Two Poems from the Chinese Underground
London, Miriam & Lee, Ta-ling
Miriam London & Ta-ling Lee TWO POEMS FROM THE CHINESE UNDERGROUND Startling democratic voices out of the New China. . One day in August ten years ago, a young man named Huang Hsiang, a worker at...
...Huang, however, rolled sections of his manuscript in plastic film and concealed them within several candles...
...One day in August ten years ago, a young man named Huang Hsiang, a worker at the Kweiyang City Needle Works in the Chinese Province of Kweichow, finished writing the second of two poems, in a mood of deep questioning and in tears, as he himself noted at the end of his manuscript...
...Perhaps the strangest thing about them is that they are not strange at all...
...Three more years would pass before Richard Nixon's stunning journey to Peking...
...After all, these authorities have already demonstrated to their common satisfaction that Chinese man is and always has been "different," that in China (as one specialist lucidly puts it) "no one is alone with God," that no separate self exists to cry put for its allegedly natural rights, and that "traditionally, fulfillment of the individual personality was conceived of solely in terms of fitting into society...
...Are they "representative," as scholars would say...
...On the presidential heels, congressmen, clergymen, scholars, journalists, and literati, not to mention actresses, would then fly west to the wondrous East...
...On that summer day in 1969, Huang Hsiang completed his manuscript and went out to read it to a circle of friends...
...The November 1978 issue of Tung Hsiang (Trend) includes a report by its correspondent Ying Tzu on his current trip to China, where, "in addition to interviewing famous personages," he paid especial heed to "the voice of the people...
...But all this excitement still lay ahead...
...The Red Guard frenzy and the clamor of mystifying internal battles were already receding, seemingly, into the historical distance...
...Great changes occurred...
...Returning Marco Polos would lecture everywhere, exotic spectacles would illumine the television screen, government policies would be made and unmade...
...An inadvertent reply to this question turns up-again, paradoxically- in one of the famed new Communist Hong Kong monthlies, which favor Teng Hsiao-p'ing and enjoy privileged access to the Chinese mainland...
...Paradoxically, only certain more advanced China scholars may have some trouble grasping Huang's poems...
...We want the freedom to publish newspapers, the freedom to publish books...
...The year was 1969-the midst of the "black decade," as the period of 1966-1976 is now called by Peking, but who could have read the portents then...
...In fact, the mimeographed pages of the first issue of Ch'i Meng-which eventually reached Hong Kong-are the primary source of all that we have just reported about Huang Hsiang...
...Liang Fu-ch'ing, a railway freight worker from Kweiyang...
...But what of the poems themselves, which we have translated in major part and introduce below...
...Yang Tsai-hsing and Huang Chieh, also workers from Kweiyang...
...Can it be, then, that Huang's poems speak for the atypical, transcendent few, rather than for the Chinese multitude...
...A teacher told him: "Does the pasting of a few wall posters in the streets mean that we have freedom of the press...
...These are startling voices out of the New China...
...But the bravest and truest voices were those that once broke the silence in the dark...
...Fang Chia-hua, a worker at the Kweichow Tobacco and Wine Company...
...For these scholars, this happy concept still sums up China today...
...Ying Tzu summed up his account by citing the words of a "theoretical worker": "Socialism without democracy is fascism...
...It is not uncommon in China to make candles at home using a mold and melted wax residue:) Years went by before Huang Hsiang's poems were released from their waxen cocoons...
...Before long, the authorities descended on Huang Hsiang and began a search for the original manuscript, to be used as evidence against him...
...From north to south, from east to west," he wrote, "the single loudest word I heard was-'democracy.' " Since the downfall of the Gang of Four, he discovered, "people have been enjoying greater freedom of speech," but "they have raised their demands to an even higher level now...
...Word of this modest activity and of the poems' content evidently spread, reaching unfriendly ears...
...Mo Chien-kang, a worker at the Kweichow Battery Plant...
...Indeed, the world was not particularly attentive to China at the moment...
...Who would not hear of China then...
...Premier Chou En-lai died, the Great Helmsman Mao Tse-tung died, the Gang of Four fell, and that astonishing Jack-in-the-box, Teng Hsiao-p'ing, popped up once more...
...The foreign reader needs no key, no explanatory footnote, no recourse to orientalism to mediate understanding...
...This group took the big-character copy to Peking and on October 11, 1978, posted it on Democracy Wall...
...Many careers would be hitched to the red star over China, many books would be published about the real country of 800 millions (who lived only to serve the Chairman, the Party, and the People) in edification of the rest of us (who were more sophisticated, alas, and accustomed to Western luxuries like personal liberty...
...Finally, in the autumn of 1978, Huang Hsiang removed his manuscript from the candles and wrote a fresh copy in big characters, which he then entrusted to a group of friends: Li Chia-hua, a worker at the Kweiyang Power Bureau...
...Later, Li Chia-hua and the other group members mimeographed Huang's poems for wider distribution in the first issue of Ch'i Meng (Enlightenment), an underground publication of the Kweichow Province Enlightenment Society-a secret organization for human rights and democracy...
...and Cheng Chi-lien, a poor peasant from Chengan County in Kweichow...
Vol. 12 • November 1979 • No. 11
