Taiwan Today

It was an autumnal scene in a northern land. The camera zoomed in slowly, slowly, on an expanse of open country. A weather-beaten village house came into view, dancing, supple reeds enliven­ing its front approaches. Under graceful eaves, ears of red corn were strung, dangling in a soothing, cool breeze. All of a sudden, a man's voice, low, deep, richly colored, rose from within, lifted in poetry:

The wind blew
In the years of Emperor Hsuantung,
Fingering the ears of red corn;

There, under the eaves,
Hanging,
As if all the melancholy
Of the vast northern land—
­The whole northern land­—
Was dangling there;

As if during afternoons
when kids cut classes,
The snow had bathed a village
teacher's discipline ruler
with its cold—
While cousin's donkey stood,
tethered to the mulberry tree;

As if the horn began to blow, and
The Taoist priest muttered—
"Why has grandfather's soul
not yet returned from
the nether world?"

As if a cricket, hiding in a cotton
gown, lingered,
Lonely, yet warm,
And mounds rolled over and over
by bronze rings in
Grandmother's buckwheat fields
came closer and closer.
I cried.

Only that species of corn was red,
Hanging there for so long a time
Under the eaves
As the wind blew
In the years of Emperor Hsuantung.

You will never understand
That kind of red corn,
The poise of it hanging there,
And its color;
Even my southern-land-born
daughter will never understand.

As if now,
When I am old,
Under the eaves of memory
Red corn is dangling;
The wind of 1958 blows, and
Red corn ears are dangling.

-Red Corn, by Ya Hsien

Voiced in an exuberance of feeling, these are the words of poet Ya Hsien, from his interview of eight years ago on a Taipei television program on literature and art. His real name is Wang Ching-lin. His penname, Ya Hsien, translates as "mute string." It is truly inappropriate.

Why Ya Hsien? "When I was a high school student, I was fascinated with the erh hu (a Chinese musical instru­ment similar to the Western fiddle). I loved its muted sound. I gain at least one advantage from such a penname-whenever anyone sees or hears it, he never again forgets it.

"At first, my wife didn't like it, so much so that she once contended that a persistent illness was inflicted on her entirely by my weird name. She asked me to change it to a name with the same pronunciation, but meaning 'elegant mystery.' I never accepted this suggestion."

But, in order to please his wife, Ya Hsien did bow in another way to her superstition. He brought a set of gongs and drums and a double-edged sword into his home—these are reputed to be able to ward off evil spirits.

Though it has been 18 years since his last poem, Easter, Ya Hsien remains a major influence on contemporary Chinese poetry. As a matter of fact, whenever he is mentioned now, the title "Poet" is appended to his name, despite his non­-poetic role as deputy editor-in-chief of the United Daily News and chief of its literary supplement-and as editor-in-chief of four Youth Publishers publications. He has held both positions since his return in 1968 from the United States, where he participated in the Iowa International Writing Program from 1966-1968.

"The literary supplement is to me what Echo is to Wu Mei-yun," Ya Hsien now says proudly. (Echo is a distinguished local magazine, and Wu is its editor). "I ardently love editing;" he continues, "my young staff and I work day and night. There is a phrase that most appropriately describes my passion for my job; that is, 'to shape it with my own life.''' And often, he jokes, "My zest for my job? I am incorrigible."

Though poet Ya Hsien has receded in time, his poems-published from 1952 to 1965, especially those recasting moods of northern China-are fresh in the memories of many. Red Corn is such a work, Ya Hsien's remnant memory of his hometown on the mainland.

He portrays the tremendous mood-impact of Chinese village scenes-sowing in spring, ploughing in summer, harvest­ing in fall, and laying in the provisions for winter-unchanged for more than a thousand years. Corn has been a common crop in recent centuries in the northern villages. Some of the harvest is used for food, and some reserved for next year's seed. As a small boy, he would find one or two red-mutant ears in the field. A string of red corn ears hang­ing from the eaves of his boyhood home in Honan Province eased with its intensi­ty, the drabness and melancholy of the post-harvest northern countryside. A string of red corn ears has thus become the symbol of his nostalgia.

In 1932, Ya Hsien was born as Wang Ching-lin in a small village in Nanyang, Honan Province. In his grandfather's day, the Wang family owned a hectare of land and more than ten thatched houses. But by 1925, in the wake of the old man's death, the family's financial situa­tion had deteriorated, and when Ya Hsien was still a small boy, the family was left with only three thatched houses. His mother farmed a small plot of land behind the homesteads and often brought Ya Hsien along with her to help with the work. In 1942, there came a special crisis-the crops suffered severe ravages from pests and drought.

Ordinarily, the family's staple diet was oats, millet, sweet potatos, and corn. Rice was such a luxury that he was aware of it only as "the stuff for making glutinous rice dumplings." When there was a famine, the family survived on makeshift cakes concocted of miscellaneous grain crops and wild vegetables.

Only a few villagers had brick houses. The village was without electricity, mechanized transportation, movies, mass-produced toys, popsicles.... Anything even "slightly modern" could not be found in his out-of-the-way village. But it did possess old Imperial roads and boundless fields. And the children there flew kites, trundled hoops, swam in rivers and ponds, moulded clay figurines, and listened to the old men, whose fairy tales and stories circulated in the village.

To Ya Hsien, within a world of antiquated things, only one thing was new-the modern literary knowledge that his father, a primary school teacher, brought to him.

At 13, Ya Hsien graduated from pri­mary school and moved with his father to a nearby city, where he continued his schooling. There, because of their poverty, the boy had to work part time to sup­port himself. During his school days, he did errands for a small coal shop; during summer vacations, he went off to the countryside to help harvest the wheat. When the harvest season was over, his hands would be raked with cuts from the awns of wheal.

Although he grew up on the broad plains of northern China and undoubtedly possessed the untamed roughness and certain uncouth mannerisms of that countryside, yet under his father's strict domain a larger character was created, in­fluenced by such literary works as Yu Hsueh Chung Lin (a collection of valuable articles for youngsters), Ku Wen Kuan Chih (a collection of ancient writings), Chan Kuo Tse (a historical record of the Warring States, compiled in the early Han Dynas­ty), and by novels and non-fiction works in the vernacular Chinese. The Chinese classics offered philosophic and vocational guidelines. The more easily-understood vernacular Chinese literature fired his interest in all literature, and also helped him to set out on his own first steps toward a literary career.

His father's expectation for Ya Hsien was to see him as a college graduate in Chinese literature, working hard at writing, becoming a shining star in China's literary cosmos. When his father first started to teach him how to read and write, Ya Hsien was instructed to write diaries and compositions diligently, to train his mind to understand intuitively the structures and meanings of the writings, and to learn by heart the most beau­tiful descriptive wording, so he might copy and quote in the future.

The elder Wang taught his son in a lively and interesting way. Whenever Ya Hsien tired of reading, his father would take him to the fields to fly kites with the neighborhood children. And when he tired of playing, his father and he would sit beside the river and read. Each time Ya Hsien finished reading a paragraph, his father would imitate the sound of the gong and drum as played at the Peking opera-which would set the nearby chil­dren to laughing. He found reading and studying pleasurable and interesting.

Later, he was always the best student in his composition classes, that is until one day he discovered two poetry collections by Hsien-hsin. Ya Hsien became engrossed in modern poetry. He recalls that his teacher assigned a theme on winter. Ya Hsien produced the theme in poetry-the first poetic work of his life. When his composition book was returned, to his chagrin and surprise, he found written there the teacher's con­demnation: "Poem writing is a manifestation of laziness." From that time on, the student dared no more poems.

November of 1948 gave birth to transcending misfortune—Ya Hsien was to be separated forever from his parents as well as from all the familiar things in his native town. As the Chinese Commu­nists entered Nanyang County, his school moved south to Hsinyang, with most of Ya Hsien's classmates. Expecting that his son could continue his schooling in the south, the elder Wang planned to sell his countryside land, then rejoin his son in Hsinyang.

"I will always remember that after­ noon," Ya Hsien recalled. "My parents went to see me off at the city's west gate; my mother handed me a bag of home­made fried rolls. I was so embarrassed—afraid my classmates would tease me-that I made a facial expression of impatience. Worse, I didn't even talk to them ... as if I had no feeling for the sadness of separation. Even when I passed the city gate, when their figures gradually disappeared, I shed no tears. How could they know that at that moment, they were leaving their only son, their only child, now just 17, forever.... "

On his journey south, Ya Hsien expe­rienced great hardships; winter cold and hunger left deep scars. Today, the scenes still pop easily into his memory.

In 1949, his school classes resumed in Hunan Province, but shortly afterward, the security situation unraveled there also. Ya Hsien and a number of his classmates then resolutely joined the army. In August of that year, he traveled from Kwangchou on the mainland to Taiwan.

Within the dullness of garrison life, Ya Hsien turned to writing articles and short stories. At first, he did not consider poetry. He became editor of a weekly wall-newspaper's literary supplement, a publication that endured for only a year. "Although this cultural activity was too small in itself to be worth mentioning, yet it was a basic preparation for my later literary life," he recalled. As the days passed slowly in the Army, he began reading translations of foreign novels and, finally, modern Chinese poetry. One rainy season, Ya Hsien wrote so many poems that they could have filled a thick book. But, they were never published.

Two years later he passed an exami­nation and became a student of drama at Fuhsingkang College, "a turning point in my life," he still says gratefully, "Fuhsingkang opened the gates of my life. I grew up overnight."

He began contributing poems to newspapers. His first published poem was carried in poet Chin Tzu-hao's,

Youth Warrior Daily newspaper column Leaves of Poetry. Chin heaped praise on the poem. In the following several years, Chin was an endless source of guidance and encouragement, bolstering Ya Hsien's growing interest and confidence in poetry writing.

After his graduation from Fuhsing­kang College in 1954, Ya Hsien began working with the Navy, at Tsoying in southern Taiwan. There, he found an "ideal" place for writing, an old deserted house shared with a friend and furnished with only two shakedowns and one kero­sene lantern. Here they spent many cold nights, working and studying hard under the flickering light.

The two agreed that each day they would memorize a famous Tang Dynasty poem, or one tsu -a form of poetry characterized by lines of irregular length, popular in the Sung Dynasty, or a chu -a verse composed for singing, very popular during the Yuan Dynasty. Also, on whatever books they read, they agreed to write down their comments. Since then, Ya Hsien has never dropped these habits.

In Tsoying, a small town, Ya Hsien made the acquaintance of poets Chang Mo and Lo Fu, whose lest for writing resulted in the later founding of their poetic publication Chuang Shih Chi (Genesis). He joined them, and despite financial difficulties, this publication survived for many years, exerting tremendous influence on modern Chinese poetry.

However, Ya Hsien's career of poetic creation came to a sudden end in 1965. After 13 years of writing poetry, he had published only one collection of poems, Shen Yuan (The Abyss­ which has since been revised and enlarged four times).

A Small Flower is an early work of the poet, much loved for its lively rhythm (in Chinese) as well as for the serenity and soft beauty it unfolds. In the Chinese, his superb technique creates a very musical atmosphere:

At last,
I alighted on a shell bearing a goddess,
A white statue, so composed,
Dancing on the sea.

Quietly,
I planted delicate roots in the thin soil
between her toes;
Never to wither, or fall to seed,
I am a small flower with static beauty.

From 1957 to 1958, Ya Hsien wrote more than 40 poems, three fifths of The Abyss- poems of refreshment character­ized by smoothness and sweetness, as in these lines from Spring Days: "We lifted the sedan chair tassels/Of her bridal transport/ And there discovered/Spring days."

In the second half of 1958, Ya Hsien's productivity took a small spurt forward; poems on Paris, London, Chica­go, and others were born, one after another. "The soft velvet shoes of your lips walk gently across my eyelids" and "Beggars by the arcade, stars beyond the sky, chrysanthemums at the window, swords in ancient ages"-his lines swept the nation, emotional fads of their time. Paris won a Lanhsing Poem Award. The style of his poems by this time had drifted from the easy, sweet, refined visions of 1957; life experience and criticism began to trickle into his poetic language. His works from this new period based more in drama than in lyricism.

In 1959, a collection of character sketches, including The Colonel, A Peking Opera Actress, and The Late Gover­nor, identified the poet as a keen observer, capable of artful characterization-a facility enriched by his years as a drama student at Fuhsingkang.

Over the following two years, Ya Hsien's pen lay idle. Then in 1963, he wrote To H. Matisse, a poem considered by the local critics to be "out-of-tune," concentrated on "petty imagery," and executed in "stiff rhyme." Ya Hsien him­self came to dislike it, finding it, later, af­fected and unreal. The failure of the effort might have been contributory to the success of An Unplanned Night-Tune in 1964. It is closely and firmly knitted, recreating the lilting tunes of his earlier works-a stranger to the verbose entrap­ments of 1963.

It was also at this moment that Ya Hsien's style took another turn-poetically, he became true to his penname, a "mute string." His poetic creativity was over. He now engaged in research, compiling a history of modern Chinese poetry.

In 1966, he went abroad to extend his research at the University of Iowa. An English edition of The Abyss was pub­lished at that time, retitled Salt. Ten years later, he returned to the United States 'for advanced study at the University of Wisconsin, where he majored in Chinese language and literature, expe­riencing them from a Western vantage.

Poet Chang Mo wrote, several years ago in A Poetry Anthology of Ten Modern Chinese Poets, the most fitting and im­pressive of the characterizations of Ya Hsien's poems: "The aura of drama, clear trains of thought, vivid local color, and 'globality' often tint his poems .... Sweetness is his language, sorrow his spirit. He is an integration of both the contradictory and the harmonious. Through beautiful and unique imagery, he transforms poetic stanzas into love songs, tender, yet forceful."

Since they span a creative period of 13 years, the sixty odd poems of The Abyss demonstrate the poet's develop­ment via several stylistic changes. He began in the tradition of the Chinese ballad, but also or the Chinese poetry styles of the thirties. Set in northern China, the language is spontaneous, sometimes colloquial, lighting moods ranging from nostalgia to humor. Imperial Capital is an example:

Quick, Imperial Capital!
Use your surviving crenelations
To chew your desolate,
hoary memories.
The oil lampads lighting your winding
corridors will soon go out;
Your eyes search the vast stretches
of yellow sand
For northern barbarian horsemen,
Nowhere in sight
In the moon's bright gleamings ....

Quick, Imperial Capital!
Use your remaining crenelations
To chew your desolate,
hoary memories.
Your drum tower can no longer beat
these modern times into sounds.
Extinguish, extinguish,
Your oil lampads
In the twilight of the setting sun ....

Ya Hsien's works—the appearance of events, people, and objects, of transitions and departures-all reveal sound dramatic structure. Written in 1957, The God of the Mountain makes use of person­ification to achieve a long shot of the four seasons of nature, and pungent imagery of the Chinese way of life:

The hunter's horn has shattered
last year's strobiles;
A plank road drawn on a steep cliff
Groans neath the hoofbeats
of pilgrims' donkeys.
While melting snows fall
like silken threads
From a girl's spinning jenny,
A shepherd sharpens his new sickle on
the toes of a stone Buddha.
Spring, oh, spring,
I am feeding a horse under a bodhi tree,
for a traveler.

Tongues of ore pant between
layers of rock.
The sun lights a fire in the woods
As an ugly hag, fashioned of miasma,
Hobbles to a feather store,
Peddling bitter apples.
Life slips away through red-weasel
eye sockets.
Summer, oh, summer,
I knock at the door with the rust ring
of a sick man.

Country tunes frolic in
Bamboo baskets on village girls' backs;
A wild goose cries, pleading with clouds
to wait his flight;
And the old setting sun lifts
a golden beard,
Devouring the persimmons
Lighting the woods.
A crimson leaf is wide enough
To hold a four-line poem.
Autumn, oh, autumn,
I spread a net in a misty river,
for fishermen.

The woodcutter's ax sings deep
in the trees,
And a cat hides ill the sleeves
of an old countrywoman;
As chill northern winds blow
their chimney whistles,
And people in reed-lined shoes spin tops
on a frozen lake.
Winter, oh, Winter,
I warm myself by a beggar's fire
Under the cracked bell of an old temple.

The translated works of foreign writers began to influence him greatly. The poem Song is an example:

Who, in the distance, weeps
So lorn?
Go and look on the golden horse
Of yesterday.

Who, ill the distance, weeps
So lorn?
Go and look on the silver horse
Of tomorrow.

Who, in the distance, weeps
So lorn?
Go and look Oil the white horse
Of love.

Who, in the distance, weeps
So lorn?
Go and look on the black horse
Of death.

In the Profile series within The Abyss, each line of poetry embraces a dramatic climax. "I love to make known the sorrows and miseries of nonentities to underline irony," Ya Hsien once said. This poem, A Peking Opera Actress, was highly valued by drama professor­ critic Yao Yi-wei:

At sixteen,
Her name began to wander the city,
Rhyming in sadness.

Her almond-tinted arms should be
guarded by eunuchs;
Oh, her delicate upward-swept hairdo—­
The Manchus were enraptured.

It was the opera Yu Tang Chun
(Night after night, faces cracking
melon seeds
Filled the playhouse!).

"Woe! Woe is me!"
For hands locked in a cangue.

People say
She had an affair with
a White Russian officer.

Rhyming in sadness,
The curses of every woman upon her,
In cities everywhere.

There is irony in many of Ya Hsien's poems, and often, sudden and unexpected lines add comic quality to a contradic­tory situation. A clear example is provid­ed by Khrushchev:

Khrushchev, a good fellow;
Yes, a good fellow.
He choked Czechoslovakia
To help her breathe.
He extended a hand to Poland,
holding a bayonet.
Again,
He plowed the farmlands of Hungary,
with tanks.
He is indeed
A good fellow.

"The title poem The Abyss is still impressive, its existentialist mood typical of the sixties. But the less ambitious poems of his later period, such as Andante Cantabile, seem actually to have been better received by both critics and read­ers," according to the Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Literature.

The Abyss is remarkably eclectic, a collection of lively ballads as well as heroically-tragic symphonies Both its gentle ripples and its tidal waves affect the reader. Ya Hsien is a sailor on emo­tional and sentimental seas, his passages washing over his readers, pulsating, sometimes smoothly, sometimes with a lash....