He was a rare bird in many ways-a mainland Chinese dissident poet who held residency in Taiwan. So he lived like a migratory bird: each year he made two big migrations between Boston and Asia then, during his times in Asia, he made small migrations between Hong Kong and Macau or Taiwan.Īfter his wife retired from teaching in Hong Kong, he lived with her in Taiwan, but when his illness became serious, he returned to Hong Kong to seek medical help. For the first few years of his marriage, he could only visit Du for short periods, until his application for Hong Kong residency was approved (perhaps because the Hong Kong government was wary of paper marriages). He was given special “white travel passes” to return to Shanghai three times, for very short periods, to visit his ailing parents and attend their funerals.Įarly in the new millennium he married Du Jiaqi, a Taiwanese lady who taught literature at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. Meng Lang’s passport was revoked when he left mainland China in 1995, so he was unable to go back to visit his family in Shanghai. After that he remained in exile, dividing his time between Boston and Hong Kong. He left China in 1995 to spend three years as visiting poet at Brown University. He was co-editor of an anthology of underground and non-official poetry published in 1986: An Exhibition of New Poetry Groups《86年诗群大展》. Meng Lang was active in the underground poetry scene from the mid-1980s. You can read a New York Times obituary about him here.
His death is a jolt of mortality for me, because he was ten years my junior. The fact that I heard the news on my birthday (16 December) is perhaps an indication of our close karmic tie. My friend Meng Lang passed away in Hong Kong on 12 December 2018.
0 kommentar(er)
