Lake Fong, Post-GazetteChinese poet Huang Xiang has painted his poetry on the outside of his home on the North Side. He is living in Pittsburgh as part of the City of Asylum project, which finds homes for exiled writers.
Click photo for larger image.
Poet-in-exile Huang Xiang was standing outside his North Side residence, staring up at the bold Chinese characters painted on the exterior of his house, when a group of neighborhood middle school students walked by.
"What did he do to his house?" they shrieked.
But when they were told he was a famous Chinese poet and that the house showcased his work, their mood changed.
After Huang, who does not speak English, performed one of his poems in Chinese, gesturing with his hands and shouting up at the sky, the girls clustered around him, having him sign their names on their hands and in their notebooks, excited to be near someone so famous, although they had never heard of him.
"Y'all live in Pittsburgh?" one girl from the Columbus Middle School asked. "Can I have your autograph?"
This type of interaction is just the type of thing Ralph Reese and his wife, Diane Samuels, were hoping for when nearly 10 years ago they began working toward getting Pittsburgh involved in the City of Asylum project, which finds homes for exiled writers. Pittsburgh is only the fourth city in the United States -- and 34th in the world -- to join the network.
Pittsburgh's participation will change the face of a small street in the North Side, the life of a persecuted couple from China and perhaps even the perspectives of neighbors who are unfamiliar with the language on the walls.
While the neighborhood students didn't recognize his name, Huang, 62, gained global fame for both his poetry and his activism. He spent more than 12 years in jail in China and was featured in the 2000 PBS documentary "Well-Founded Fear," which followed a handful of expatriates as they navigated the precarious path of applying for asylum.
Huang's father fought for the Nationalist Army in China and was executed when the Communists came to power. This pedigree led Huang to be ostracized in his early childhood and barred from attending school.
"[Huang] was not brainwashed," said his wife, Zhang Ling. Because he did not go to school in China, he was not exposed to Communist teachings.
Huang earned international attention in 1978 when he and friends traveled 1,500 miles to Beijing and posted his political poems on a wall in the street. The Democracy Wall Movement, as it became known, put him at odds with the authorities. For the next 20 years, he was jailed numerous times, blamed for inciting a riot and sent to labor camps. It was only when a Beijing company revoked a long-awaited publishing contract because of governmental pressure that Huang saw a way out of China.
He was invited to speak at the Association of American Publishers in 1997 and, with Zhang, escaped to the United States. They applied for asylum -- a process that often takes years to complete -- and lived initially in the basement of an English teacher's home in Tenafly, N.J. They remained there while trying to find a way to support themselves, unwilling to go back to China.
"His works belong to the world," said Zhang, interpreting his words in their kitchen, surrounded by parchment with Chinese characters and scrapbooks showing Huang in Chinese jails and protesting on the streets of China.
Reese, their host and onetime owner of one of the country's largest telemarketing firms, sat beside them in the house he once rented to paying tenants. He remembers the day in April of 1997 when, along with his wife, he saw Salman Rushdie, who was then president of the nascent International Parliament of Writers, speak about the importance of advocating for persecuted writers.
Huang Xiang has painted an anthology of poems in white strokes on the dark wood of his North Side home. They span his career, from "Singing Alone," written in 1962, to the most recent, "Poet's House, Dream Nest," which is what he and Zhang have called their homes of refuge. The poem below, as translated by the late Andrew Emerson, is painted on the front and center panel of the house.
The oldest way to write poetry
Is with a brush
The newest way to write poetry
Is with the body
The most wonderful way to write poetry
Is to stand right on your head
With mind and body as one
And dab ink
On the ground!
Lake Fong, Post-GazetteThe work of Chinese poet Huang Xiang is displayed in huge calligraphy on the exterior walls of his North Side Home. Pittsburgh is the fourth city in the United States and 34th worldwide to join the City of Asylum network, which finds finds homes for exiled writers.
Click photo for larger image.
After hearing his lecture, Reese and Samuels began writing to Rushdie about the prospect of Pittsburgh hosting an exiled writer. At the time, one U.S. city was well on its way to becoming the first in the country to become part of the City of Asylum network. Writers Wole Soyinka and Richard Wiley found a funding stream in Las Vegas resort magnate Glen Schaeffer, who pledged the majority of the funding to support Sierra Leone poet Syl Cheney-Coker.
With this first step, the North American Network of Cities of Asylum was formed. Ithaca, N.Y., and Santa Fe, N.M., followed Las Vegas as hosts to exiled writers. With an American network established, Reese and Samuels finally found the avenue they had sought.
In March of 2004, they met with NANCA executive director Sarah Ralston and Wiley, who were organizing the North American network. Ralston and Wiley visited Pittsburgh in May and were surprised at the number of passionate supporters gathered at Reese and Samuels' home. The Mattress Factory, which is a stone's throw from the couple's North Side home, also became involved.
A writer cannot live on words alone, of course. He needs a place to write, a house to shelter him and food to sustain him. Reese and Samuels provided the house -- two doors down from their own -- as well as living expenses, garnered through an "all-volunteer" fund-raising effort. Their devotion to the project was what convinced the NANCA coordinators that Pittsburgh should be a part of the City of Asylum network.
As Ralston said, success requires "a situation like you have in Pittsburgh, where there is a small group of very committed activists who take charge."
Huang and his wife first visited Pittsburgh in July. When they saw the bluffs on Mount Washington, Huang proclaimed that he would carve the rock into a Rushmore-like poem as a gift to the city. Zhang convinced him to leave his mark on the house instead, so he painted his poetry -- in sweeping Chinese characters -- onto the exterior.
But that's not the end of it. On Sunday, Huang will read his poetry at The Mattress Factory. Mayor Murphy has proclaimed it Huang Xiang Day in the City of Pittsburgh, and the poet sees that as the start of his civic involvement.
"It feels like returning to Hong Kong," Huang said in Chinese, with his wife translating. Gesturing to the small garden in the back of his house and referring to the three rivers and small streets that remind him of home, he added, "Memory is always painful, but now I find the respect of a human being."
Huang struggled when he moved to the United States, feeling thwarted as a writer in a country that did not speak his language. But he tries to express much of his poetry through body language, or through his actions, and has met with more success of late. The man Chinese authorities censored has published 15 books through foreign companies, including an English translation of his work completed by a retired professor he met after arriving in the United States.
"He feels that his dream came true," his wife said. "It could not come true in China, but it came true here."
Both Huang and Zhang miss their friends in China and would return without hesitation if they thought they could be free there. For now, they're content to make a home in Pittsburgh, where artistic accomplishment and new friendships are destined to melt the cold hardships of the past and the present language barrier.
"Exile is not [Huang's] choice," said Zhang. "He is always looking for the home of his heart. But for now, he feels he has returned to his hometown."
First Published: November 16, 2004, 5:00 a.m.
