Much of Taiwan poet Hsi Mu-jung's work is about the loss and rediscovery of her homeland.Yang Guang reports.
It was 1949, and the ship was about to sail from the mainland to Hong Kong. Hsi Mu-jung, 5,was given a gold ring and a black cotton-padded coat with her name sewn on the inside by hermother. All of her siblings were given the same, and they compared their rings to see whosewas bigger. "Only years later, did we learn from mother that we were given the rings and coatsin case we got lost on the journey," the 67-year-old Taiwan poet recalls at the launch of herlatest anthology, In the Name of Poetry, in Beijing.
"The coats were to identify us, and the rings were financial assistance to help bring us up," sheexplains, tears welling in her eyes.
Hsi was born in Chongqing to a Mongolian family. They moved to Hong Kong in 1949 and toTaiwan five years later.
A trained painter, she began to compose poems at 13. Her first poetry anthology - mostly lovepoems - was published in 1981. It became an instant success both in Taiwan and on themainland.
"Writing poems was spontaneous for me," Hsi says. "In that turbulent age, I was alwaysadapting to new classes and it was difficult to become accepted. I started writing poems in mydiary to ease my loneliness and frustration."
She went to college in Belgium in the 1960s andreturned to teach painting at a college in Hsinchu.
"The homeland is a place I have never seen/ All myknowledge of it is a name / The name is a thorn in myheart."
She wrote these lines in 1979 but was not able to setfoot on the mainland until 10 years later, whenrestrictions relaxed.
In 1989, she went to the Inner Mongolia autonomous region for the first time and has sincevisited the Mongolian Plateau several times a year.
"On the plateau, I do nothing but walk," Hsi says. "The sweet grass is broken by my steps andits fragrance permeates the air. Grasshoppers jump around and eagles hover in the sky, while Ijust walk, thinking of nothing."
Two essay collections, Mongolian Lessons and In Pursuit of My Homeland, were published in2009 to record her explorations of Inner Mongolia's land and culture.
"Since my first visit to the Plateau in 1989, the idea of making nomadic culture known to morepeople has smoldered and grown into a fire," she says.
"By constantly walking and writing, I was finally able to find my homeland in my heart and in mypoems."
In the Name of Poetry is her seventh poetry anthology and includes about 50 pieces, mostlywritten after 2005. Three of them, each about 200 lines, retell Mongolian heroic narrativepoems, drawn from stories in the Mongolian epic Jangar.
Jangar is one of the world's three mega-epics, together with Kyrgyzstan's Manas and the Tibetautonomous region's Gesar. It deals with King Jangar's battle with the evil Mongolian warlordMangus, a threat to Mongolia.
"The Chinese translation of Jangar was the first book I obtained when I returned to theMongolian Plateau," she says. "Stories in Jangar and The Secret History of the Mongols havebeen a constant temptation to write about."
Hsi says her greatest regret is she can't speak Mongolian. Before 5, she talked with familymembers in Mongolian, but she gradually forgot how to speak the language as she movedaround. She started taking Mongolian lessons, on and off, several years ago and can now spellher name in Mongolian.
On her website, she writes regularly to a fictional Inner Mongolian boy, about her observationsof their national culture. She has finished 10 letters, and a collection will be published when there are 21.
Source:China Daily 11/11/2011 page19
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