City Gate, Open Up

A Memoir

Dao Bei

"City Gate, Open Up" is the lyrical autobiography of China's a memoir legendary poet Bei Dao. Exiled from Beijing in the wake of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, Bei Dao returned to his homeland in 2001 for the first time in over twenty years. The city of his youth had vanished: "I was a foreigner in my hometown", he writes. The shock of this experience released a flood of memories and emotions contained in "City Gate, Open Up".

The poet recalls the Beijing of his youth, from the birth of the People's Republic, through the chaotic years of the Great Leap Forward, and on into the Cultural Revolution. At the centre of the book are his parents and siblings and their everyday life together through famine and festival. Bei Dao's autobiography is a memory palace of endless alleyways and corridors, where personal narrative mixes with the momentous history he lived through.

About the Author

Bei Dao (the pseudonym means "north island") was born in Beijing in 1949. Educated into the beliefs of Communist China, his subsequent disaffection found its voice in poetry, for which he has been nominated for the Nobel Prize on several occasions. Since 1989 he has lived first in Europe, then in the USA, and finally Hong Kong, where he teaches at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His poetry in English translation includes "The August Sleepwalker" (1988), "Old Snow" (1992), "Forms of Distance" (1994), "Landscape Over Zero" (1998) and "Unlock" (2006). He has also published several collections of essays, including "Midnight's Gate" (2007).

Back to the list of books