Gao, who has lived in exile in France for many years, was no doubt hoping for a happy homecoming. He didn’t get it. After he won the Nobel Prize last October, he forcefully denounced the Chinese communist regime for destroying artistic freedom in China. But those sentiments were gone by the time he got to Hong Kong. Gao was invited by a newspaper and university friends to stop in the “Special Administrative Region” for three days of speeches, but there was one condition: he could not openly criticize Beijing. “I believe I’m here to talk about literature,” Gao told a crowd of 1,200 college students. He later admitted feeling “embarrassed” by his sheepish acquiescence to his hosts’ demand, adding: “I am not so free here as I usually am.” That mea culpa wasn’t enough to satisfy some writers, who complained that Gao had sold out the free-speech cause. “He should use this opportunity to criticize the government–how it has suppressed publishing freedom,” says Bei Ling, editor of Tendency, an overseas journal for exiled Chinese writers. “For an artist, the most important thing is to hold fast to his principles.”
Gao has never tried to be a hero. He was born in 1940 in eastern Jiangxi, and his early adulthood was one misery after another. During the Great Leap Forward in the 1960s, his mother drowned after being sent to the countryside to do forced labor. In 1966, when the Cultural Revolution was at its height, his wife denounced him, and he destroyed everything he had written for fear of imprisonment. In 1989, after the government slaughtered thousands of protesters in Tiananmen, he fled the country. He produced a play critical of the massacre, and later his modernistic novel of a haunting journey through China, “Soul Mountain,” burnished his reputation. Yet last week he insisted that “literature should stay above politics.”
That view is considered either weak or naive in Hong Kong. Since the handover in 1997, Hong Kong writers have been vigilant in defending their freedoms. Liberals scorned the South China Morning Post for firing its veteran China watcher, Willy Wo-Lap Lam, who had apparently angered Beijing with his inside reporting on party policy. When Beijing criticized a radio station owned by the Hong Kong government for airing an interview with a Taiwanese politician in 1999, the local media almost unanimously condemned the interference. Editorials in the leading newspapers regularly denounce Beijing. “Gao says literature should be completely separated from politics,” says Liu Kin-ming, general manager of Apple Daily. “I completely disagree–no writer can escape the struggle against the pressures of reality.”
Another popular paper, the Oriental Daily News, said in an editorial that Gao’s self-censorship had already had a chilling effect on young writers inside China. “Looking over the last century, the Chinese people have at long last won the Nobel Prize in Literature,” it said. “Now all the fledgling artists who love their country have become infected with the ‘Gao Xingjian paranoia’–to always toe the line.”
Not everyone in Hong Kong was so severe. The pro-Beijing Ta Kung Pao newspaper praised Gao’s narrow focus on literature. “He thinks that although Hong Kong is small, it has great room for artistic creation,” the paper wrote. Other writers called Gao’s cautious approach to politics a refreshing antidote to the extremism still prevalent in China. “We’ve grown up with a communist culture that emphasizes heroics, but it turned out to be a false heroism,” says Zha Jianying, a prominent writer. “Gao has recognized his own weakness, which is not easy to do.” Arriving in Taiwan last Thursday, Gao at last spoke up about artistic freedom. “Some might say being under pressure can be a source of creation,” he said. “But for me, I tried to keep writing secretly during the Cultural Revolution. I would not want to have that experience again.” That is a choice only artists themselves can make.
