NYSWI

Bei Dao is one of several pseudonyms employed in the past by the poet and writer Zhao Zhenkai to conceal his identity from the Chinese authorities. "Bei Dao" means "North Island," and was chosen arbitrarily for the poet by a journalist colleague. It has no significance for its owner , beyond the fact that it is the name by which he is known to the rest of the world.

One of China's most celebrated poets-in-exile, Bei Dao served as a member of the Red Guard during Chairman Mao's infamous Cultural Revolution. In 1969, however, he was sent into the countryside for "re-education "-- seven years of forced labor in the construction trade. During this time, Bei Dao became disaffected with the Chinese political system, helped to organize dissident reading circles, and began writing poetry and short stories. He distributed his work illegally, and helped to found one of China's most influential-- though short-lived-- underground literary journals, "Jintian" ("Today").

At the Sky's Edge

During a period of cultural openness in the 1980's, Bei Dao's identity became known, and he became more of a public figure as an outspoken critic of the government and society. When students took over Tiananmen Square in 1989, they recited his poetry as chants and emblazoned it on banners, notably the lines,

"I will not kneel on the ground
Allowing the executioners to look tall"

Away in Berlin for a literary conference during the political crisis, Bei Dao was not allowed to return to his wife and child in China (they were reunited six years later). He has lived since that time in Europe and the U.S.

Written in a pioneering modernist style, Bei Dao's short stories tell of lives destroyed or rendered absurd by the Cultural Revolution. Published in Chinese as "Bodong" (Hong Kong, 1985), and in English translation as Waves (1987, ISBN 0-8112-1134-7), the stories established Bei Dao as one of China's leading literary figures. Historian Jonathan Spence, writing in the "New York Times Book Review," called the stories in "Waves," "almost unbearably poignant."

As a poet, Bei Dao is one of the inventors of "misty poetry ," an obscure, surrealistic, modernist mode of expression that was originally designed to foil Communist Party censorship. His collections in English translation include "Notes from the City of the Sun" (1983), "The August Sleepwalker" (1988, New Directions, ISBN 0-8112-1132-0), "Old Snow" (1991, ISBN 0-8112-1183-5), "Forms of Distance" (1995), and "Landscape Over Zero" (1996). His most recent collection, "Unlock" (2000, New Directions, ISBN 0-8112-1447-8), is composed of forty-nine new poems written in the United States.

He lives with his daughter in Davis, California.

"To categorize Bei Dao as merely an exile or disssident is to miss the point. Bei Dao is simply a poet. There's no greater threat to totalitarianism than individuality, and few living writers possess a voice as elegant as that heard in Unlock." - Andrew Ervin, Philadelphia Inquirer