thought world changed over two decades with the socio-economical, political and cultural transformation in modern China. Their treatment of the poet and the idealism in the campus of 1980s in their respective fictional work reflects the psychological, mental and ideological maturation or development of the elite Chinese youth of this generation, which fits into the process of development of China or commercialization of China for the past two years or more.

 
My central argument is that since the utopianism and idealism, which underpin the poetry movement of the 1980s, have disappeared, that true poetic spirit is impossible in everyday life as well as in the literary works of the generation of 1960s.

Next I will discuss the political and social forces that contributed to the poetic utopia and thus the heyday of poetry in 1980s campus.

 

Utopia of Deng's early period as socio-political milieu of the heyday of poetry

American-based Chinese scholar Jing Wang uses "euphoria" and "emergent crisis" to describe the post-Mao era China in the 1980s (Wang, 1996, p1?). The 1980s, especially the first half of 1980s, was the historical epoch of honeymoon between the government and almost every stratum of the Chinese society. Of all the social groups, University students benefited directly from the reintroduction of the tertiary education entrance examination after being abolished for almost ten years by Mao during the Cultural Revolution. They were therefore particularly grateful and appreciative to the government led by Deng. This sentiment culminated impressively in a dramatic moment during 1984's celebration of the 35th anniversary of the PRC; when passing by 检阅台 rostrum in Tiananmen square the students of Beijing university suddenly pulled out a bed sheet turned banner, painted with four characters: Xiaoping Nihao ("How are you, Xiaoping?"). This sensational moment was broadcast live to the whole nation and became an unforgettable image for young university students in China. As Guo Moruo, a former poet and then president of Chinese Academy of Science, proclaimed to a convention of scientists in 1978 "the spring of science has come." Indeed, the late 1970s and early 1980s was the spring of the whole nation, particularly for those scientists, intellectuals and professionals who had long been suppressed under Mao. Though some internal contradictions had already emerged, to some degree, there is no denying that the ethos of that particular period was confidence and optimism with an upbeat ambience spread all over China. The skepticism, let alone cynicism or negation of socialism and nationalism was not yet evident in the circle of intellectuals and among University students. This was, of course, also true of Chinese literature in the late 1970s and the early 1980s.  Given that the entrance rate was only 1% for tertiary education from 1970-1985 (杨明 2003), "God's favored sons? 天之骄子. Furthermore, the prospect of modern socialism did not seem to be a remote dream, the logic appeared to be crystal clear: since the "Gang of four" have been removed, aren't we on the right track now? This optimistic zeitgeist was even more explicitly evident in the later June Fourth movement of 1989 and dissident scholar Li Zehou's work (1979, in 洪子诚 2003).

 

Poetic spirit and perspective:

Besides the refreshed and moderated socio-political utopia inherited from Mao's time, in the early 1980s, the burgeoning liberalism and rationalism also contributed to the prosperity of poetry. It is well known that Misty Poetry emerged in early 1980s, however, their creation, as underground poetry passed on among literary youth, had been written many years before. Its roots can traced back to the period of the Cultural Revolution (Hong, Zicheng, 200?, Yeh 1996). The mild political and cultural environment of the early Deng period provided an ideal time to unleash the contained passion and new poetic discourse that contrasted drastically with Mao's mainstream aestheticism or Mao-speak.

However, in retrospect, I would argue that the popularity and influence of poetry in the 1980s was purely an historical contingence. The nation, after suffering as long as ten years cultural and economic isolation and alienation, desperately needed spiritual therapy to remedy the trauma and fill out the vacuum in cultural production. Literature, particularly poetry, naturally assumed the role of soul salvage at the right moment. For this, Michelle Yeh also takes into account the religious feeling that only poetry was able to evoke (Yeh 1996).

 

Despite the fact that Misty Poets once underwent criticism from traditional, mainstream, old revolutionary poets and critics (陈思和1999, p? 朱栋霖 et al 1999, pp?), they eventually gained their legitimacy in literary circles. It is worth noting that their impact on the university campus and post misty poetry fever (mainly initiated by university students after the mid 80s) was also immeasurable. The elements of enlightenment, humanism and individualism embedded in such seminal Misty poets as Bai dao，Shu Ting and Gu Cheng, gained wide readership among university students and, more importantly, in some sense catalyzed and nurtured the ensuing university poetry movements, namely Manghan (Tough Guy) poetry in Sichuan (Li Yawei), the third generation (韩东) （陈思和? Michelle Yeh 1996)

 

For those undergraduate poets, whether their poems were formally published or distributed only in mimeographed booklets on the campus, at that poetic and innocent time they were deemed to be mysterious and noble, They were an indispensable part of the university, coloured with idealism. Also, they were never short of admirers from the opposite sex.

 

In the transition from pure socialism to commercialization, I would argue that with the advent of globalization and commercialization, the 1980s might be the last time in Chinese history when poets could function as cultural heroes and that this cultural phenomenon has gone forever.

 

The drastic decline of poetry in contemporary China since the 1990's is an undisputable fact. Its air of tragedy was reinforced by the death of Gucheng Haizi (see Yeh 1996a, 1996b). Besides this kind of martyr's solution, like that of Quyuan as the first poet in Chinese literature, and Mayakovski of the former USSR, there must be some other less drastic way of coping with the "winter" or marginalization of poetry and the whole of literature-as-art in China.

 

In the ensuing section, I will focus on an analysis of the image of the poet and his conflicts, disillusionment and self -alienation.

 

Meng Jinghui's Chicken Poets: Resistance and Identity crises: Poetic Don Quixote versus Windmill of Commercialization

Before the film Chicken Poets, which was released in 2002 (attended Toronto Film Festival, 2002), the director of this film, Meng Jinghui, had established himself as a leading director of avant-garde theatre over many years in Beijing. Though Chicken Poets is undoubtedly a very awkward and clumsy film in narrative and cinematography, the justification for selecting this film for discussion is just because it functions as a perfect example of the views and mentality of those former campus poets of the 1980s when confronted with an unavoidably collapsed poetic and idealistic utopia.

 

Meng Jinghui's wife, Liao Yimei, who was also his classmate and graduated in 1986 from Capital Normal University in Beijing, wrote the script. The script was inspired, according to Liao Yimei, by the real story of their former classmate who was also a dedicated poet at university. The tension demonstrated in the film is a misfit poet who is so disillusioned by a commercialized and increasingly vulgar society, that he decides to give up his sublime poetry writing and throw himself into the chicken farm run by another former poet, who was then engaged in this more profitable career in the outskirts of Beijing. To give up may not be a bad choice for a talent-exhausted 江郎才尽 poet, so trying to find an alternative way of making a living seems logical. However, the message that the director is trying to convey through the narrative of the poet is that this absurd world can no longer accommodate a poet, the poet has to poignantly struggle with his identity crisis, and the tension between an idealistic poet and the vulgar surrounding is irreconcilable. Obviously, the poet in the film has the full sympathy of the director and the screenwriter. Poetry writing and working in a chicken farm was depicted as an antithesis. From this, a self-proclaimed spiritual superiority is attested, though from the perspective of viewers, this superiority is highly questionable. This grumpy poet in the film is obviously the heritage of the heyday of poetry in 1980s university campus. One cannot help asking question: what is the justification that sustains such superiority for this poet? Now let us probe the psychological and historical factors in some depth.

 

Narcissism and the Mayakovski complex

The waning of poetry fever was an unavoidable late trend of Deng's determined economic reform in China. Poetry as cultural product was naturally marginalized or sent back to its former position in correspondence to its readership. However, the status of poetry had been related to the revolutionary time and the Chinese poetry cult tradition (Michelle Yeh 1996, pp) strengthened the role of poets in revolutionary or war time, the spirit of enlightenment in the early 1980s also endorsed the students poets with the adulation and glory comparable to today's pop stars.

 

A considerable number of young poets in the 1980s campus failed to reconcile to the social and cultural changes of the 1990s and remained indulged in their utopian idealism of the 80s. In Chicken Poets, the tragic but heroic image of former USSR poet Mayakovski, as cultural idol, haunted the poet in the film. The root of this sentiment can only be traced back to Maoist heroism permeating through the protagonist or the director's childhood memories.

 

In this film, the obsessive Mayakovski complex is more a cultural and spirit nostalgia than an ideological confrontation of China's current political or social reality. The director himself is well aware that the revolutionary passion has long been replaced by the priorities of the market economy in China, the posture of missing Mayakovski and the bygone heroism in this film has provided nothing more than an exaggerated and illusionary past. It can be related to the dispute evoked by a nondescript Che Guevara drama in 2000 Beijing. In both cases, the romanticism, heroism, Mayakovski, Che Guevara are by no means treated in a traditional revolutionary sense, but as selling points to cater for the curiosity of reporters in entertainment pages and the nostalgic demands of a minority of petty bourgeois in urban China. Here we see the paradox; the anti-commercial artists have actually displayed their commercial acumen. 

 

The director tries to engage the empathy of viewers of the same generation, force them to recall the may-not-be-true past of 1970s and 1980s and confront the reality of the fall of the spirit of the cultural mass. Unfortunately, the failure of the poets to adjust to an ever-changing society results in the opposite effect being actually felt by any sensible viewers: that it is not society, the world surrounding the poets and the failing taste of the cultural masses that appear as absurd and ridiculous? but the attitude of the poets and the director who become the isolated and hopeless Don Quixote who fruitlessly fights the imagined windmill.

 

Another reason why the poet as narrator fails to attract the sympathy of the audience is that he obviously chooses the wrong target to assault: blaming the vulgarity of the common folks or the populace for lacking the taste to appreciate his sacred creation. In the film, his poems are reduced to mere promotion of black chicken eggs (although it was a business he despised as a poet, his word for advertising was not appreciated by his boss) and to having his poems recited at a local wedding in front of those vulgar town folks. The self-important poet and this environment constitute an allegorical relationship: the misfit beat poet represents the sublime and idealistic on the one hand, the town in the outskirts of Beijing indicates suburban materialism and vulgarity on the other. Neither the town nor the local people and this former poet (now chicken farmer) should be blamed in any sense. On the contrary, it is this uninvited poet who harassed the local people. Thus an intended tragic misfit and heroic cultural rebel is virtually presented as an absurd, pretentious, unreasonably self-proclaimed spiritual aristocrat who obsessed with his 80s idealism and utopian dream. In this sense, Meng Jinghui produced a specimen of the psychological world of a disillusioned, indignant and sarcastic poetic left in the wake of commoditization in China. The underlying cause of his frustration and indignation was that he remains indulged in the illusion of 1980s and refuses to come terms with the transformative changes. 

 

The marginalization of the poets in society also results in the obvious anxiety about the loss of the love and admiration from the opposite sex that they had enjoyed in the 80s campus much as pop stars enjoy nowadays. In the very beginning of the film, Mayakovski was introduced as having young men and women following him madly and reciting his poems after him just like today's pop stars. From the point view of the poet, the frustration can be easily conceived through the course of his love affair with the local girl Fangfang who desperately wants to fulfill her impossible dream of being an air attendant despite her inherited colour blindness. From the viewpoint of the narrator, Fangfang was far from perfect, not in any sense related to the heroine of traditional love poems. The only common ground for their love is that they both cherish dreams that could not possibly be realized, and their mutual repugnance at the vulgarity of their environment. For Fangfang, her love is based on the unreasonable cult of the poet, who appears so different from the dull everyday setting of the town where she has been bored; while for the poet, Fangfang may function as the sole object of his attentions but may not be an appropriate partner in that boring town. His love also mixes with his condescension and desperation.

 

The narcissist and soliloquy-like monologue by the poet can be juxtaposed with Geng Zhanchun, who is an influential Chinese poet and scholar. His sentimental but sincere confession can function as a cross reference to the affected protagonist in Chicken Poet; while the former gives a more concrete and clearer description of the psychological predicament of those poets confronting the reconstruction of literature and culture driven by the irresistible spread of global capitalism:

"Life, though full of lies, has started a real change. Idols of the market have replaced everything.  At the beginning, we felt that we were heroes in a tragedy; gradually we found the comical elements of our existence. A proud ideological rebel turned into an embarrassed pauper, his temperament of being distant from vulgarity and sense of responsibility of the nation and his people became ridiculous"

(耿占春 Geng Zhanchun 2002, pp393 trans. by the author)

 

Geng Zhanchun's essay has resonance among the academic circle of literary and cultural studies, however, in a time when poets outnumber readers. It is extremely doubtful that Meng Jinghui's bemoaning of bygone innocent idealism and criticizing the irresistible commercialization of society via the most industrialized, modern and popular art form, film, would gain any acclaim or sympathy from the audience - even from those poets or former poets of the same generation.

 

What makes this film and Meng Jinghui's experimental drama paradoxical is that the banner of utopianism and heroism that Meng Jinghi carried high to resist ubiquitous commoditization itself was also packaged as a commercialized product. When avant-garde or nostalgic sentiment becomes a trademark attracting the attention of the judging panel of western film festivals, or media, the fictional poet and real filmmaker are both trapped in this dilemma (Dai Jinhua, 1997). At the end of the film, the fictional poet has to escape the town so he can continue to wander, while heroism and idealism under Meng Jinghui's exclusive patent still attracts the eyeballs of a targeted audience group. This is also the reality of a cultural market.

 

The Pure, Poetic and Utopian 1980s Versus Ironic and Hedonic 2000s in Chengdu Fenzi (Chengdu Beauty).

Compared to Chicken Poets? pretentiousness, the discourse of Chengdu Fenzi, reflects a more authentic ambivalence towards the 1980s and 2000s by 80s graduates who constitute the bulk of struggling or well-qualified professionals and white collar workers in commercialized urban China.

 

In contrast to the passive and indignant protagonist in the Chicken Poets, the characters of Chengdu Fenzi, who are also university graduates of 1980s and had immersed themselves in the poetic utopianism in the 1980s campus, demonstrated much more aggressiveness in the dynamic process of commercialization in the metropolitan city of Chengdu. They already conceded the huge discrepancy between real life and their dreams and expectations about their nurtured life. They are active participants and creators of the status quo of urban China, whether it is described as "phony" or exciting. This novel also provides a lively sample of the spiritual crisis of a bourgeoning urban professional who is obsessed with the conflict of lust, desire and nostalgia for the utopianism of the 1980s.

 

On the one hand, the attention-grabbing side of this novel is the detailed naturalistic description of the sexual adventure and the endeavor to achieve business success.  The narrator uses present tense to chronicle his journey of seeking women and fortune .The story started with the crisis in relations between the protagonist Hu Xiangdong and his fiancee Zhou Jiamei before Valentine's Day - a widely-adopted and thoroughly consumed Western festival in urban China. The whole novel progressed with two lines entwined: one is the endeavor of the protagonist and his partner and friend Wang Jiannan's to establish their own advertising company in fulfillment of their dream of fortune; the other is his Don Juan's pursuit of women in contemporary Chengdu. The present tense narrative is interspersed with flashbacks to life in 1980s, including their innocent first loves and enduring untold unrequited loves since high school - all of which presents a longitudinal case history of growing up for those who born in the 1960s. The novel contributes a valuable perspective on how the youth of the 1980s entered the 1990s and the 2000s.

 

The story ends with the protagonist being sent to a psychiatric hospital as the result of his failures in love, sex, and business. The last straw, due to his error, is the police detention of his life-long "innocent poet" friend for prostitution.

 

The theme of this novel is the internal contradiction of flesh and soul, material success and spiritual fulfillment, poetic utopia in the 1980s and the utilitarian reality of contemporary life, love and lust. Being an active participant in life, the author does not give us a simple judgment or preference to either extreme, nor does he adopt a critical stance towards either the 1980s past or the 2000s China. All the characters are indispensable parts constituting the past and present. From the protagonist's narrative, a mixed feeling can be fathomed: on the one hand, they miss the 1980s, the ascetic poetic utopia which is deeply embedded in the blood of the generation born in the 1960s and consciously or unconsciously affecting their action in reality; on the other hand, they also indulge themselves in today's sensual gratification and long for material success. From the point of view of the narrator, they no longer play loners, romanticists and indignant outsiders. Rather, they are true actors in the show, in terms of action they are realists and materialists, however they still maintain some softness in the most private part of their heart, such as nostalgia and affection towards friends.

 

To correspond with the theme that this paper tries to explore, in what follows I will be focused on the analysis of the image of the former poet and now newspaper editor, Wang Jiannan, from the point of view of the narrator and the protagonist Hu Xiangdong.

 

Compared to the protagonist and the other main male characters, the author has given more sympathy and appreciation to this poet. The author deplores his integrity as inappropriate for survival in the transitional period of commoditization, when the social ethos features greediness and deception at the early stage of capitalism.

 

The author himself is a poet (see his blog) and still composing poems. However, being a realist, he is fully aware that the time of poetry has gone, so in his narrative an ironic attitude is clearly reflected in his witty but foxy comments.

 

In retrospect, Hu Xiangdong, as the narrator, is very cynical about the campus poets. In his eyes, towards the late 1980s, the decline of campus poetry had already become an unavoidable trend. The insistence and dedication to poetry incurred bewilderment and scorn. He begins to re-examine the meaning and value of poetry writing. He came to a very ironic conclusion about poems: the poem can only serve in the function of a prop for attracting the opposite sex - although in the late 1980s and early 1990s, this prop appeared much less effective. Ironically, from the viewpoint of the protagonist, the status of poets is very questionable.

 

In the narrative of recalling the friendship with his poet friend Wang Jiannan, a very amusing scenario is presented:

"One year in the early 1990s before Qingming festival, Wang Jiannan said a poetry recital would be held in Teacher's University. Being a former campus poet, he was also invited.

 

I was then very surprised; is Wang Jianan still writing poetry? Such a vigorous and absolutely normal young lad is still writing poems and even I had no idea. Under my insistent interrogation, he eventually admitted, with tears in his eyes, that indeed he had been writing poems." (Chapter 24) Translated by the author

        

It was during this poetry reading that the protagonist got to know what was later to become his girlfriend and de facto wife, Zhou Jiamei - also by pretending to be a poet of love and appropriating poems by the real poet Wang Jiannan (who had written them in 1980s for the girl they both fell for and admired). With these poems, he eventually captured the heart of Zhou Jiamei.

 

Another excerpt narrated by the protagonist interestingly mirrors the author's attitude of self-ridicule concerning the poetry fever of the 1980s

"In Zhou Jiamei's eyes, I was a poet, - of course she did not know that I was a fake one. Actually I realized later that in this world, the poet is the easiest profession to pretend to do. To be a fake painter, you must at least know how to sketch. Even if you don't know how to sketch and try to pretend to be a post modern avant-garde painter doing some abstract work, you must have demonstrated some sense of form and construct your working situation; for instance making the frames or arranging the canvas. To pretend to be a novelist you still have to present the image of writing at the desk, to pretend to be a musician, you need one or two instruments as your prop, ...as to being a businessman, that is hardest thing pretend to be; you need to be able to settle the bill, unless you are a professional swindler. Claiming yourself to be a poet is easy, a sheet of paper and a pen is enough and maybe you don't even need them, simply call yourself a poet. For this reason, there were so many poets in 1980s just like the general managers in the 1990s and MBAs in the 21 century.

(Chapter 30)

 

Poetry writing should be a private business however. In the 1980s, it became a movement (Yeh 1996b). The author was a student poet and is still writing poems in his 30s?. In this sense he is not against poetry, however, in retrospect and through the narrator, he casts some doubts on the heyday of poetry of 1980s in the above ironic comment.

 

In this novel, another feature about the 1980s is emphasized through the protagonist's narrative: the prolonged cycle of maturation for the generation of 1960s, the narrator attributes the effect of 1980s? utopianism and idealism to this phenomenon. It is interesting that the author, in his postscript emphatically equates his novel with Salinger's Catcher in the Rye; in so far as he also puts his novel into the category of rebel and growing up. This association seems very far-fetched in that Salinger's Holden Caulfield is just an adolescent who refutes and refuses to integrate with the adult world when realizing its defects. However, the three male characters of this novel are well into their thirties in the beginning of the 21^st century, as I mentioned above, they are not just victims of this ever-changing urban China, they are voluntary participants in this far-from-perfect urban life. Of the three characters, two of them still embody the tension or anxiety between their inner world and their environment. In this sense the protagonist and his friend, the former campus poet Wang Jiannan, both (though to a varying degree) suffer from the conflict between the ideals of an ascetic, pure and romantic love in 1980s and the contemporary sins of the flesh, the former being just the legacy of the dominant utopian discourse and sexual repression that was an integral part of Chinese socialism's moral system in the 1980s.

 

Love in the 1980s was highly idealized, romanticized and mysterious. Along with the discourse by mainstream educational administration, parents, teachers, a utopian and poetic aura permeated in the university. Students of that era were inclined to believe that there exists such a thing as true love, which can transcend and be separated from sensual desire. In this novel, Shen Qiu, as the idol of the poet Wang Jiannan and the protagonist Hu Xiangdong ever since their high school, the only way Wang Jiannan conveyed his platonic love was by sending his poems of love without any physical intimacy - that was regarded as the enemy of great love. In retrospect, the idol was an enduring hallmark for both Hu Xiangdong and Wang Jianna as their commonly cherished memory of the 1980s.

 

In the process of "decline", the narrator maintains a kind of respect for the poet friend Wang Jiannan in that he sticks to his seemingly outmoded philosophy of life and the bottom line of morality shaped by the 1980s. The former poet has a willingness to adapt and also develops some cynicism; he applies his literary talents and skills to advertising slogans, adapting a solemn Greek poem to promote the sale of European-styled apartments, and never pretentiously disdaining the temptation of commercial gain. In this poet, we don't see the fundamental conflict between the expectations of life and social reality; the only problem is the clash between the anomie of morality and ethics in contemporary China and the ideals of his inner world. He is a loser in life but he still has a chance to win, he is against bad rules or no rules, but not the game itself. In this sense, he is easier to be salvaged than Salinger's Holden Caulfield. If, in the narrator's view, the writing of poetry is just a symptom of adolescence, he is no longer obsessed by this complex of idealism and utopianism of 1980s, all he needs is love that well-balanced in both soul and flesh and success in his career as a professional in advertising - not as a poet at all.

 

The reason why the author insists that this should not be regarded as an erotic novel and should be compared with Catcher in the Rye is because, as I noted above, the sex depicted here is related to the pain and bewilderment of the over-extended process of growing up for those born in 1960s. In terms of sexuality, for these University students - though called "God's favorite sons" in the 1980s - their four years of University life was a process of oppression and self-oppression imposed by the institution and the society. The literature, poetry and other activities just served as, in Freudian's eyes, empathy of sexuality. Officially, the ban on the marriage of undergraduate students, actually a ban on sex, is still effective today (见争论大学生可以结婚 2003?). In contrast, from the end of the 1960s in the industrialized countries there had been a tendency to lower the age of for voting and legal sex (Hobsbawm, 199? p326). Unfortunately, Chinese tertiary students had to struggle with desire accompanied by sexual maturity. In this respect, this book is a valuable personal chronicle of the discovery of sexuality and unleashing of the energy of sexuality that had been accumulated and repressed in the 1980s. Restrained by the historical and cultural forces, the span or process of growing up had been unnecessarily extended. The protagonist had first sex as late as 28 years of age, while for his poet friend, as a pious believer in love, the process was extended even longer. It is ridiculous to talk about the rebellion of a thirty-something person. However, it is can be clearly deduced from their life experience as a good boy in the 1980s to a decadent capitalist in the 2000s, that what they challenge is an outmoded doctrine about life and love based on the illusory utopian's perspective on human nature and society. In this sense, they are still rebels, but too old to be rebels.

 

These heroes of 1960s generation were trying to compensate for the asceticism they underwent in 1980s and the shortage of commodities in their childhood. In their thirties they still compete with youths born in the 1970s and even 1980s. University students in the 1980s developed their fantasies about love and their ideal love mainly through poems and love stories; the romanticized love illusion would constitute a sharp contrast with their experience in later life with the loosening of social control since the early 1990s. In this, most university graduates of the 1980s still hold the same ambivalent attitudes towards their life on campus in the 80s as the two heroes in Chengdu Fenzi.

The generation born in the 1960s may accept the reality of a de facto sexual revolution or the anomie of their changing stances: while embracing and benefiting from the emancipation from moral restrictions, they can not help looking back on the pure and poetic utopia of the 1980s.

 

For a thoughtful reflection on poets and poetic utopia in 1980s campus, we can turn to Bi Feiyu's poet in his Yuyang.

 

 

Bi Feiyu's Poet: another perspective on political and sexual repression in the idealized 1980s campus.

In this section, I will be focusing on Bi Feiyu's dystopian attitudes towards poets and the campus of 1980s reflected in Yuyang. Unlike the poets we previously discussed, the poet in Bi Feiyu's Yuyang is placed in the context of the 1980s campus. His trilogy 玉米Yumi，玉秀Yuxiu and Yuyang can be read as an historical narrative of the politics and sexuality in villages and regional towns in Mao's time and the campus of a teacher's college in the early Deng 'speriod.

 

Through the poet in Yuyang, though he is not the main character of the novel, the author provides a different way of looking at the 1980s campus and the poet. Compared with the two images of misfit poets in previous sections facing the ever-changing society, being a campus poet himself in the 1980s, Bi Feiyu's work appeared in 2003 (3), exploring the internal tragedy of the poet in that poetic and romantic period. Underneath the romanticism and idealism, harsh political autocracy is revealed. From the viewpoint of a innocent female protagonist, who is both the victim and collaborator in political and sexual oppression, the cruelty was even reinforced. It can also be conceived that the poet is far from perfect himself with tragic defects in his personality. Therefore, the poet of this novel reflects some poet-turned-novelists? skeptical attitudes towards their own "youth symptom" as campus poets and examines critically and suspiciously the negative impact or harm it exerted on the youth of 1980s.

  s big sister Yumi was dumped by her fianc?, a pilot in the air force after her father was removed form the post of Party secretary. She decided to save her family by marrying to a local official who was almost her father's age. This is a narrative about the entanglement of sex, status, power and love in Mao's rural China. This is the first part of the trilogy

'

 

Yuyang is the third part of the trilogy. In this novella, the writer shifted the setting from rural to the teacher's college in a city. The youngest daughter of Wang's family entered the teacher's college by her own effort in the entrance examination in the early 1980s (a measure introduced by Deng Xiaoping who came back to power in late 1970s.) The author did not romanticize life in the 1980s campus at all. Rather, we can easily find the conflict of power, oppression, sexuality and love in the ivory tower in the1980s. The idealism, poetic utopianism and true love are closely scrutinized with pessimistic skepticism in this novella.

 

Yuyang was not beautiful or flirtatious, nor was she as outstanding in extra curricula activities as her classmates from urban areas, so she never gained any advantage in the competition for patronage from the political instructor of this class. As a hierarchal structure, the political instructor was the agent exercising control of students in the campus at the base level who, nonetheless, always played a vital role in determining students? future and employment ­ particularly before the market economy was introduced in 1990s. Yu Yang was discriminated against in her class by her roommates and was unfairly treated by the political instructor just because of her rural background and her plain appearance. She was even unfairly wronged in a non-existing stealing incident in the dormitory; thus, she then became the prey of a security officer in charge of surveillance of student deviation including dating in the campus. He then turned her into an informant.

 

She fell into a one-sided love with the campus poet Chu Tian. The talented Chu Tian was the idol of many female fellow students in the campus, so was the protagonist. In her eyes, the poet was too mysterious to be approachable so the mystique was further intensified. While following Chu Tian, she discovered the secret of Chu Tian. In the eyes of the young and innocent Yu Yang, the image of the poet collapsed, from a sublime poet to an indecent rogue.

 

Instead of extolling or eulogizing the cult of poetry (Yeah 1996) in the campus of the 1980s, Bi Feiyu, instead presents a highly problematic world. We see the drastic disparity in the poet: on the one side, it is the elevated romanticism as an idol on the campus, on the other, the repressed sexuality in a passionate youth in his early twenties. Bi Feiyu took the poet from the divine to the mundane. There is a touch of irony about the repressed poet in the narrative. However, it was the institutional forces and its hegemony that was blamed.

 

The poet's loss of divinity was cruel. What made it even crueler was that the hidden and most private part of him, his repressed lusting after his fellow female students was revealed by the ruthless interrogation of the security officer. The poet had to confess the motives behind each love poem and what he referred to in each love poem. Moreover, it was Yu Yang, the disillusioned admirer who reported her fallen idol.

 

Being a former poet, Bi Feiyu removes the romantic veil of the 1980s, exposing the many facets of the 1980s university campus that had been covered by the umbrella of utopianism and poetry, the imagined past served as symbol or icon to devalue the profound change and emancipation with the development (if not progress) in China. The poets Chutian in Yuyang and Ouyang Yunfei in Chicken Poets are the product of the heyday of the poets. However, that time was not without problems, considering the political violence and institutional and social control over these elite youth; the sexual repression and oppression hidden in that utopian time. Also Yu Yang's accidental peeping at a poet has its profound allegorical connotation: it shows that human desire can hardly be transcended by poetic spirit.

 

Bi Feiyu is not alone in casting doubt on the idealism and utopianism of the 1980s campus. Another Nanjing-based writer, Su Tong also presented the shifting attitudes towards the utopianism and romanticism from the perspective of a graduate in his short story A Friend on the Road. The title itself was a parody of On the Road, by the American beat generation writer Jack Kerouac. Lijun was a schoolmate and friend of the narrator in the 1980s. This friend and other philosophy students were heroes in 1980s admired by their peers; they were all fascinated with Western philosophy. However, in the ironic account, half his peers did not like Lijun because he borrowed money from them and never returned it, the other half still admired him because he had not borrowed money from them. An episode happened to the narrator that has its particular comic effect; Lijun approached the narrator to borrow money to buy a book by Jean Paul Sartre. The narrator was moved by his friend's devotion to recondite philosophy. However, his friend never mentioned the money until the narrator had to ask for it when Lijun was drinking in the caf?. Interestingly, the narrator was eventually moved by Lijun's talk about fraternity and philosophy and ashamed over his persistence concerning the money.

 

Lijun, before graduating, volunteered to work in Tibet in quest for the mystical and romantic. His exciting slogan was: "I just want to be on the road" (emphasis mine), which the narrator realized years later was copied from Jack Kerouac. Since his graduation and work in a university as junior staff, his ideas and attitudes were subdued to normal and urban life. However, his idealistic friend, although still on the road, kept sending postcards and, most annoyingly, his uninvited friends or friends? of friends to him seeking food and accommodation when passing by his city. From the narrative, the tension between the utopian ideal nurtured in university campus in 1980s and the comfortable integration into everyday life loomed large. The story ended when his newly wed wife, for the first time turned down the unknown visitor sent by Lijun. The narrator felt guilty for his friend and the fraternity of the old life on the one hand, however he was relieved by his wife's decision to reject the unknown visitor sent by his friend Lijun:

This is the only thing we can do, see his muddy boots, our rug is new and we have only one room.?   

(Su Tong 199?)

This is an unhappy ending with the obvious sentiments of a reluctant but inevitable farewell to the attachment of 1980s? romanticism and idealism. The cozy and stable urban family life has replaced the passion of wandering on the road.

 

Like Bi Feiyu, in this short story, Su Tong also examines the passion of idealism and utopianism with some skepticism. Accepting the passion and impulse for seeking the sublime meaning of life, these poets and philosophy lovers were idealists. However, it can be sensed from the narrative that these self-divined people were far from ideal and perfect from the hindsight of an adult in his 30s. The persistent seeking of the ideal spiritual life and their consequent material dependence on other people constitutes a sharp contrast which reflected Bi Feiyu, Su tong and other writers born in the 1960s.

 

Conclusion:

This is paper is not about the study of development of poetry for the past two decades or more in China. Rather, it is through the analysis of the attitudes of a particular age group of writers in current China who are more or less descended from the heyday of poetry in the university campus of the 1980s, that I endeavor to depict the route of their psychological and mental development through the drastic social, political and economic changes occurring in China for the past two decades.

 

Though we still have such a voice in Meng Jinghui as a very small minority of intellectuals, artists and writers still carrying the banner of heroism, utopianisms and idealism, ?. In my analysis above, it can be perceived that the nostalgia of 1980s, or even earlier, only reflects their mentality of narcissism, demandingly daydreaming of their questionable (值得怀疑) and imaged spiritual superiority and social status in the 1980s or even earlier. Their criticism of the commercialization of the culture itself was paradoxical to their practice in real life, as a matter of fact. Both experimental plays and remaining avant-garde poets can not escape the reach of the cultural market. There is no doubt that Meng Jinghui and his peers are fully aware of the existence of this market, their stance as non mainstream dissidents or anti-commercialization make a very good trade mark for western or local critics and patrons. The wave of rewriting red classics and short lived fever of eulogizing of Che Guevara in the small theatres of Beijing, in essence, are more market-oriented than ideological.

 

The more noteworthy phenomenon is the irony and parody in the narratives of those participants of 1980s poetic utopia on the campus. In my view, their attitudes, in contrast to Meng Jinghui's pretentious self-pity and long-lasting indignation have gained more resonance for those born in the 1960s. In Chengdu Fenzi, we can feel clearly that the enlightenment movement in the 1980s campus that embodied the poetry fever and modern western philosophies have become a bygone past and will never return. In retrospect, this turning-into-realist generation born in 1960s, on the one hand, under the pressures of a modern urban, materialist society and in the pursuit of sensual gratification, they still miss the purity and sincerity of the campus of the 1980s. On the other hand, they are fully aware that their happiness, their love, must be based on their economic success. This is the spiritual and material reality of current China with which the generation born in the 1960s, brought up under Mao and early Deng's socialist utopian dream, must cope.

 

From the poet in Chengdu Fenzi, we can also see the split of aesthetic views and ideology shaped in the 1980s, the ever changing new discourse of the 1990s and the new century of China.

 

Bi Feiyu and Su Tong's personal history of literary writing tells us more about those writers who were born in the 1960s: starting from enthusiastic campus poets, turning to experimental avant-garde fiction writers, from the 1990s their works transformed to more realistic styles and attracted more critical attention and wider readership. Interestingly, these two Nanjing based writers both have had experience of collaboration with China's leading film director Zhang Yimou, Su Tong has had his novella and novel adapted by other filmmakers. Their literary value and commercial success provides a good example for quality and commercially successful writing in contemporary China, their cases can also be juxtaposed with the discussion about how film techniques affect fiction writing (Martin 1986). In Yuyang and A Friend on the Road, both writers have cast their doubts on the nostalgic and sentimental discourse that idealized, romanticized and sanctified the 1980s. Bi Feiyu uncovered more oppression, inhumane asceticism in the political aspect of the campus and their impact on the youth of that time that glorified by some writers and poets. While Su Tong, endorsing the narrator with the view point of a socialized and integrated university graduate, revealed the contradictions and faults of these idealists in seeking their ideal, while continuing to affect and harass the normal life of other people by the conflict between their spiritual world and the secular world of normal people (or those becoming normal people). Both Bi Feiyu and Su Tong's narratives not only reflect their attitudes towards the 1980s poetic campus but also the reality that could have gone unnoticed by any nostalgic remembrance of that utopian time. This is, of course, the indicator of diversity and de-politicization of literature and arts in China.

 

It is the widely accepted reality that the poetic and utopian spirit has declined, if not disappeared, in Chinese literature. As the most talented and legendary poet of Manhan (tough guy) poetry arising in the mid-1980s campus, in the 1990s Li Yawei, quit his poetry writing and became a successful private publisher after years of wandering, his farewell to Chinese poetry reveals his rude awakening:

"In a time when people dump poetry, the one who writes more, becomes more stupid."

Li Yawei, has voluntarily given up his profession as a poet when he thought he would not be embraced by people any more in a commercialized society. He threw himself into the business of publishing. It is extremely regrettable that a talented poet made such a choice. However, in my view, he presented a much better role model than Ouyang Yunfei in Meng Jjinghui's Chicken Poets, - at least in the sense that he would not claim superiority and blame society. More importantly, he is willing to take the responsibility of a husband and father. When China does not need so many poets, the natural elimination (Yeh, 1996a, 1996b?) had to begin. To be or not to be a poet should not be a question haunting the minds of those poets and former poets.