The Old City in Exile

"The night gave me black eyes, but I use them to find the light." In 1993, the poet Gu Cheng and his wife Xie Ye bid farewell to the world in an extremely tragic way on Waiheke Island in New Zealand. For more than 20 years, controversies, rumors, evaluations, and speculations about Gu Cheng have never stopped. In 2014, with the death of Gu Cheng’s lover Li Ying, we tried to restore a real Gu Cheng and the Misty poets who were worshiped religiously by poetry fans from a “human” perspective. We looked back at the poems that “awakened China’s sleeping lion in the East” after the Cultural Revolution, and the 1980s, which was dubbed by Chinese intellectuals as “the most free-thinking era after the founding of the People’s Republic of China.” The glory and exile of that generation, as well as their respective destiny development, are the epitome of the changes of a country and the times. Living in another country and having difficulty returning to his hometown became a huge dilemma for Gu Cheng until his death. As the poet Yang Lian said, "The tragedy of Gu Cheng is both a personal tragedy and a historical tragedy."