China and the West

Ginsberg. Allen. Allen Ginsberg on China today : poet's impression of country, people. In : The Boston globe ; Febr. 20 (1985). = Ginsberg, Allen. Allen Ginsberg takes a poetic look at China. In : San Francisco examiner ; Feb. 26 (1985).
I went through China asking everybody I met what they really thought – and found the general atmosphere is one of an opening up, of reform and new breath. In individual conversations, the Chinese are completely clear and very friendly, and tell you everything they can about themselves. Buc you can only have a sublte, real, frank conversation on a one-to-one level. If you talk with three people, they'll be somewhat inhibited because it is considered antistate activity to criticize Deng Xiaoping. China's paramount leader, or the socialist basis of the state, or to say anything funny about China's occupation of Tibet. When people talk about the Gang of Four, for example, they lift up their hand with five fingers as they say 'Gang of Four', meaning Mao Tse-tung was actually behind the four leaders blamed for the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, although that is still not officially said. In class, students ask very few questions except technical ones. They told me that anybody who asked too much, or too curious a question, would stand out as too individualistic and it might be noted in his dossier. They are also inhibited by a cultural timidity and traditional Confucian respect for authority. Sometimes they surprised me. One student near Shanghai borrowed a book and translated a large number of my erotic poems. When I asked him who he would show it to, he said "My girlfriend." I asked him, "What's your pleasure in that?" He said, "I’m young and I enjoy love. I'm interested in love." But he said he couldn't show it to very many people: maybe one or two friends. The Chinese I met were thirsty for some kind of real emotion and frankness and feeling. They denied there is any sex life until people get married at 28. One guy told me, "Well, people go to the park and rub elbows for hours." If a student is caught just making out, tt could mean a mark in his dossier. If he is an English speaker, instead of being sent to the United States or Oxford he might be sent to teach high school In the Gobi Desert or assigned to a provincial town and stuck there for the rest of his life because he didn't measure up to the moral standards of the community. So mostly they take showers or do Boy Scout exercises. Every morning they're up at 5:30, running around the, soccer field, doing tai chi exercises. It's like the Moral Majority is running China. I was in China with a literary delegation sponsored by UCLA and the American Institute of Arts and Letters, and invited by the Peking Writers Assn. to meet leading writers in China at a four- day conference. The subject of the conference was "The Source of Inspiration," a tricky title designed to dodge the doctrine of art as revolutionary propaganda and give Chinese and American writers a chance to talk about the real reasons they write. In a sense, we were an excuse to allow, the Chinese writers to talk about Individ-ual sources of Inspiration and for them to air their ideas of liberty of expression. The best conversations were in private, on the side, and we Americans, being polite, didn't probe too deeply Into Chinese censorship but made speeches about freedom of expression as a basis of art, hinting by example rather than criticism. The excesses of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) are still very much a part of their lives. Some Chinese are worried that the "open door" and the new free market might close down again, worried about whether the recent reforms are permanent, worried about what effect they will have on Chinese culture. Some Intellectuals fear that the new technology China Is buying might lead to a hi-tech computer control system over the population, more efficient than the paper-shuffling bureaucracy. I spent a lot of my time among the in-tellectuals at the foreign languages departments of universities, so everybody had a story about the Cultural Revolution, about how they were sent out to the country as a Red Guard, or how their parents were fired from their Jobs as translators or physicists, or their mothers sent off to the countryside or how they themselves were exiled to clean latrines.
Almost every city In China was ivvolved In the Cultural Revolution, so it's like a giant family problem as well as a political problem. In conversation, the Chinese express different emotions about the decade of upheaval. They feel bewilderment that China, which was the greatest civilization in the world, went through this period of self-degradation. A lot of the Chinese knew my work from a translation of 'Howl' in the Foreign Language Magazine. And they knew about the Beats - there was an essay on the Beat Generation by Fan Yl Zhao, a former Red Guard who had been burning dictionaries in the '60s and who is now taking his PhD on Edmund Wilson at Harvard. The Chinese think of the Beat Generation very differently from Americans. They see it as a literary movement In rebellion against capitalism, or American imperialism, and partly in rebellion against simple government repression and censorship. They don't understand all of it, but they got a whiff of liberation, of Bohemian openness and freedom of speech, and that fits in with their current phase of getting rid of the heavy bureaucracy that controls literature. The Chinese are heartbreakingly in love with Americans. At a literary conference in Shanghai, Chen Nal-Sun, a very good young lady poet, was asked by the elder writers to be the first speaker. Talking about her ideal, she said that as a young girl she always dreamed of Gregory Peck and his movie adventures. 'I had colorful dreams of youth about him', she said. At these conferences, the elders often call on the younger people to speak, and refer to them as being fresher and less intimidated by the painful memories of the Cultural Revolution. The older writers tell you they are more wary because of their disillusionment with the past. The Chinese writers said they admired poets Walt Whitman, Gary Snyder – who was at the conference with me – Gregory Corso, and asked about Robert Creeley and T.S. Eliot. There's an ambiguousness among the Chinese. The people are trying to sort out how much of the sexual repression, how much of the travel limitations, how much of the hyper-organization is really a support system for keeping the whole society together, and how much is a control system to keep power at the top. But they rely on some kind of basic socialism to keep the country from falling back into the dog-eat-dog time when the European nations' free market – including Western nations peddling opium – dominated Chinese politics. I spent three weeks teaching at Baoding University in the provinces. It's not an open city, so there is no façade created for tourists, no international hotel, no marble-floored bathrooms, no heat in any of the houses – even in the teachers's houses – and soft-coal dust everywhere. There's soft-coal smog throughout in China ; it is the industrial energy source and used for cooking. After I finished teaching at Baoding, they held a farewell banquet for me and another teacher. An old cadre member at the dinner – whom I'd thought was a spy bureaucrat – turned out to have managed a Chinese opera company on tour in the mid-50s. He sang to us, and then sentimentally recited a famous herois poem by Mao that goes in part : 'The mountains are dancing silver serpents, The hills on the plain are shining elephants I desire to compare our height with the skies'. We were Americans, we were geoing away and the wanted to manifest his great feeling for China. Our farewell was warm with tipsy embraces.