Gu Cheng was a world-famous modernist Chinese poet, essayist, and novelist. He was born in Beijing in 1956, the son of poet and People’s Liberation Army soldier Gu Gong.
When Gu was twelve, Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution began its violent “re-education” programs, and his family was sent to rural Shandong province. Uprooted from their relatively comfortable lives, they faced extreme poverty and raised pigs to survive. Gu found solace in his inner life, writing poetry inspired by his circumstances and the beauty of the natural world around him.
After Mao’s death, Gu and his family returned to Beijing. Gu began writing for the journal Jintian (“today”), which was founded by Bei Dao and Mang Ke in 1978 amid a burgeoning crop of underground publications. Jintian pushed back on the government’s strictures around freedom of expression and was condemned by those in power as menglong shi, meaning misty, hazy, or obscure poetry. The journal was banned in 1980, but not before the “Misty Poets” connected with it had started a major movement, blossoming from the ashes of the Chinese government’s long suppression of cultural output. Gu’s Nameless Flowers sold tens of thousands of copies, and soon he was receiving invitations to read at institutions around the world.
Gu secured approval to read his work in Germany in 1987. Once in Europe, he decided not to return to China. He traveled to Hong Kong, then to New Zealand, where he was granted refugee status. With his wife, the poet Xie Ye, he settled in the tiny village of Rocky Bay on Auckland’s Waiheke Island. Young Chinese emigres helped to find him a post teaching Chinese at the University of Auckland. He was banned from returning to China in 1989, after his strident criticism of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
Gu struggled to make a living for his family through his writing and resented his wife’s financial support of their household. He and his wife, who had one son, soon separated and began discussing divorce. His mental health, fragile for years, began to decline further. In 1993, he went to his wife’s home and hit her on the head with an axe, then hung himself from a tree. Xie died en route to the hospital.
Gu’s work has been translated into Chinese, English, German, French, Swedish, and Danish, and the later years of his life were dramatized in the 1998 film The Poet (Gùchéng bié liàn).
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More Gu Cheng
Text: Read four poems by Gu at Archipelago
Text: Read an excerpt from Gu's “Walled Dreams, and an Awakening” at Words Without Borders
Audio: Gu Cheng is discussed on the Chinese Literature Podcast
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Photo courtesy of New Directions.