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ASIAN POET/SHORT PLAY WRITER: Zhao Zhenkai “Bei Dao”
Zhao Zhenkai also known as Bei Dao is a Chinese born in Beijing, China. He’s one of the most outstanding, extraordinary and distinguished Chinese poet of his generation. By many, he’s seen and considered as one of the major writers in modern China. Bei Dao which literally means “Northern Island” is the pen name of this Chinese poet and he’s won copious international awards for his poetry, he’s been nominated severally for the Nobel Prize in literature and he’s an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and letters. He’s also an author of short stories. He’s known through his writing as a critical thinker who creatively constitute a driving force culture and he’s seen as a pervasive, Insuppressible media machine that is incessantly grinding lives into story lines and human voices into carefully gleaming sound bites. Bai’s poetry core concern at this time is a solicitation for the reimposition of personal space and life’s ordinariness against a general indigence of humanity in china for the past ten years. Bai has written many poems which challenge the issue of a corrupt society, abuse of power and bloody landscape of the fascist dictatorship in China. Some of Bei Dao’s books of poetry and essay include, Blue house (2000), Unlock (2000), Midnight Gate (2005), The August Sleeper (1988), Old Snow (1991) and at the Sky’s Edge Poems (1991-1996) and untitled.
I’m going to introduce Bei Dao’s poem “Requiem” which, appeared in the collections of the poems “Old Snow” (1991). Bei Dao wrote this poem in remembrance of the dead civilians who were protesting and wer...
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... cannot be shared in the legal Chinese media. Moreover, despite the repeated refusal of the label “political poet,” political reading of his work remain an exasperating continual practice and fortunately for him, he cannot avoid being read by his Chinese readers against the social context of coeval China.
Work Cited Source Citation (MLA 7th Edition)
Li, Dian. "Ideology and Conflicts in Bei Dao's Poetry." Modern Chinese Literature 9.2 (Fall 1996): 369-385. Rpt. in Poetry Criticism. Ed. Michelle Lee. Vol. 130. Detroit: Gale, 2012. Literature Resource Center. Web. 6 Apr. 2014.
Prezi.” ‘Requiem’ by Bei Dao” 10 January 2013
< http://prezi.com/nxthzsqyfsa2/requiem-by-bei-dao/>
This essay will explore how the poets Bruce Dawe, Gwen Harwood and Judith Wright use imagery, language and Tone to express their ideas and emotions. The poems which will be explored throughout this essay are Drifters, Suburban Sonnet and Woman to Man.
Australian poets Bruce Dawe and Gwen Harwood explore ideas and emotions in their poems through vivid and aural poetic techniques, the poets also use symbolism to allow the readers to relate to the text. In Dawes “Homecoming”, the poet explores the ideas in the text using language techniques such as irony, paradox and visual imagery to construct his attitude towards war and the effect. While in Gwen Harwood’s, “The violets”, she uses prevailing imagery and mood to emphasize fertility and growth. Contrastingly, In Bruce daws, “Life cycle”, the poet uses the idea of sport to symbolise and represent religion with the use of clichés and juxtaposition to convey his ideas of religion, myths and Christianity in the language use, similarly Harwood poem
Within these four years, Yu has worked typically by enforcing his critical writing style within the cultural and linguistic traditions of both Australia and China. He explores and questions the relationship between the two as a new generation of post-colonial writing and how this influences his distressing experiences on life and work. The former events between Australia and China provide a heavy leverage towards the poet’s fault-finding attitude. Australian-Chinese are known to be the single largest minority with significant immigration during the End of the White Australian Policy by 1965 and the Victorian Gold Rush in the mid-19 century. The Chinese were independently hard workers, sending money back to their motherland. Yet these ‘differences' between the two including language barriers, religion/beliefs and lifestyle choices lead to obvious xenophobia. Even though the poem itself is written years after and being a well-established ethnic group, these influences of casual racism and unjust have accumulated the poets bleak and homesick
The Sun of the Revolution by Liang Heng, is intriguing and vivid, and gives us a complex and compelling perspective on Chinese culture during a confusing time period. We get the opportunity to learn the story of a young man with a promising future, but an unpleasant childhood. Liang Heng was exposed to every aspect of the Cultural Revolution in China, and shares his experiences with us, since the book is written from Liang perspective, we do not have a biased opinion from an elite member of the Chinese society nor the poor, we get an honest opinion from the People’s Republic of China. Liang only had the fortunate opportunity of expressing these events due his relationship with his wife, an American woman whom helps him write the book. When Liang Heng and Judy Shapiro fell in love in China during 1979, they weren’t just a rarity; they were both pioneers at a time when the idea of marriages between foreigners and Chinese were still unacceptable in society.
Bei Dao, "13 Happiness Street." Contemporary Literature of Asia. Ed. Arthur Biddle et al. Blair: Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1996. 280-291.
Levertov, Denise. "Some Notes on Organic Form." The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Ed. Jahan Ramazani et al. 3rd ed. 2 vols. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2003. 2: 1082-1086.
Although still adopting a traditional literary form, the poetry writing can be regarded as an example of the heterogeneity and border-crossing of cultural-scape in globalization period. Those poems were produced under the brunt of the international mobility that is propelled by the capitalist globalization, but precisely and paradoxically, in a suspending situation caused by national regulation, a “state of exception” of this mobility. The juxtaposition of the frustration on foreign life and the flare of nationalist emotion (with the rhetoric emulating ancient barbarian-expelling heroes), may imply a paradoxical consequence in globalization: the international mobility undergirding the national awareness instead of undermining it. Following this thread, the publication of this kind of poetry in 1930s, the oblivion of it after war, and the subsequent re-discovery, recognition, and research of it can be all taken as symptomatic traces of the localization, articulation, and transformation of national consciousness (both as “Chinese” and “American”) in the continuous globalization. Needless to say, those poems are deeply flawed in terms of aesthetics due to the rather poor literacy of their authors. It would be invoking to put these poems beside those “high art” works also produced in globalization context, such as the works on the Eiffel Tower and the London fog by Huang Zunxian (黄遵宪), a late Qin intellectual caught in between the East and the West, the
In his poem, “Notes from the City of the Sun”, Bei Dao utilizes obscure imagery consistent with the Misty Poets and veiled political references to illustrate the struggles in Chinese society during the Cultural Revolution. The poem is sectioned into fourteen short stanzas containing imagery that are symbolic of the cultural hegemony in China under the rule of Mao Zedong. Bei Dao, born Zhao Zhen-kai, is an anti-revolutionary poet and one of the founders of a group known as the Misty Poets. The Misty Poets wrote poems that protested the Cultural Revolution led by Mao Zedong. Therefore, a lot of Bei Dao’s poems speak out against the Cultural Revolution and the restrictions that it placed on any form of art. Bei Dao’s poetry is categorized as “misty” because of the ambiguity in its references to Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution. An obscure imagery that occurs twice in “Notes” is the sun imagery. Another imagery that depicts the injustice of the Cultural Revolution is the description of freedom as scraps of paper. In the poem, Bei Dao also equates faith to sheep falling into a ditch; this is a depiction blind faith during the Cultural Revolution. The purpose of this essay is to analyze how Bei Dao’s use of the Misty Poet’s ambiguous imagery and implicit political context in the poem “Notes from the City of the Sun” to illustrate the cultural hegemony in China under Mao.
There is no better way to learn about China's communist revolution than to live it through the eyes of an innocent child whose experiences were based on the author's first-hand experience. Readers learn how every aspect of an individual's life was changed, mostly for the worst during this time. You will also learn why and how Chairman Mao launched the revolution initially, to maintain the communist system he worked hard to create in the 1950's. As the story of Ling unfolded, I realized how it boiled down to people's struggle for existence and survival during Mao's reign, and how lucky we are to have freedom and justice in the United States; values no one should ever take for
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Jonathan Spence tells his readers of how Mao Zedong was a remarkable man to say the very least. He grew up a poor farm boy from a small rural town in Shaoshan, China. Mao was originally fated to be a farmer just as his father was. It was by chance that his young wife passed away and he was permitted to continue his education which he valued so greatly. Mao matured in a China that was undergoing a threat from foreign businesses and an unruly class of young people who wanted modernization. Throughout his school years and beyond Mao watched as the nation he lived in continued to change with the immense number of youth who began to westernize. Yet in classes he learned classical Chinese literature, poems, and history. Mao also attained a thorough knowledge of the modern and Western world. This great struggle between modern and classical Chinese is what can be attributed to most of the unrest in China during this time period. His education, determination and infectious personalit...
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10. "Book of Poetry : Minor Odes of the Kingdom : Decade Of Bei Shan : Bei Shan 2 - Chinese Text Project." Chinese Text Project. N.p., n.d. Web.
Shortly after broadcasting this episode of the Jimmy Kimmel show on late night October 16th2013, controversy has raised among many Chinese-Americans, and later Chinese abroad. To them, the “joke” of “killing all the Chinese” does not seem to be fun. Thus, the protest of Jimmy Kimmel and ABC soon spread out among many of the Chinese-Americans and Chinese citizens nationwide to gather outside ABC’s...
Zhao, Y., (1998), Media, Market, and Democracy in China - Between the party line and the bottom line (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press).