...from a kitchen in england...perceptions of 2 chinese poets exiled in australia...

Zijie Pan: Vostock & This Could Have Happened To You

Ouyang Yu: Songs of the Last Chinese Poet

Wild Peony Book Publishers Pty Ltd
PO Box 636 Broadway NSW 2007 Australia
phone: (612) 9660 6793
fax: (612) 9566 1052

image of china: a newspaper photograph of mao in the yangtze river... head only visible surrounded by the heads of acolytes...

invented image: JFK or LBJ in the potomac river... head only visible surrounded by the heads of acolytes...

image of china: numberless figures in suits of blue red stars on their caps.. hands raising a small red book of maoist ideology....in cities and in fields...

invented image: numberless figures in suits of blue red stars on their caps... walking through the streets of central london or new york... through suburbs wearing trails in manicured lawns... hands raising a small red book of maoist ideology...

many in the west experiencing their politically formative years absorbed... half absorbed pretended to absorb the ideologies of marx, mao, ho chi minh, guevara..castro... bought vinyl recordings of tibetans singing songs of thanks to mao for his liberation of their country...one in particular...’a pure and white hata for chairman mao’ ..showed a painting on its sleeve of a gathering of smiling tibetans...a...beautiful.. female representative of that nation handing a white scarf to a smiling mao...in gratitude for the invasion...

they i bought novels describing revolutionary heroes working 20 hours a day in foundries..men and women ..forsaking all for an increase in the month’ s steel production.forsaking love...sex... despite strong mutual attraction..for the revolution...

images of china prior to this were sketchy and of a racist...propagandist nature..crumbs of british imperialist propaganda...in books and comics...the chinese were portrayed as cunning... inscrutable opium smokers with long mustaches and silk jackets which fastened with toggles...or owners of laundries into which young white girls were lured..these laundries being fronts for a slave trade...prostitution...a half belief for some a whole belief for others was that the meat served in chinese restaurants was dog or cat...chinese men walked the streets it was said...late at night...with a net....

images of china...porcelain skinned painted women...wooden shoes...emperors...ming vases...pagodas..incense gongs...bhuddas...women with feet bound in cloth for beauty...curved swords...bamboo flutes...exotic stringed instruments...puzzles and gunpowder...mandarin oranges..board games...painted herons in a pond...calligraphy....rice fields...pine trees...a very long wall...images inherited from a pale victorian skin deep interest in the 'oriental'......more recent usually surface interest in zen and other buddhisms... acupuncture...practised by hysterical cracked up falling apart illusionists...

into the middle of the 20th century the paranoid image described above of inscrutable single minded selfless armies of chinese political zealots invading the democracies represents what was a real fear for many.... socially and politically constructed to justify the cold war and the continuation of the devastation of vietnam...

Go To Page: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7