阿飛正傳
1989 — 2023
In April of 1989, I was living in Providence, Rhode Island and working as a speech writer. I was 23 and the world was abloom where everything seemed possible, the books to read, the poems and stories to write, the lips to kiss, the stories to swallow, the lives to enter and the places to go. At 23, everything was infinite and possible, everything but death.
I had moved to Providence to support my youngest brother financially after having enrolled in the Rhode Island School of Design to study painting. At the time, I had fallen in love with a painter from Korea whose stories about her relationship with her high school English teacher drew me into a world I could not have imagined at the time and though my own life had been an interesting and peripatetic one, I yearned for the world away from the usa.
1988 had been a tinderbox for flight: I’d watched with my brother the Korean Olympics in October and hungered for Asia, not having been back to Taiwan or Hong Kong since I was a kid; I started re-reading everything by 北島 whose poetry I had fallen in love with in university and whom I had met. I knew he’d return to China with his wife and daughter and that he had worked on a petition calling for the release of pro-democracy activists like Wei Jingsheng.
I also lost my heart to Gong Li in Red Sorghum and then watched one Chinese film after another: Yellow Earth, King of the Children, The Horse Thief and others and I realized I had to go to China and so I applied to teach English in Beijing and was accepted and started to plan to leave Providence and my job as a speech writer and re-learn Mandarin and then came May, my birthday, and then the 天安門廣場的絕食四君子 (Tiananmen Four Gentlemen Hunger Strike) and then like so many of us watched on CNN the horror that was unfolding in front of us and my heart sank and my life was turned upside down.
Death and destruction had come. Spring was gone.
The tanks and the brave man who stood in front of them risked everything and the world changed and thousands of lives were lost and China and the people were never the same again.
My appointment was rescinded and I stayed in Providence as history fell apart: first China…and then the Caribbean and then Poland and Czechoslovakia and then Berlin…and history began to fall, brick by brick and all but in China, it seemed as if the urgency of democracy and human rights were at the fore and a year later I left for Prague to teach English to students who were older than I was, some of whom hadn’t celebrated birthdays or anniversaries since the Prague Spring in 1968 and I forgot about China and turned toward life in Eastern Europe…and then to Hong Kong and I started to write the poems that would make up my first book.
I later burned them after the death of a dear friend from Hong Kong.
Now, this June 4th, 2023, 34 years later, I am a different man, a different writer and China is a different nation in so many ways and so much the same in others: the heart of the Chinese people for life without oppression still writes poems on the walls and the government still oppresses and jails her citizens and nothing we have done seems to have rid the men in charge and every night before and through the night I hold a vigil of sorts: a few times in Hong Kong, once in Taipei, several times in Toronto and New York and tonight, once again.
This year instead of a candle, I danced: to feel my body ache with sweat and music, to free my head
from the hurt that comes every June, feed memory with heartbeat and in solidarity with those still struggling
wrote poems with my body instead in a darkened room, spoke with gestures in the air through the late night with my partner, a woman from Taiwan, as we swayed beneath the red lights and the ephemeral and for a few hours, there was nothing but music and love and embodied sound and the night for once seemed infinite and we moved into the light from the shadows and there was life and there was cadence and language was replaced by unthinking and we knew again one day there would be bliss and we all would be free.
阿飛 正傳
our days of being wild, again.
this reflection was first published on June 4th in Cha Asian journal. my gratitude to the editors
