Split allegiances
Can a continent be a nation? / Can an island be a home? / Can a blink of an eye be a youth? / Can a lifetime be forever? --"Jianghu Shang"
Who am I? That's the question that Yu asks time and again.
It's a question he asks repeatedly because he continually moves, and is continually categorized-whether from a geographical or psychological standpoint. For Sixty Years: Selected Poems by Yu Kuang-chung, the editor Chen Fang-ming divided Yu's poems into three periods: Taipei, Hong Kong and Kaohsiung. The impact of the geographic environment on Yu's work is quite apparent. "Every time I change where I live and confront a new topography and environment, it's a test and challenge to my creativity as a writer," he says. "But change is also the currency of creation."
Take, for instance, moving to Kaohsiung. For his first two months there, Yu felt at a loss. Then he gradually settled in and got involved in life there. It gave him inspiration and material for his work. Whether a writer likes a place or not, Yu believes that when you can sit down and write about a place, it means you are settled there. And being settled means that you are interacting with the place and that "in one sense the place has become yours!"
Provence was van Gogh's, Shanghai Eileen Chang's, the Yangtze gorges Du Fu's, Hainan Island Su Dongpo's. What about Yu? Nanjing was once his, Taipei was once his, so were America and Hong Kong. And now? As Yu himself says, Kaohsiung is his. His domain is Qijin's lighthouse and the Taiwan Strait.
"Mainland China is my mother; Taiwan is my wife; Europe is my mistress." But America has no place in his loyalty or affections. "America is a woman I've abandoned"-someone he once loved but no longer has any feeling for or desire to see again. And if Taiwan is his wife, "Taipei is my first wife, Kaohsiung my second."
The complications engendered by moving and these mixed allegiances have time and again caused identity crises for Yu. His own sense of identification is uncertain. Poets say he's an academic, but academics disagree. Traditionalists say he's a modernist, but modernists say he's a traditionalist. He writes about Kaohsiung, and says that's where he's from, yet the city's natives say he's from Taipei. Taiwanese say he's Chinese. And the Chinese say he's a "homesick poet."
"If you start from an ideological standpoint, and focus only on one side of me, intentionally ignoring the other sides, then it's easy to pigeonhole me," Yu says.
Self-exploration
It has been Yu's fate to do battle against fundamentalists and to mix with writers of all ideological stripes. "Probably most people with clear identities are fundamentalists of some sort," he says. "Fundamentalists are happy. Things are simple for them; they have no need to pursue self-discovery."
His life, on the contrary, has been a long difficult journey of self-exploration, a journey on which he couldn't avoid politics. He has constantly challenged himself with political questions. "But that's just creative stimulation."
The relationship of Yu Kwang-chung and Chen Fang-ming became a topic of discussion because they started out as teacher and student and then had a major falling out. For 15 years, Chen, who had gone to America, was on a KMT blacklist and couldn't return to Taiwan.
Literature may have no influence over politics, but politics can certainly influence and distort literature. In 1977 Yu sparked a war of literary theory over Taiwan's Nativist Literature Movement by publishing his essay "The Wolf Nears." He was accused of "opposing nativism" or-to use a more current way of putting it-of "not loving Taiwan" or "selling Taiwan out." Compared with controversial stances that Yu had been taken in theoretical debates about modern poetry, the use of literary versus vernacular language, and abstract painting, Yu's comments made him many enemies-even if he had never equated "nativist" literature with the "proletarian literature" praised by Chairman Mao.
Back then Chen Fang-ming chose to stand amid the ranks of those championing nativism. When he met his former teacher Yu 20 years later, he recalls, "I knew that things could never return to the way they had been, when the master poet and I would read poetry together. Politics, political parties, ideology, and national identification had sowed seeds of impurity in our friendship." There was bitterness when they met again, but "literature must return to being an artistic discipline that is concerned with aesthetic judgments." The impurities in their relationship settled over time, and Chen Fang-ming eventually determined to put it to rest. "When people now ask me who my teachers were, I never hesitate. In literary matters, Yu Kwang-chung is my modernist and also my classicist."
And it's not just Chen Fang-ming. For many second- and third-generation poets in Taiwan, Yu has served as a father figure and model, as someone who has lit the path toward poetry.
And about that battle of literary theory over the "native soil," Yu later would say: "Back then, some people pressed me to make my position clearer, but I thought that would be pointless. The truth isn't necessarily arrived at by arguing more and more. The battle over theory makes it easy for second-rate literary historians to attach labels and divide people into black-and-white camps. But what writer of true accomplishment would rely on wars of literary criticism to find a lasting legacy?"
Belonging only to literature
In the end he knew who he was, and he no longer needed to fight with himself. But it was another matter when fights came to him. For instance, there was nothing personal in his criticism of the Ministry of Education's policy of reducing the emphasis on classical literature in school textbooks.
When he was 40, he would look upward and ask / Ask the starry sky who he was / Why was he still suffering down here? / Did one of the gods up above / Really have it in for him? / Now, after passing 60 / His mind is no longer consumed by fears and vexations / He long ago stopped quarreling with the constellations / The night has become quiet and gentle / Like a border city during a ceasefire / When his childhood companions are scattered to the ends of the earth / Who, apart from his desk lamp, still casts light upon him / As the story ends --"The Last Half of the Night"
He belongs only to literature. In the city of Changde in Hunan Province, there is a 2.5-kilometer dike along the Yuan River where people have carved poems starting from Qu Yuan from the Warring States period. There are also poems by Luo Fu, and Zheng Chouyu. Yu Kwang-chung has of course not been overlooked.
In that long promenade devoted to Chinese-language poetry, he realizes the promise he made to China in his youth: "China would find glory in his name." When the mainland selected eight contemporary essayists, he was included among the likes of Bing Xin, Ji Xianlin, Jin Kemu, Zhang Zhonghang, Wang Zengqi, and Yu Qiuyu. Chiu Ko Publishing founder Tsai Wen-fu is still convinced that Yu Kwang-chung will one day win the Nobel Prize. At any rate, as Yu himself has said, "Being recognized by one's own people is a writer's greatest honor."