Bei Dao has been allowed to return to mainland China since 2006, but has not done so except for brief visits.
37 Facts About Bei Dao
2.
Bei Dao has been described as having played a significant role in creating a new form of poetry in Chinese literature, one that is often viewed as a reaction to the artistic strictures of the Mao era.
3.
Currently, Bei Dao resides in Hong Kong, where he is an Honorary Professor of Humanities at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
4.
Bei Dao was born in Beijing, China, on August 2,1949.
5.
Bei Dao's great-grandfather was director of the Guangdong Manufacturing Bureau and retired as director of the Shanghai Manufacturing Bureau.
6.
However, due to war and internal strife in China, the family's fortune declined, and his paternal grandfather earned a modest living selling paintings and scrolls before dying when Bei Dao's father was still a child.
7.
Bei Dao's maternal grandfather, Sun Haixia, was a member of the Tongmenghui society founded by Sun Yat-sen, who eventually became provisional president of post-imperial China.
8.
Bei Dao's father was self-educated and passed a test to gain employment at a bank.
9.
Bei Dao was later a co-founder of the People's Insurance Company of China and a deputy secretary for propaganda for the China Association for Promoting Democracy, a political party.
10.
Bei Dao's parents married in Shanghai and settled in Beijing the year before the poet's birth.
11.
Bei Dao grew up on Sanbulao Hutong, a street named for its most famous resident, Admiral Zheng He.
12.
Bei Dao attended Beijing Middle School No 13, where his teachers praised his writing.
13.
Bei Dao then tested into the elite Beijing No 4 High School.
14.
However, he was unable to graduate: in 1966, when Bei Dao was sixteen, Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution, which closed the school.
15.
Bei Dao led a group of teenagers in publicly shaming a neighbor, forcibly shaving the man's head in the street and briefly imprisoning him.
16.
Bei Dao moved into a dormitory at his high school, which became a hub for revolutionary activity, hosting various committees and "struggle sessions".
17.
The students there formed a commune composed of two Red Guard factions dedicated to promoting the ideals of the revolution, for which Bei Dao assisted in disseminating propaganda.
18.
In 1968, Bei Dao's aunt committed suicide after she became the focus of a government investigation.
19.
Bei Dao participated in the demonstrations, which were violently suppressed.
20.
Bei Dao continued to publish poetry and short fiction in Jintian, which appeared irregularly until Chinese authorities banned it in 1980.
21.
Bei Dao found work as a journalist, writing for the magazine China Report.
22.
When that campaign ended, his work appeared again in Chinese in a Communist Party publication called An Anthology of New Trends in Poetry, which Bei Dao has credited with having "a profound and wide-reaching influence" in China.
23.
On June 4,1989, when the Chinese military forcibly ended the Tiananmen Square demonstrations, resulting in a mass number of casualties, Bei Dao was in West Berlin as a writer-in-residence at the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program.
24.
Bei Dao has described that day as "a nightmare" that left him "utterly dejected".
25.
Bei Dao's forced exile garnered global media attention as well as increased interest in his work.
26.
In 1991, Bei Dao relocated to Paris, where he lived on Rue de Venise, across from the Pompidou Center.
27.
In 2001, after his father became seriously ill, Bei Dao was granted permission to visit him in Beijing; his visit in December of that year marked his first time in China since 1989.
28.
Bei Dao described the trip in an essay, "Midnight's Gate", which became the title of a collection of essays that appeared in English in 2005.
29.
Between 2002 and 2005, Bei Dao was based primarily in New York City.
30.
Bei Dao taught at Stony Brook University, and spent a semester as a visiting writer at the University of Alabama.
31.
Bei Dao has one daughter from his first marriage to the artist Shao Fei.
32.
Bei Dao has been, and continues to be, a featured speaker at institutions and cultural events around the world, including the Poetry International Festival Rotterdam, the Prague Writers' Festival, the PEN World Voices Festival, and many others.
33.
Bei Dao's books have been translated into more than 30 languages, and his poems have been widely anthologized.
34.
McDougall argues that this preoccupation in Bei Dao's work is "not a pretended or temporary escape from society" but rather "a commitment to non-political communication between people and the realization of the self".
35.
Bei Dao's project has thus been to reclaim language for the imagination, to create, as the scholar Claudia Pozzana has termed it, "an independent space for poetry".
36.
Bei Dao has done this by expressly rejecting the political co-opting of certain words, as he does in his famous "I don't believe" declarations from "The Answer".
37.
Bei Dao has written of the influence on his early work of the Chinese poet Guo Lusheng, whom he counts as an important precursor to the Misty Poets.