Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
ASIAN POET/SHORT PLAY WRITER: Zhao Zhenkai “Bei Dao”
Zhao Zhenkai also known as Bei Dao is a Chinese born in Beijing, China. He’s one of the most outstanding, extraordinary and distinguished Chinese poet of his generation. By many, he’s seen and considered as one of the major writers in modern China. Bei Dao which literally means “Northern Island” is the pen name of this Chinese poet and he’s won copious international awards for his poetry, he’s been nominated severally for the Nobel Prize in literature and he’s an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and letters. He’s also an author of short stories. He’s known through his writing as a critical thinker who creatively constitute a driving force culture and he’s seen as a pervasive, Insuppressible media machine that is incessantly grinding lives into story lines and human voices into carefully gleaming sound bites. Bai’s poetry core concern at this time is a solicitation for the reimposition of personal space and life’s ordinariness against a general indigence of humanity in china for the past ten years. Bai has written many poems which challenge the issue of a corrupt society, abuse of power and bloody landscape of the fascist dictatorship in China. Some of Bei Dao’s books of poetry and essay include, Blue house (2000), Unlock (2000), Midnight Gate (2005), The August Sleeper (1988), Old Snow (1991) and at the Sky’s Edge Poems (1991-1996) and untitled.
I’m going to introduce Bei Dao’s poem “Requiem” which, appeared in the collections of the poems “Old Snow” (1991). Bei Dao wrote this poem in remembrance of the dead civilians who were protesting and wer...
... middle of paper ...
... cannot be shared in the legal Chinese media. Moreover, despite the repeated refusal of the label “political poet,” political reading of his work remain an exasperating continual practice and fortunately for him, he cannot avoid being read by his Chinese readers against the social context of coeval China.
Work Cited Source Citation (MLA 7th Edition)
Li, Dian. "Ideology and Conflicts in Bei Dao's Poetry." Modern Chinese Literature 9.2 (Fall 1996): 369-385. Rpt. in Poetry Criticism. Ed. Michelle Lee. Vol. 130. Detroit: Gale, 2012. Literature Resource Center. Web. 6 Apr. 2014.
Prezi.” ‘Requiem’ by Bei Dao” 10 January 2013
< http://prezi.com/nxthzsqyfsa2/requiem-by-bei-dao/>
Jonathan Spence tells his readers of how Mao Zedong was a remarkable man to say the very least. He grew up a poor farm boy from a small rural town in Shaoshan, China. Mao was originally fated to be a farmer just as his father was. It was by chance that his young wife passed away and he was permitted to continue his education which he valued so greatly. Mao matured in a China that was undergoing a threat from foreign businesses and an unruly class of young people who wanted modernization. Throughout his school years and beyond Mao watched as the nation he lived in continued to change with the immense number of youth who began to westernize. Yet in classes he learned classical Chinese literature, poems, and history. Mao also attained a thorough knowledge of the modern and Western world. This great struggle between modern and classical Chinese is what can be attributed to most of the unrest in China during this time period. His education, determination and infectious personalit...
Within these four years, Yu has worked typically by enforcing his critical writing style within the cultural and linguistic traditions of both Australia and China. He explores and questions the relationship between the two as a new generation of post-colonial writing and how this influences his distressing experiences on life and work. The former events between Australia and China provide a heavy leverage towards the poet’s fault-finding attitude. Australian-Chinese are known to be the single largest minority with significant immigration during the End of the White Australian Policy by 1965 and the Victorian Gold Rush in the mid-19 century. The Chinese were independently hard workers, sending money back to their motherland. Yet these ‘differences' between the two including language barriers, religion/beliefs and lifestyle choices lead to obvious xenophobia. Even though the poem itself is written years after and being a well-established ethnic group, these influences of casual racism and unjust have accumulated the poets bleak and homesick
Bei Dao, "13 Happiness Street." Contemporary Literature of Asia. Ed. Arthur Biddle et al. Blair: Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1996. 280-291.
Levertov, Denise. "Some Notes on Organic Form." The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Ed. Jahan Ramazani et al. 3rd ed. 2 vols. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2003. 2: 1082-1086.
“I don’t want to be part of this kind of denying reality. We live in this time. We have to speak out” (Klayman). Ai Weiwei is an internationally known Chinese artist as well as activist, and his motivation and determination can be summed up by this quote. In all of his pieces, Weiwei critically examines the social and administrative issues facing China today. Many of his works exhibit multiple themes that can be interpreted in various different ways. This lends itself to the universal appeal of his art and makes it a more effective medium of conveying his messages to viewers. Ai Weiwei’s activist artwork—and activist artwork in general—is important to society because it effectively forces the viewer to engage in a self-reflective process that makes the viewer critically examine his or her own beliefs and world. Nevertheless, censorship greatly hinders the dissemination of the critical and thought provoking messages of Ai Weiwei’s art and makes his artwork less effective. In order to gain a better understanding of the relationship of Ai Weiwei’s activist art and the Communist Party’s subsequent censorship, I will examine Ai Weiwei’s influential childhood, his specific brand of activist artwork, the censorship of the Chinese government and the effects of censorship on the effectiveness of Ai Weiwei’s art.
The hunger for power lies within every one of us, yet most can have the strength to resist it. However, occasionally the temptation is so strong that it corrupts the brain. All the person can think about is achieving that power, no matter the cost. Ji-Li Jiang’s memoir, Red Scarf Girl, tells the personal narrative of a young girl growing up during the Cultural Revolution in China. Despite being a black whelp, the child of a family belonging to any of the “Five Black Categories”, Ji-Li Jiang is able to overcome the countless tribulations brought upon her and her family. Although Ji-Li’s naivety enhances her involvement in the Cultural Revolution, her constant loyalty towards her family perseveres; nevertheless, without her earlier devotion
The Dead End of Traditional Ideologies and the Search for a New Way Out Xiao Hong, like Lu Xun and many other writers during the 1930s, was looking for a new way out of China’s economic and social dilemmas, and a new way to transcend the paired animal-human relationship. In The Field of Life and Death, Xiao Hong clearly demonstrates some of her foundational beliefs: first, old traditions cannot save China. The semi-feudal semi-colonial system in China has decayed and come to brink of collapse. Her entire novel is intended to display the common people’s lives under the decayed system. Xiao Hong expresses no hope in the old traditions.
10. "Book of Poetry : Minor Odes of the Kingdom : Decade Of Bei Shan : Bei Shan 2 - Chinese Text Project." Chinese Text Project. N.p., n.d. Web.
There is no better way to learn about China's communist revolution than to live it through the eyes of an innocent child whose experiences were based on the author's first-hand experience. Readers learn how every aspect of an individual's life was changed, mostly for the worst during this time. You will also learn why and how Chairman Mao launched the revolution initially, to maintain the communist system he worked hard to create in the 1950's. As the story of Ling unfolded, I realized how it boiled down to people's struggle for existence and survival during Mao's reign, and how lucky we are to have freedom and justice in the United States; values no one should ever take for
Australian poets Bruce Dawe and Gwen Harwood explore ideas and emotions in their poems through vivid and aural poetic techniques, the poets also use symbolism to allow the readers to relate to the text. In Dawes “Homecoming”, the poet explores the ideas in the text using language techniques such as irony, paradox and visual imagery to construct his attitude towards war and the effect. While in Gwen Harwood’s, “The violets”, she uses prevailing imagery and mood to emphasize fertility and growth. Contrastingly, In Bruce daws, “Life cycle”, the poet uses the idea of sport to symbolise and represent religion with the use of clichés and juxtaposition to convey his ideas of religion, myths and Christianity in the language use, similarly Harwood poem
Shortly after broadcasting this episode of the Jimmy Kimmel show on late night October 16th2013, controversy has raised among many Chinese-Americans, and later Chinese abroad. To them, the “joke” of “killing all the Chinese” does not seem to be fun. Thus, the protest of Jimmy Kimmel and ABC soon spread out among many of the Chinese-Americans and Chinese citizens nationwide to gather outside ABC’s...
In his poem, “Notes from the City of the Sun”, Bei Dao utilizes obscure imagery consistent with the Misty Poets and veiled political references to illustrate the struggles in Chinese society during the Cultural Revolution. The poem is sectioned into fourteen short stanzas containing imagery that are symbolic of the cultural hegemony in China under the rule of Mao Zedong. Bei Dao, born Zhao Zhen-kai, is an anti-revolutionary poet and one of the founders of a group known as the Misty Poets. The Misty Poets wrote poems that protested the Cultural Revolution led by Mao Zedong. Therefore, a lot of Bei Dao’s poems speak out against the Cultural Revolution and the restrictions that it placed on any form of art. Bei Dao’s poetry is categorized as “misty” because of the ambiguity in its references to Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution. An obscure imagery that occurs twice in “Notes” is the sun imagery. Another imagery that depicts the injustice of the Cultural Revolution is the description of freedom as scraps of paper. In the poem, Bei Dao also equates faith to sheep falling into a ditch; this is a depiction blind faith during the Cultural Revolution. The purpose of this essay is to analyze how Bei Dao’s use of the Misty Poet’s ambiguous imagery and implicit political context in the poem “Notes from the City of the Sun” to illustrate the cultural hegemony in China under Mao.
Zhao, Y., (1998), Media, Market, and Democracy in China - Between the party line and the bottom line (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press).
Swimming through the river, like a red bolt of lightning, the salmon tries to find the place it was born at so it can spawn. It has learned this through the species’ trial and error, which is acquiring knowledge, one of the most important parts of a journey. As we’ve seen through many journeys, such as the poem by CP Cavafy “Ithaka”, and the migrations of animals like salmon, beluga whales, and horseshoe crabs, the journey is the most important thing out of an adventure. Although the destination still matters, the journey is where you gain all of your knowledge and your important items from.
The poem “Warned’ by Sylvia Stults, first seems to be about the ways human are hurting nature. However, when we look at the poem through the lens of John Shoptaw’s essay “Why Ecopoetry,” we see the evidence that this is an ecopoem and is asking people to take action to protect the environment. The poem is about the destruction of earth. The poet also tries to raises some awareness about the environment. Additionally, the internal meaning of the poem is that we, humans depend on the world’s resources, therefore we should take care of the natural world.