Recently, I sent a query to Singapore asking if they were interested in having me do an interview with some controvertial Chinese poets and editors of underground literary journals. The response came asking, "Do they write in English?" Which is exactly the same as the one asked in 1994 in the Victorian Writers' Centre when I approached them for the possibility of inviting two well-known Chinese novelists visiting Melbourne by asking if they'd be interested in getting them to give a talk. The question came, "Do they write in English?"

My answer to that is a definite one: No, they don't. So what? In fact, the recent debate in China between the so-called "intellectual poets" and "minjian poets" ("minjian" as against the established, the authorized and the governmental) focuses on whether Chinese poets should imitate their Western "masters" by quoting them in their obscure and derivative lines and dedicating their poems to them or whether they should write poems that are founded on the "ordinary life" and take their source from the poet's "original creative power", a phrase much used by the "minjian poets". Poetic nationalism, combined with a desire to ascend to the position of domination prompted Yu Jian, a major poet from the border province of Yunnan, to make the remarks that, "I don't believe any Chinese poets can write in other languages," and "for Chinese poets, English is an infinitely second-rate language."

To respond to the questions raised with me in an interview given me by the Guangzhou-based Chinese poet, Yang Ke, about how to maintain the "dignity of the Chinese language, the most poetic language" in the world, I said that I don't know about the dignity of the Chinese language but, as a bilingual poet, I do believe that if Chinese language is a most poetic language, English is equally so if not more, and I would rather maintain the dignity of both instead of one.

I wrote some English poems on first arriving in Beijing, China, a heavily polluted city, where foreigners working there get the so-called "pollution allowance" to make up for the loss of their good health. My nose itched, running all day, I sneezed constantly, my leather shoes were covered in thick dust whenever I come back from the city and my hair basically a bin gathering dust. It gets under my skin, the skin of my poetry. For the first time, I was brought to the realisation that poetry is useless. It can't even stop the dust from getting into its lines. And I came to the understanding why Chinese poets keep their poetry so clean: it is not that they are hypocritical but that they want to keep their poetry a clean place, like a church, from all the dusty rubbish surrounding them.

I find myself writing more and more Chinese poetry, until I cease writing English poetry altogether. I have been doing so for years, and I have to now. After all, it's my language although I am Australian by nationality. To write Chinese poetry as Australian is to resist the temptation to be known as an Australian poet. It is to place oneself outside the mainstream English speaking and writing world, which has so far been asking the same question: "Do they write in English?" It is, to borrow a fashionable saying, to exile oneself in obscurity. And finally it is to realize that a thousand years or more may be needed before anything is ever known by that standard.

The way Chinese poets freely give away their books of poetry reminds me of nothing comparable in Australia. They don't give away one or two; they carry big bags of them. In a recent poetry conference held in Changping, a small town near Beijing, I witnessed the touching scene of poetry giving: poets sign copies of their self-published books of poetry, exchange or simply give them away, to their counterparts, their critics and their friends. Should we call this poetic masturbation? That would be nice. That might sound denigrating, too. But the real story is there is no market for poetry in this country, commonly known as "the poetic nation." The smaller place you go to, the less poetry there is. In my hometown Huangzhou or Yellow Town, I can hardly find any poetry in any bookstore or bookstand. If a poet takes his poetry to the publisher, he will be advised that he'll have to financially subsidise its publication himself. Before I came back to China, I had been invited to join other poets in a poetry series edited by Yi Sha, with the request that I pay ¥7000 (worth about A$1,500) to get in. I asked if they'd publish my recent book of poetry that might be controvertial but they said no and suggested that I remove the offending title and certain poems in it. So, there you are: economic as well as political restrictions. Why should I be bothered if I can't even pay to say what I want to say? But the painful fact is that that publisher has since been shut down by the authorities because of its publications of books related to the falungong.

The thing is, if you are a poet, you are on the blacklist with the police. That's what a prominent poet told me himself, whose name I refrain from telling you. You are basically an "Other", politically unwelcome and suspicious.

But they tell me that China is now a freer country. Freer in what, in giving away poetry or money? I keep my own observations to myself because if I say anything critical I am in danger of being categorized as a "Westerner" who likes to pick on China. I notice that the loudspeaker system on the university campus is still the same as ten years ago, waking everybody up in the morning, announcing meal times, broadcasting the campus news and pop songs, a form of official control no-one can escape. I notice that cable television is installed in every household whereby everyone can watch programmes from 32 channels throughout the country, a great technological leap forward from the past, but no-one can get anything from overseas because it is not allowed in, a form of official control on a national scale although in certain coastal provinces such as Guangdong, formerly Canton, and Fujian, people can watch programmes from Hong Kong with edited versions. I even notice the uncomfortableness of the heating system in Beijing whereby each household is heated by a centrally controlled heating station that regulates the heat with no-one having any control on it, not even able to turn it down or off, leaving one the only choice of opening the windows to let in the cold air or drying up in the morning as I often do. However, the good news is the introduction of the internet whereby one can get anything he wants to know by bypassing the control system because it is so time and money consuming to censor everything online from pornography to politics and it would be futile for the government to do so although the authorities have successfully wiped out the falungong websites in Chinese from the net.

As an Australian poet writing in English, I can feel a little proud of the fact that we in Australia seem to be doing fine by comparison: there are a dozen poetry readings in Melbourne on a weekly basis although the attendance is small and irregular. Some small publishers still persist in the labour of love of publishing poetry at their own or the government's expense. But that's where my pride ends because poets still live a life no better than beggars, except certain favoured ones such as Les Murray, whose poetry I don't like.

To talk about Australian poetry! Everywhere I go in China, I see the prevalence of cultural colonialism, represented by an overwhelmingly large number of translated works from William Shakespeare to W.B. Yeats, from Flaubert to Faulkner, and from Hemingway to Hesse, nothing Australian, not even in the biggest bookstore of 4 storeys in Beijing. The eight nations that used to dominate the Chinese scene in the beginning of this century still dominate the scene, with books if not guns. They are U.S.A, U.K., Germany, France, Italy, Russia, Japan, and Austria, with the addition of Spain, Portugal and a few South Americans. However, Australia is gaining a small voice as a number of books have recently been published in Chinese, including Inventing Australia, Australian Civilisation and my translation of Christina Stead's The man who loved children.

I travelled from city to city, giving talks at various universities, occasionally reading a couple of my own poems in English and Chinese, prompted by my own remembrance of readings I had had in Australia. My poetry readings were less enthusiastically received than my literary talks, understandably, for poetry readings, like poetry itself, have nearly gone from the Chinese poetic scene. To organize any readings is to ask for permission from the authorities and ask for trouble, I was told. Besides, people these days are simply not used to the idea of poetry readings, I was again told. They prefer more relaxed activities like going to the discotheque and song and dance halls or watching T.V. at home. Our proposal for one-put forward by Carolyn, another resident writer, and I myself, has met with nonchalance and excuses of difficulty and non-attendance. So far we have not been able to have one single official poetry reading organized on our behalf at our resident university.

I keep writing Chinese poetry and sending it out to literary journals around the country. I thought I was doing well because some of my poems were getting published in major literary journals such as "People's Literature." But what poetry of mine are they publishing? I am ashamed of even mentioning it. The kind of stuff, romantic, light-weight and detached from life, was from more than fifteen years ago! Does that mean that their level of poetic appreciation stopped fifteen years ago? If not, why then don't they accept anything that I write today? Interestingly, there is a parallel in Australia where the stuff I get published is from 5 or 8 years ago, and very little of what I write now.

What do I write in Chinese anyway? To save you the trouble, I shall just quote the titles of some of the poems I write. One reads, "Around 9 a.m. the 26 of September today when I want to operate a poem". Another reads, "Period". A third reads, "The season of syphilis". And the way I write them? With a tape-recorder, of course. Too unusual for their taste? Too Australian? Or just too bad?

But the editor of the underground literary journal, Shi Can Kao (Poem Reference), said to me, "We'll publish anything and we can." To test him, I showed him my latest unpublished collection of Chinese poetry, xian du (The limit). He was reading it while I was cooking a dinner for both of us in my rented apartment in Beijing. When he got home, he rang to say that he would like to publish a dozen of my poems and feature me prominently in the leading pages. True to his words, and to my amazement, he has made the selection of some of the ones I thought were unpalatable to the taste of the Chinese authorities. We shall see what comes out finally in the new issue.

Testing the ground has been my strategy, if there is ever one. In Australia, some literary journals have been consistently and consciously rejecting my work. They are Canberra-based now dead Voice, Melbourne-based now dead Scripsi and Quadrant. Everything that I write has been rejected by Quadrant and subsequently published by others (I have to qualify this by saying that a recent issue of Quadrant did publish one of mine long after I decided not to send anything to them again). I want to put this on record to show how exclusive, authoritarian and tyrannical the Australian literary climate can be, under which "multiculturals" like me will have a hard time. In some ways, they are exactly the same as the established, authorized and government-funded Chinese literary journals that reign supreme in a Communist regime aimed at silencing any fresh and new voices on the pretext of elegance, propriety and the so-called "literary quality". Fortunately, there are magazines like Shi Can Kao and Kui, funded out of the poor poets' own pockets, that devote themselves to the publication and promotion of suppressed new poetic voices.

When I told my Chinese poet friends of this bleak side of Australia, they were surprised. They had thought everything better in the West. They had not thought that the sort of situation mentioned in Gangland was possible in a "democratic country." They did not know that if they did the same in Australia, that is, publishing their work with their own money, they'd be categorized as self-publishing and wouldn't be eligible for grant applications; they'd remain in poverty and obscurity for the rest of their lives. As far as I know, some Australian-Chinese writers have been doing that for years and remain unknown to the mainstream.

However, if there is any alternative to this monolingual and mono-cultural tyranny, it is the Chinese reality, in which if a poet wants his voice to be heard and heard strongly he can do so by self-publishing it at any cost, through a publishing house, an underground magazine or simply by mimeograph, without even a book number, illegally if need be. The "post oral-language poetry" is just one group of these poets, who, by sheer effort and fighting spirit, have made their voice heard, loud and clear, in the Chinese literary landscape. You might ask if their poetry is any good but listen to this popular saying that goes: "good poetry is found in minjian", not in officially funded and established journals.

The current Chinese poetic weather is diffused with gun powder. The "intellectual poets" are attacked for using "Western resources," quoting T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Boris Pasternak, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Borges, the list goes on, in nearly every line of their work, while the "minjian poets" are criticized for their tendency to secularize poetry by catering to the taste of the masses and incorporating the ordinary in poetry with an attention to the sordid daily details. The two groups, as I see it, are fighting for the power to dominate contemporary Chinese poetry, reaching its climax in April 1999 in Panfeng Conference where a war of words was waged and ending in Longmai Poetry Conference in Changping on 12-13 November the same year, which the invited "intellectual poets" boycotted so that no climax of conflict was forthcoming. As a detached observer from Australia, I watched the whole show with a mixture of nonchalance, curiosity, bewilderment, disgust, and disapproval because I see something more than poetry that is going on there, something that smells of power struggle, lack of individuality, a collective spirit akin to the feudalistic guild system.

Like the Chinese poets, I had to give away my own books, ostensibly for the promotion of Australian literature. A large investment in the unfathomable. I doubt if anyone will ever read them, particularly the ones I wrote in English, the margin on the margins. Should I take delight in the fact that a PhD candidate has recently had his thesis accepted of which my Songs of the Last Chinese Poet forms a major part? Should I be upset by the fact that people to whom I have sent the book never gives a comment, positive or negative, probably because they have shelved it and will never read it? In any case, it certainly takes more than days to decolonize the Chinese mind that is comfortably contained and curtailed by the "world literature" represented by the afore-mentioned literary super-powers.

As my four months' residence draw to an end, I begin to miss Melbourne more and more. I miss its cappuccino on Lygon Street. I miss my Chinese migrant artist friends a telephone call away. I miss its maddening quiet in which I can think for myself or think nothing and do nothing. I miss a very few Australian writer friends who constantly encourage me to try the impossible. Above all, I miss its blue sky, clean air and environment, its strangers who will smile to you on the streets and offer help with street directions, and its possibility for me to remain on the edges and see a clearer vision of the world. Deep down, I am an Australian whatever that means.

Do I also miss the rejection of me by the literary establishment in Australia? Do I also miss the fact that my three books, one novel and two poetry books, have been turned down by nearly everyone? Do I also miss the overwhelming silence imposed not only on myself but also on other writers and artists who remain and have to remain as part of the night that we tend to sleep away with or on?

Every time I spot a "white" person on the Beijing streets, I feel like approaching him or her and asking, "How are you"? But they keep on their way and I, mine, because if I do I may be mistaken as an eager Chinese student trying to practise his English. At other times, I am tempted by the thought that I may simply go on living like this in China as an Australian, writing Chinese for the rest of my life and remaining someone that neither accepts.

When an Australian academic wrote to me that she had written this subject "dry", meaning the subject of Chinese writing in Australia, my immediate, unvoiced response was: "No, you haven't because the other half of the writings I have done, along with other writings by other poets and writers in Chinese, remain the night that has not been explored and will probably never be touched upon for centuries to come, as long as the question is still being asked: "Do they write in English?"

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