My experience of a lifetime Semester at Sea: Spring 2012: Hong Kong

April 1, 2012

I loved Hong Kong! I had an FDP in the morning for my Creative Writing class. It was a poetry reading and discussion with Bei Dao on the ship. A little about him:

"On August 2, 1949 Zhao Zhenkai was born in Beijing. His pseudonym Bei Dao literally means "North Island," and was suggested by a friend as a reference to the poet's provenance from Northern China as well as his typical solitude. Dao was one of the foremost poets of the Misty School, and his early poems were a source of inspiration during the April Fifth Democracy Movement of 1976, a peaceful demonstration in Tiananmen Square. He lived in exile from his native China after the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. His awards and honors include the Aragana Poetry Prize from the International Festival of Poetry in Casablanca, Morocco, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has been a candidate several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and was elected an honorary member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters. Bei Dao was a Stanford Presidential lecturer and has taught at the University of California at Davis, the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, and Beloit College in Wisconsin. In 2006, Bei Dao was allowed to move back to China. He is currently Professor of Humanities in the Center for East Asian Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong."

He talked to us about his life, about how he was exiled from Beijing because of the poems he was writing. He has only been to Beijing one time in about 20 years because his father was sick. While he would tell us about his life, we would read poems from that period in his life. I then met up with went with Turner, Sarah, Sam, and Austin to eat lunch. Then we went to a German bar for happy hour. After, we took the metro to see Tian Tan Buddha, also known as the Big Buddha. It is a large bronze statue that was completed in 1993. The statue symbolizes the harmonious relationship between man and nature, people and religion. It was a long journey with a metro ride and a 45 minute drive through the mountainous coast.