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“1989 was a special political year”

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Poet Bei Dao was one of the highlight guests at this year’s The Script Road – Macau Literary Festival, visiting the University of Macau with some other writers, and participating in a number of other events during his stay.
 
“1989 was a special political year,” Bei Dao told the several dozen young faces with eager eyes sitting in every corner of the UMAC lecture room. 
 
Currently teaching in Hong Kong with a “stable life”, he spent almost 20 years with a “wandering career” abroad. And during his visit to Macau, he did not refrain from mentioning the Tiananmen incidents.
 
Reflecting on his own self-identity, the controversial poet noted that he was “dubious” about the concept of ‘hometown’. Returning to Beijing in 2001, for the first time after 13 years of living aboard, the poet found himself a “stranger” in his hometown.  He found that he could not understand anything at all in the rapidly-growing city, even in the place he used to live.  Many of the people living in the capital are not locals nowadays, he explained.
 
Not surprisingly, during the Q&A session many questions were posed to Bei Dao, asking if he would compromise his work for any reason, and how he looks back on some of his works. 
 
To the amusement of the audience, the outspoken poet simply answered with one sentence: “What else can I compromise for?” 
 
As for one of Bei Dao’s most notable works, ‘The Answer’, written in 1976 about his participation in Tiananmen Square Demonstrations which were triggered by the death of Premier Zhou Enlai, the writer is skeptical. 
 
“Looking back, I’m not satisfied [with the work]. It was heavily affected by the revolution,” he said.
 
Bei Dao’s compatriot writer Sheng Keyi was also present at the UMAC session, and described contemporary China as “chaotic” and a place where “people can’t drink healthy water”. 
 
The novelist thinks literature is the way to fight for freedom, and being in this chaotic period enhances her writing, because “truth is being revealed without research”. 
 
“What I saw in 1989 was not the truth”, she observed. 
 
Based on her insistence on writing the truth, some of Sheng’s works are still prohibited in Mainland China today.
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