Who is Xiang Yang      

By John Balcom

A thread runs through the work of poet Xiang Yang --the Taiwan experience. Although influenced in his youth by Tang classical verse, he enjoys writing in his native southern Fujian dialect and has managed to link tradition with invention in a highly distinctive way.

        Xiang Yang ﹝向陽）is a rich, complex poet. Some of his poem lyrically evoke the beauties of the landscape, but he can also write social1y engaged poetry commenting on politics, decrying social ills, and condemning environmental degradation. He has written poems about the history of the island and he has deftly captured the joys and trials of rural and urban life through the use of dialect, with all the opportunities it affords for subtlety and nuance.

        Xiang Yang's 1982 poem,“The Soil and the Flower," can stand as a statement of his poetics:

The flower swells in the gentle breeze and bright sunlight

And gracefully opens, her bewitchingly attractive

Face looks up at the blue sky

She looks askance at the soil beneath her feet,

and flaunts the aesthetics she has always emphasized

In a perpetually warm climate, she announces

To the open fields: the so-called symbols

Are her petals and pistil

So-called purity is a ladder to heaven

Unsoiled and rising above the dirt

　

The soil silently and honestly supports the flower

And her wild arrogance, not a word does it say

All night long it madly collects the dew

To provide her with all the more during the day

All day long it diligently gathers nutrients

And never stops guarding her roots

With no thoughts about purity and transcendence

It is rough and impure but firm and stable

The more beautiful the flower,

the lower sinks the soil's head

Showiness and exaggeration make the flower

Grow thin and wane

The soil bears all and slowly grows fat

When a violent storm arrives

Petals and pistil fall from stem

Joining the soil that gave her life and home

Learning to live once again in the dirt

Between blooming and withering, seemingly dead

The finest artistic achievements of China, like those of any other culture, have been made possible by the sustaining labor of innumerable anonymous farmers and workers and the popular culture that is theirs. For Xiang Yang, all poetry, like the flower in his poem, must sink its roots into the life-giving ground of a place and its tradition if it is to be viable. In his own case, this has meant writing for and about Taiwan, often in his native dialect, and in learning all he can from the classical poetic tradition of China. This is his basic aesthetic position, and it imbues the seven collections of poetry that he has published to date: Looking Up at the Gingko Tree (1977), Seeds (1980), Ten-Line Poems (1984), Time (1985), Songs of the Soil (1985), The Four Seasons (1986), and My Cares (1987).

        Xiang Yang was born Lin Chi-yang in Nantou, central Taiwan on May 7, 1955, and grew up in a village where his family ran a small shop. Early in life, he developed an interest in Tang poetry, which remained a passion for many years. However, the formative literary experience occurred while he was in junior high school when he plunged into the Li Sao, a long narrative poem about a scorned minister of state, attributed to China's first poet Chu Yuan. The poem contains lush descriptions of the flora and fauna of the mainland's southern rivers, written in unique Ch'u form.

      “It was through a misunderstanding on my part that l ever picked up the Li Sao," Xiang Yang says. ''Being somewhat romantically inclined, I thought it was a long love poem, You can imagine my surprise when I opened the book. It's hardly a book for a thirteen-year-old boy. But working through the poem awakened in me the desire to write poetry. My later experiments in poetic form and the strong sense of place in my work owe much to reading the Li Sao.”

        The Taiwan landscape is present in many of Xiang Yang's rural poems. Such poems have a long history in China, generally depicting the court or city as decadent places exercising a corrupting influence. In contemporary poems, the sense of alienation one associates with modern life is viewed as a largely urban phenomenon, whereas all healthy values reside in the countryside. But this dichotomy, which is sometimes seen as a shortcoming of his poems, is itself a significant part of the local literary tradition of Nativism , which emerged during the Japanese occupation (1895-1945) as writers and artists sought to articulate a sense of Taiwan identity.

        The young poet first encountered modern vernacular poetry in the fifth grade, when he read the works of writers such as Hsu Chi-mo and Chu Tzu-ching and began to imitate them. But it was not until high school that he first encountered the high modernist poetry then being written in Taiwan-- he bought copies of Yu Kuang-chung's Associations of the Lotus (1964), Ya Hsien's Abyss (1968), Lo Fu's River Without Banks (1970), and collections of essays on poetry and poetics by Lo Men and Tan Tzu-hao. Reading the best of modern poetry alongside the masterpieces of the classical canon, he wondered if vernacular poetry could ever attain the beauty and perfection of poems by Tao Chien, Hsieh Ling-yun, Li Po, and Tu Fu, It seemed an impossible task, and is one that has constantly preoccupied him.

        While studying Japanese at the Chinese Culture University in Taipei, Xiang Yang began to reconsider his past work, which seemed to lack direction and depth, and seriously contemplate the road he was going to take as a poet. His own views and experiences were at odds with many aspects of current modernist poetics. Like many young poets of the day, he was becoming disillusioned with high modernist writing the elitist movement and its individualistic and frequently nihilistic verse was turning into an empty formalism. Furthermore, much modernist writing was starting to be perceived as a puerile imitation of western writing. Younger poets began looking closely at the Chinese literary tradition, both classical and modern.

        The so-called“third generation poets,” such as Lo Ching and Tu Yeh, wanted to see a resurgence of local culture after years of foreign domination. In Taiwan, this revival has been more complex and multifaceted than in other places: the trend toward Westernization in the cultural sphere was subverted by a resurgence of interest in traditional Chinese culture, and mainland Kuomintang political domination was opposed by promotion of Taiwanese language and culture. Xiang Yang himself eventually decided to explore two avenues: to write poetry in his native southern Fujian dialect and to experiment with formalist verse.“I asked myself what made classical poems so enduring," he says. " It seemed to me that the strict compositional rulles and form of classical poetry contributed greatly to its poetic quality.”He began experimenting with forms and rhyme schemes, finally settling on a ten-line poem broken into two quintets as the format most suited to his artistic temperament.

        Xiang Yang wrote his first ten-line poem,“Listening to the Rain," in l974, and most of his formalist verse was written over the next ten years. While the form of his ten-line poems is consistent in terms of theme and content, they have developed through three roughly chronological phases. The first(1974-1976) is represented by the twenty or so poems in his first book, which are largely concerned with personal emotions of love, nostalgia, and homesickness. His poem“Little Station,” written in l976, is a typical example:

Isn't it like

That small red flower

Standing timidly in the deep gloom

Under the golden gingko grove of home

Soaked in the rain last autumn?

　

Away from home this spring, from the train at dusk

I see an egret

     Flap its ash-white wings

            Soar among crimson clouds

And disappear!

In the first quintet, the speaker recalls his home, specifically, a small, solitary red flower seen the previous autumn. In the second, the focus changes to what the speaker is seeing now from a train window the following spring. Between time remembered and time present, the speaker has left home. Now, sitting in a train, he sees an egret take flight. Here, the egret can stand as a manifestation of the speaker's own feelings of aloneness in the vast world.

        Structurally, this poem follows the traditional thematic progression of a classical poem as outlined by Yuan dynasty scholars for discussing Tang and Sung poetry. This partitions the poem into four parts -- chi, cheng, chuan, ho, or beginning, development, turn, and conclusion. The poem begins with the image of the small red flower, an image that is further developed and enriched in the description of the gingko grove. The second quintet initiates a turn--in this case a change in time and place. The poem ends by fusing time present and time past in the image of the soaring egret.

        In his ten-line poems, Xiang Yang frequently resorted to the three traditional compositional techniques that developed out of the early exegesis of the Book of Songs, China's first poetry anthology--hsing, or motif, pi, or metaphor, and fu, or narrative display. In the poem quoted above, the egret image can stand as a metaphor for the speaker's own thoughts. And much like a traditional nature poem, the speaker's experience is manifested in an inherent antithetical structure in which for a particular scene there must be a subjective consciousness to respond to it. Thus, while Xiang Yang's poems are written in the modern vernacular, they obey many of the rules of classical verse.

        In his second phase (1977-1981), Xiang Yang wrote thirty ten-line poems, most of which were published in his l980 collection, Seeds. The poems are still concerned with landscape but also objects in the classical yungwu tradition--poems about objects that describe by analogy abstract feelings or human qualities.“Autumn Words"(1979) is one of his better known landscape poems:

The leaves can no longer cling to the withered limbs

Falling in droves they litter the cold lake at dawn

Someone with an umbrella walks the dewy shore

All that is heard in the forest is a pine cone

Leapt from the tree, a startled cry：

Is this how you come? Ripples

And echoes linger over the water

The duckweed suddenly parts

Leaving the mountain's reflection kissing

The blue rain-washed sky, and autumn deepens

The third period (1982-1984) also shows a further shift in thematic concern--this time away from abstract ideals toward the concrete. The language tends to be less polished, more colloquial and matter-of-fact. The twenty-one poems of this phase were included

in his third book of poetry, Ten-line Poems, written after Xiang Yang had graduated from college and begun working. They are on the whole less romantic in emphasis. A good example is "Stand"(1984):

You ask where I stand, in silence

I look up at the birds in the sky and refuse

TO reply, among the crowd we breathe the same

Air, standing we experience happiness and sadness

But on this same piece of ground we

　

See things differently, at the same time

We see the crowds passing by

On both sides of the street. If we forget our

Different directions, I will answer you

That all people walk in their homeland.

The theme of this poem is the universality of the human condition and mankind's love of the land, which transcends all ideological positions. Many of the poems written during this period also focus on the adult world and a loss of innocence; the simple joys of childhood and the romantic idealism of youth have given way to adult feelings of unhappiness, conflict, defeat, and compromise. And as is customary with Xiang Yang's poems, we generally find clustered around the rural pole the ideas of goodness, warmth and supportive human relations, childhood, and health; whereas, solitude, filth, adult alienation, and unhappiness are associated with the urban pole.

        At the same time Xiang Yang was experimenting with formalist poetry, he also struck out in another direction and began writing poems in his native southern Fujian dialect. For a poet, there are advantages and disadvantages in using dialect: while southern Fujianese, also known as Taiwanese, is spoken by 70 percent of the population of Taiwan, the written form of the language has never been standardized, nor is it taught in schools. Thus reading and writing poetry in dialect takes a lot of effort. However, the expressive powers of the dialect for a native speaker cannot be matched by Mandarin, and some poets insist that only southern Fujianese can express the reality of Taiwan.

        When Xiang Yang began writing dialect poetry, the use of Taiwanese was still a sensitive issue-- he was even criticized for advocating separatism-- but he persisted.“When I was in college in Taipei, " he says,“the chaos in my life and in cultural circles forced me to look at my roots in the countryside. I thought of the people I knew and loved at home, their joys and their sorrows, and wanted to write about them. But I wanted to do it in the language they spoke."

        Having no formal education in reading and writing Taiwanese, Xiang Yang's first attempts were naturally slow and painful."I kept the rhythms of opera and puppet theatre in my head when I started writing, and then I found the words to fit character by character, line by line, It was very slow going at first."

        Rural life and politics are two predominant themes in dialect poetry, and Xiang Yang has written a number of poems that combine both. The use of dialect in poems such as“His Honor, Mr. Assemblyman, Is Not at Home”makes them seem even more true-to-life. After all, local politics is conducted in the local dialect. Here is“The Village Chief Wants to Build a Bridge”(1976):

The village chief wants to build a bridge

To make it easier for people in the village to get around

        for transporting the crops

And educating the children

With more reasons than grains of sand in the riverbed

The village chief goes from door to door

Talking about the importance of bridge

        the need to build a bridge

　

The village chief is really something

Of the street lights he had installed last year

       only half still shine this year

The water pipes he's repairing this year

        have been repaired two or three times before

And though there's no water in the river

        he still wants to build a bridge

For once there's bridge the city folks'll come

        and the village will develop

A bridge is important and it'll be easier

       to transport the crops

　

Building a bridge is really important

        otherwise the village will be backward

The cabs and trucks dare not pass

There's lots of money to be had from sightseeing

    in our village

         but it's inconvenient

Building a bridge is important, please support it,

        I'm not in this for myself

Though I have a nice car,

        until the bridge is built

I'll walk across the riverbed like the rest of you

　

The village chief means what he says

Every day he has to cross the riverbed to get to the village

For village transportation

         and the convenience of the villagers

He has locked his car in the garage

And says there it'll stay until the bridge is built

O! building a bridge is really important

         we have to build a bridge

The narrator appears to be a naive farmer, unaware of the village chief's selfish motives, while we as readers see them clearly. His naivete adds bite to the poem's sarcasm.

        During his military service, Xiang Yang contemplated writing along historical narrative poem about Taiwan, but it was not until he returned to civilian life that he had the time to make this idea a reality. In l978, in order to enter the China Times poetry contest, he began writing“Wushe,” a narrative poem about the l930 Wushe incident, when Atayal tribespeople in the small mountain village of Wushe took up arms against the Japanese colonial rulers.

        The poem is divuded into six sections. In the first part, Monalutao, one of the leaders of the uprising, narrates the mythological origins of the Atayal people. He compares their proud beginnings with their present state of humiliation under the Japanese. In the second section we hear him advocating rebellion against the Japanese oppressors:

My father tried it once ten years ago, I

Tried five years ago, and now five more years have passed

Down another glass! Children without a future

We will die, all hopes and happiness

Will become the freedom and dignity of our descendants

Success is not assured, but we must win this battle

We might die, die standing up in resistance

What sparked the Wushe uprising was essentially a misunderstanding. Monalutao felt he had been insulted by a Japanese police officer who refused to drink with him at his wedding banquet. (The officer saw that Monalutao's hands were stained with pig's blood so he felt it would be unsanitary to share a drink.) As a result, Monalutao and his friends beat the officer. The next day, they went in person to apologize, but the officer rejected their apologies and threatened to punish the entire village. Rather than wait to be punished, they decided to strike first.

        The third section depicts a discussion over whether to fight or to submit. Finally, the time for rebellion comes. At an athletic competition at which the Japanese are present, the Atayal attack：

As swift as lightning, two hundred Atayal children

Attack the playing field

As swift as lightning, they attack and kill their cruel rulers

As swift as lightning, the playing field was bathed in blood

When the attack ended, 134 Japanese had been killed and another 215 injured. The governor of Taiwan dispatched troops from Taipei, Hsinchu, and Tainan. The tribespeople retreated to a large cave where they held out against attack, Unable to dislodge them, the Japanese bombed them with poison gas:

We couldn't breathe, choking smoke filled the air

Tearfully, some fell

    others were killed in the forest

        still others jumped to their

Deaths from the cliff, no way to breathe in the white smoke

We had to leave, leave our beloved

Wushe, the eyes and hands of the Atayal were waiting

We died resisting, the battle could not be won

The uprising lasted fifty days, When it was over, more than nine hundred Atayal tribespeople had died, as well as an additional forty-nine Japanese.

        To date, Xiang Yang's magnum opus is without a doubt his poetic sequence The Four Seasons, published in l986. This combines many of the qualities of his earlier work: the formalism of ten-line poems, the use of dialect, the abiding presence of the Taiwan landscape, and a strong social consciousness. The twenty-four poems in the book, one for each of the twenty-four periods of the traditional Chinese agricultural calendar, provide the reader with a comprehensive picture of Taiwan in the l980s.

        The early poems in the sequence tend to be landscape poems in which man lives in harmony with nature. As the sequence progresses, however, the rural orientation gradually shifts, and the urban intrudes ever more, and a somber tone gradually takes hold. The single text spans the seasons and the changes they bring to the island, the socioeconomic development of the place, as well as encompassing the whole spectrum of human moods and emotions.

        The eighteenth poem of the sequence,“Hoar Frost,”is a notable example of Xiang Yang's social concern:

The frost spreads from north to south

Along the shinning black rails, an illusion

lt drifts over cities, poor and remote places

Circles a railroad crossing

Then nestles on a shop sign at a little railway station,

Illumined by cars passing in the night

Snatches of "Buy My Dumplings" are heard

"Mending Broken Nets" is heard on the radio

Taiwan at the end of the eighties

Playing and singing songs of the early forties

　

That's the way homesickness is, up north

Crying for mom and pop in front of karaoke clubs

Beer cans and wine bottles lie scattered under the tables

Head of white foam rises and falls like frost on the table

Western culture has replaced the Eastern

Historic sites are just demolished walls

Folk-customs ride flowery floats, and sightseeing

Is a young woman's thigh that everyone enjoys together

The middle class discusses the world and the future

Frost falls on the hair of those concerned

        about the country and the people

The allusions to the folk songs are telling. Take the l946 song "Mending Broken Nets." In Taiwanese, the word for "nets" is homophonous with the word for "hopes". The song was originally written to lament a broken love, but later took on a political significance. For many years the song was banned on television. "Buy My Dumplings" deals with the difficulties that the people of Taiwan faced just after the Japanese retreated. Both songs stand as living memories of the past and, over the years since they were penned, both have helped define and shape a sense of a Taiwan identity.

        When this poem was written, democratization was becoming a reality, Taiwan was growing prosperous, and there was a new pride in the island, However, while people listened to old folksongs, they failed to take their significance to heart. This was nostalgia, and nostalgia is not memory-- it is a sentimental white wash that obscures memory. The globalization of the economy has meant greater Westernization: historical landmarks are being razed in the name of progress; and local culture is being debased.

        Xiang Yang's poetry stands as elegant testimony to the Taiwan experience. The range and formal variety of his work is truly impressive. But in the ten years since The Four Seasons appeared, he has published little. He has written a few poems using both Mandarin and Taiwanese to“better reflect the linguistic reality of the island," as he puts it. He has also brought out a collection of previously published love poems and emerged as a self-taught woodblock print artist of some merit. He earned an M. A. in journalism and at present is teaching at Providence University while working on a Ph.D. in journalism. He plans to write another long sequence when he has the time.“Although I haven't written much recently," he says, "the poems I will write are still there, gestating, waiting to come to fruition."

From " Free China Review " ( pp.58-65). Vol.47, No.11, November 1997.

Copyright © 1997 by John Balcom

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