A Portrait of a Contemporary Chinese Exile

Abstract

Liu Zaifu was a leading Chinese intellectual in the 1980s whose theories challenged the dominant Marxist paradigms in Chinese literature by defending the aesthetic complexity of the human character and literary creation. These aesthetic positions, his popularity among students and writers, and involvement during the Tiananmen movement led to his political blacklisting and subsequent exile toward the United States. This exile began his second phase of life that was primarily characterized by acclimating, wandering, and cultivating in cultural peripheries. His life can be divided into three distinct phases, the first being a Chinese intellectual enthusiastically engaged in social reform and steadfastly loyal to his home country. In contrast, the second phase was moving from a nostalgic attachment to the homeland into a simultaneously eremitic and cosmopolitan worldview which epitomized his third phase. Despite constant loneliness in a foreign country, Liu Zaifu turned his solitude into a personal renaissance to prolifically publish richer cultural reflections. Within exile, Liu Zaifu used his newfound political freedom to emphasize the transcendental value of literature, publishing dozens of books, articles, essays, and prose poems that include his most acclaimed and emblematic writings.