Waves

by Bei Dao

Overview

In Waves, Bei Dao—China’s foremost modern poet—turns to fiction, recording the painful years of the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath. Avoiding polemics, his attention is on individuals—intellectuals and factory workers, drifters and thieves—swept up in the turbulent political tides of contemporary China. Bei Dao himself has been a victim of the censors, and he wrote the title novella clandestinely in a makeshift darkroom while ostensibly developing photographs. The author now lives in exile.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811211345
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	05/17/1990
Series:	Paperback Series , #693
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Bei Dao, (the pen name of Zhao Zhenkai) was born in Beijing in 1949. During the Cultural Revolution, he worked as a concrete mixer and blacksmith for eleven years. Forced into exile after the Tiananmen Massacre, he lived in Europe and the US until 2007, then settling in Hong Kong until, only recently, moving back to Beijing. He has been hailed as “the soul of post-Mao poetry” (Yunte Huang) and praised for his “intense lyricism” (Pankaj Mishra). Bei Dao has received numerous awards for his poetry all over the world, and founded the International Poetry Nights in Hong Kong. His photography and paintings have been exhibited in China, Hong Kong, and Japan. New Directions publishes ten of his books.

Editorial Reviews

``Our generation's dream is too painful, and too long; you can never wake up, and even if you do, you'll only find another nightmare waiting for you,'' says a young woman in this collection of six stories and a novella written between 1974 and 1982. The tension between the dead-end despondency the characters see in post-Cultural Revolution China and the passion, hope and anger they express gives Waves its intense vitality. The author, a Beijing resident who is known for his poetry, draws upon an impressive range of literary styles to explore and critique contemporary life under Communism, from the realism of ``The Homecoming Stranger,'' (a father returning after ``exactly twenty years of reform through labor'') to the surrealism of ``13 Happiness Street,'' in which a journalist seeking to learn who lives in a mysterious house is accused as an ``ideological criminal.'' Bei Dao never mitigates the horrors he recounts by pointing to easy solutions or obvious villains, and his evocation of a troubled marriage in ``Melody'' suggests that some of the obstacles to human happiness in China may not be so foreign to Americans after all. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

"Bonnie S. McDougall, an expert on modern Chinese literature and history, with some of the first Western scholars to see the brilliance of Bei Dao....Now the the two volumes ('The August Sleepwaker' and 'Waves')...allow people who do not read Chinese to gage the full range of Bei Dao's work, and also to appreciate his hauntingly sad imagery. Bei Dao uses words as if he were fighting for his life with them....In 'Waves'...the form lets Bei Dao explore his own self and his own society with more leisure....The stories are almost unbearably poignant." -- New York Times Book Review

Jonathan D. Spence