City Gate, Open Up

City Gate, Open Up is the lyrical autobiography of China's legendary poet Bei Dao. Exiled from Beijing in the wake of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, Bei Dao returned to his homeland in 2001 for the first time in over twenty years. The city of his youth had vanished: 'I was a foreigner in my hometown,' he writes. The shock of this experience released a flood of memories and emotions contained in City Gate, Open Up. The poet recalls the Beijing of his youth, from the birth of the People's Republic, through the chaotic years of the Great Leap Forward, and on into the Cultural Revolution. At the centre of the book are his parents and siblings and their everyday life together through famine and festival. Bei Dao's autobiography is a memory palace of endless alleyways and corridors, where personal narrative mixes with the momentous history he lived through. 'One of the great poets of our time.' Michael Hofmann. 'Intense, elegant and impressionistic.' Dwight Garner



Bei Dao, the pen name of Zhao Zhenkai, was born in Beijing in 1949. He is one of contemporary China's most distinguished poets and the cofounder of the pivotal underground literary journal Today. He has received numerous international awards for his work, including the Cikada Prize in Sweden, the Golden Wreath Award in Macedonia, the Aragana Poetry Prize in Morocco, the Jeanette Schocken Literary Prize in Germany, and the PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award; he is also an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2009 Bei Dao attained U.S. citizenship, and he is currently Professor of Humanities in the Centre for East Asian Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.