
- 320 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
City Gate, Open Up is the lyrical autobiography of China's 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. 'One of the great poets of our time.' Michael Hofmann. 'Intense, elegant and impressionistic.' Dwight Garner
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Preface: My Beijing
- Light and Shadow
- Smells
- Sounds
- Toys and Games
- Furniture
- Vinyl Records
- Fishing
- Swimming
- Raising Rabbits
- Three Never Old Hutong Alley No. 1
- Qian Ayi
- Reading
- Going to Shanghai
- Elementary School
- Beijing Middle No. 13
- Beijing Middle No. 4
- The Great Linkup
- Father
- Translator’s acknowledgments
- About the Author
- Also by Bei Dao from Carcanet Press
- Copyright