From Tiananmen Square to Providence, in poetry

Dissident poet Xue Di found at Brown a safe harbor for writing

Xue Di had never run faster in his life. Plainclothes national security police were following him through the streets of Beijing. They got stuck in traffic; he climbed over factory fences and roofs into another district, and the authorities were unable to catch him.

Police were chasing Xue Di (pronounced zhway dee) because he had gone to the anti-government demonstration at Tiananmen Square in 1989. During China's democracy movement, he organized writers and poets into support groups for the Tiananmen students' hunger strike and asked them to march.

Di had avoided immediate imprisonment because police had no proof that he took part in the demonstration. By the time the national police came for him, Di had a visa and a plane ticket for the next day - impossible without the sympathy of pro-democracy supporters. U.S. embassy officials knew who he was and why he was in danger, and one had expressed admiration for his poetry.

Of his escape, Di says, "I believe there is a guardian angel for my life."

While the world was reacting to the Chinese government's violent crackdown on the Tiananmen demonstrators, Brown announced the creation of the University's Freedom to Write Program, which would provide Chinese dissident writers with fellowships that would enable them to leave their country. Di was one of three writers who arrived Brown in December 1989. He has remained in Providence since.

"Reading poetry I feel love, I sense nature. It's really beautiful. It's so far away from my dirty present. I think it was the only thing that saved me," says poet Xue Di, left.

Photo by John Abromowsky/PAUR

Help for Di continues today. He recently received a $40,000 grant from the Joukowsky Foundation that allows him to continue writing poetry and stay in Providence.

"This is huge for me," Di, 42, said of the grant. "It means encouragement, acceptance from this society."

Di's transition has been one of frightened newcomer at JFK Airport with no knowledge of English to talkative communicator who moves confidently in the world. He has given poetry readings in New York and achieved recognition in his field. He plays table tennis in a league on Monday nights, ferociously defending his state title for five consecutive years. He plays because it allows him to extend his energy outward, in contrast to the solitude of writing poetry.

"In creative writing you want to be very quiet, focus on the quiet of the internal life," Di said.

He is in love with an American girlfriend, has a part-time job as an office assistant in the English department, and lives in an apartment on a peaceful East Side street bordering the river.

It is in his apartment where he reduces his world to what's inside his head, and writes his thoughts.

"Human rights belong to everyone, or they are guaranteed to no one," is written on a poster hanging on the wall in the study area in which he writes. Seated at his desk, the afternoon sun shines on him, which helps him to focus.

He plans to publish a collection of poems next year. His verse, written in Chinese characters, is translated into English for publication. The characters are written onto small yellow notes that he sticks to his table and desk. These are the seeds of ideas that will blossom into phrases and poems that tell stories of the range of human emotions.

"Difficult to write and difficult to read emotional truths" is a description of Di's work given by Gale Nelson, the assistant director of Brown's Creative Writing Program. Nelson published Di's small book, "Flames," in 1995, a cycle of poems reflecting on the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh.

Nelson says that Di is highlighting "new ways to express very real and difficult-to-express emotions in non-trite ways, so that the emotion of the poems comes through almost intuitively rather than in a more explicit manner."

Censorship of contemporary literature in China has kept three volumes of his collected works from publication.

Di has chosen the title "Parallel Deep" for the collection of poems he is writing. The parallels are of his daily life in China and the United States, the development of society and his inner being, the traditional and the contemporary.

Part of Di's inspiration comes from a miserable childhood. He lived alone from the age of 6 after his parents' divorce, slept in a dormitory for workers, and ate in the cafeteria on the first floor with money his father gave him each month.

"I had nightmares every day, permanent damage on the inside," Di says. "I was so lacking of love in my childhood."

At the age of 12, reading poetry was his escape from a mean existence in which he considered suicide. Aleksandr Pushkin was a favorite author.

"Reading poetry I feel love, I sense nature. It's really beautiful. It's so far away from my dirty present. I think it was the only thing that saved me."

Di is not bitter toward his father for neglecting him. He says the suffering challenged him, developed his spirit and made him "mature in thinking of humanity, not just my own joy or sadness." Three years ago, he returned to China and stayed with his father. He believes the phone was tapped, but he was able to enter - and leave - the country.

"All the wrong things in my life, but I don't hate them. I understand them. I don't know why. ... That's the spirit of poetry. You are full of misery but you still see the beauty of love, you are still present."

"If I would have never searched my life so hard, I would never understand the beauty," Di says.

Di says his next book will be a collection of love poems.

"I'm very happy. It's very important to have been given love. Otherwise, I know my life would be much more hard," Di says. "I'm in another country. Solitude I choose, but loneliness, separated from family, friends, language....Of course everybody knows love is the most important thing in life."