Huang Xiang: A Lifetime is a Promise to Keep

 In 1997, inspired by an initiative of Salman Rushdie's,  the city of Pittsburgh became designated a City of Asylum for oppressed writers and artists from all over the world.  These writers, fleeing persecution in their home country, were given a place to live and resources to pursue their craft.  I recently visited Pittsburgh with some good friends, and we explored the row of whimsically decorated houses, decked out in murals and writing in myriad languages.  Unsurprisingly, there was a book store nearby that featured works by poets who have lived in these spaces over the past decades, and my eye was drawn to the volume in question.  Huang was evidently the first poet in residence at the City of Asylum nearly 30 years ago, moving there after facing censorship and imprisonment by the mainland Chinese government for his sentiments, and especially his commitment to individuality and self-determination. When I saw that the book was a side-by-side edition with the original Chinese text, I snapped it right up, along with a signed copy of the poem "Listening to Mountains from Behind Iron Bars" in the author's own calligraphy.  

The editor of this volume, Michelle Yeh, is decidedly more insightful than I am used to seeing in introductions to such editions--and by insightful I mean that I agree with her.  As she observes, Huang is primarily a poet of the self, and specifically of creating and exploring that self, the magical "I". It is no wonder that this message failed to resonate with the communist government.  He expresses this search beautifully, without ever fully resolving it, in such works as "I Believe"

    I

    Shine in my nakedness

    Right here

    Golden

    Melancholy

    Beautiful

It is the process, not the product, that is of special interest to Huang, and he captures it vividly in "Living Simply":

    Man is an earthen mold

    The heart a cooking tripod

    His naked soul and flesh

    Burn 

    In a cup of clear water

    Bathe

    In a mountainful of luminous snow.

The self is not simply discovered.  It is forged, created, molded, and tempered.  We decide who we are, and in a society that wants to mold us, though not in the same ways that mainland China might, we all need our own City of Asylum.