Befriending China through literature
Writers get opportunity to write, talk with counterparts from other nations
IOWA CITY, Iowa — Iowa has been called Aihehua (meaning “love the glamour of lotus”) in Chinese, at least in the world of writers and poets.
Chinese novelist Nieh Hualing, who has lived in Iowa City for five decades, has helped link the place with the image of the lotus, which represents poetical peace and moral integrity in Chinese literature.
The UNESCO City of Literature has also been quite famous among those writing and speaking Chinese. For around 40 years, it has invited talented Chinese writers and poets to the United States for the opportunity to write and talk with counterparts from other nations, giving many of them a rare chance to experience a foreign culture when their country was just opening up to the outside world.
Paul Engle’s poem
“A gray-haired wind has blown thousands of years. Red dirt from green fields into your brown eyes. ... The future is a rocket where you ride.”
The verses were created by Paul Engle, a US poet born and brought up in Iowa, the heart of the Midwestern region famous for its corn and hogs. A stranger to the Chinese language, he recorded his intense responses to several trips to China with his wife Nieh in the late 1970s, when the country began to conduct reforms and embrace the wider world.
So moved by his experiences in China, which convinced him that the country was ready to open up, Engle believed that the only possible reaction he could make had to be in poetry. Images of China, a poetic collection of his thoughts on China, was filled with rhymed stanzas, blank verse, the sonnet, free verse unrhymed, rhymed couplets, all verse forms in English.
The trips to China also partly explain the couple’s commitment to the International Writing Program, a writing residency for international writers and poets in Iowa City.
According to Hugh Ferrer, the IWP’s associate director, since its inception in 1967, the exchange program has provided optimal conditions for the creative work of nearly 50 emerging and established Chinese poets and novelists, in a bid to grasp the momentum of Chinese modern literature and enhance bilateral literary communication for better understanding.
“During my first time coming back to China, I met with Wang Meng, Bing Xin and Ai Qing, as I wished. I was so happy since I knew that meant China was beginning to open up,” recalled Nieh, who was born in 1925 in Hubei province.
“I needed to know and invite the senior writers, I needed to know and meet the young ones, I needed to know what had happened in the past and what would happen then for this country.”
Noticeably, most of them were invited after the launch of reform and opening up in China. They were household names, even globally famous, such as Nobel literature laureate Mo Yan.
For most of them, the stay in Iowa City became their first ever experience outside China. Their exposure to the agricultural US heartland city to some extent altered their general imagination of the US that had come mostly from movies and books.
However, the culture shock has been a rare experience for young Chinese attendees since 2000, as China had become an integral part of globalization by then.
For Chi Zijian, who participated in the program in 2005, the subjects of the IWP’s panel discussions, such as gender and writing, the depiction of horror, imagination and reality, had all been inspiring to her writing.
“My colleagues come from different parts of the world with different cultural backgrounds,” Chi said.
“There are many windows for us Chinese writers to look through to the outside world, but the one in Iowa has still been the largest and brightest one,” she said.