Bei Dao. Midnight's Gate: Essays.
Williams, Philip F.
Bei Dao. Midnight's Gate: Essays. Christopher Mattison, ed. Matthew Fryslie, tr. New York. New Directions. 2005. 255 pages. $19.95. ISBN 0-8112-1584-9
BEI DAO (pseudonym of Zhao Zhenkai, b. 1949) is acclaimed primarily for his poetry, with at least half dozen volumes of verse published in English translation since the 1980s. Narrower in scope yet still finely crafted and nuanced, Bei Dao's fiction is his second major genre, though its reputation in English rests almost entirely on the short-story collection Waves (1990), whose titular polyphonic novella interweaves five contrasting narrative voices with the dexterity of Faulkner in As I Lay Dying. However, unlike his fellow writer in exile from the same generation, the Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian, Bei Dao has apparently not attempted to build upon these early successes as a fiction writer with a truly monumental novel that would compare in stature with Gao's Soul Mountain. Instead, he has been turning increasingly to a genre that ranks third in importance within his overall oeuvre: namely, the literary essay. Midnight's Gate joins Blue House as the major repositories in English of Bei Dao's efforts as an essayist.
Most of Bei Dao's essays in Midnight's Gate fall into one of two categories. If an essay does not come across as a travel account of a footloose expatriate literary celebrity, then it usually reads as an impressionistic biographical sketch of a memorable individual he has come to know either in China before 2989 or overseas since his first trips abroad in the 1980s.
Travel accounts, or youji, have a venerable history in China. Bei Dao resembles many of his worldly forebears in focusing more on what the narrator does and observes in the destination city than on the journey taken to reach that destination. Figuring most prominently among Bei Dao's favored settings for his essays are such meccas of contemporary global culture as Paris, New York, Beijing, Prague, Bonn, Durban (South Africa), and Ramallah (in Palestine). In these cultural centers, Bei Dao usually either recounts his hobnobbing with other famous writers--including Susan Sontag, Gu Cheng, Breyten Breytenbach, Mahmoud Darwish, and Allen Ginsberg--or else reflects upon the milieu and sayings of such past literary luminaries as Proust, Baudelaire, and Kafka. Yet smaller cities such as Durham, England; Davis, California; and Arhus, Denmark, also come in for ample description, as Bei Dao held temporary university teaching posts in each of these places and cherishes fond memories of either individual academic colleagues or else the respite from big-city crowds. The book's many biographical sketches mostly touch upon an unexpected quirk that Bei Dao finds intriguing, such as an elder in-law named Liu who decides to abandon the idea of suicide after the gun he points at his own head fails to discharge when he pulls the trigger. The author's comments about overseas writers achieve more breadth and depth than those about his fellow Chinese writers (including fellow exiles). For example, we hear nothing of what Bei Dao thinks about Gu Cheng's literary achievements or the latter's murder of his wife and subsequent suicide.
Although Midnight's Gate contains errors in grammar and diction that a careful translator would have avoided, it is well worth perusing, but only after having read Waves and one or more of Bei Dao's collections of verse. [Editorial note: Excerpts from Midnight's Gate can be read in the May-August 2005 issue of WLT (pp. 31-32).]
Philip F. Williams
Massey University
