Ouyang Yu Bilingual Blog

Wenche Ommundsen: Not for the Faint-Hearted: Ouyang Yu: The Angry Chinese Poet [PAGE 595] In the title poem of Ouyang Yu's first collection,  Moon Over Melbourne , a homesick Chinese poet compares the Australian moon with the moon celebrated by countless poets in his homeland. The moon is the same, but at the same time it is different. Like the ancient Chinese moon, it inspires poetry—and madness. But in Australia, that poetry is born of frustration and loss, and of everything this foreign moon fails to be. The ‘bastard’ moon over suburban Melbourne even looks Australian. ‘Mooching’ along in an ‘air-conditioned’, ‘I-wouldn't-care-less’ kind of mood, it mimics the country's indifference towards the newcomer and towards everything else: ‘you hang on you all right you no worries mate’. 1  Australia and China are both colonizers, but they colonize differently. While Australia is content to plant ‘the rag of a flag/among your rocks’, and then retreat into lazy indifference,...

Beauty is so far from being the dominant principle of modern poetry that many of the most splendid modern works are clearly portrayals of ugliness - Friedrich Schlegel ( On the Study of Greek Poetry , 1797) Contemporary Chinese poetry has unashamedly turned from the sublime and sacred to the vulgar and profane. In April 1999 at the Panfeng Conference in Pinggu County, Beijing, poets split into two camps, the  zhishi fenzi  (intellectual) and the  minjian . 1  The poets in the intellectual camp (Wang Jiaxin, Ouyang Jianghe, Xi Chuan, Zang Di and others) were mostly well-published, anthologised, critically acclaimed, well-travelled and internationally well-connected. As university professor and poetry critic Cheng Guangwei noted, much of their poetry reflects the influences of Western literary masters such as Yeats, Rilke, Lowell, Pound, Baudelaire, Milosz, Pasternak and Brodsky. 2  The  minjian camp (Yu Jian, Yi Sha, Xu Jiang and others) critiqued these infl...

Belonging is longing, a longing. For migrants to live in a land they have chosen to settle themselves in, to be(long) or not to be(long) is a crucial question. It depends on what they long for: Is it a temporary abode for short-term benefits before packing up and going home, a permanent enclave on its own or a (second) home where they feel they truly belong or want to be long in? This paper seeks to examine issues of belonging for first and second generation mainland Chinese migrants in a post-malticultural Australia where the idea of multiculturalism is being rendered increasingly obsolete, becoming almost ‘mal’ as in the sense of malfunctioning. [1]  The discussion will be based on three books, Wang Hong’s novel,  jile yingwu  (Extremely Happy Parrots), Shen Zhimin’s novel,  donggan baozang (Dynamic Treasure Trove) and Leslie Zhao (Zhao Chuan)’s photographic novel,  he ni qu ouzhou  (Going to Europe with You). ‘I should never have come to Australia, I sh...