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    A Study Guide for Bei Dao's "The Homecoming Stranger"
    A Study Guide for Bei Dao's "The Homecoming Stranger"
    A Study Guide for Bei Dao's "The Homecoming Stranger"
    Ebook48 pages35 minutes

    A Study Guide for Bei Dao's "The Homecoming Stranger"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Bei Dao's "The Homecoming Stranger," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJul 27, 2016
    ISBN9781535837361
    A Study Guide for Bei Dao's "The Homecoming Stranger"

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      A Study Guide for Bei Dao's "The Homecoming Stranger" - Gale

      12

      The Homecoming Stranger

      Bei Dao

      1979

      Introduction

      Although Bei Dao has been publishing poetry and fiction in his native China since the 1970s, it was 1990 before The Homecoming Stranger was published in English in the United States in Waves, as translated by Susette Ternent Cooke with the assistance of Bonnie S. McDougall. Waves was released simultaneously with Bei Dao's poetry collection The August Sleepwalker. Since the early 1970s, he has been known for his imaginative and avant-garde fiction and poetry and his political activism. He was a member of the Democracy Wall movement of the late 1970s, and his most famous poem, The Answer, which was written during that period, became an anthem of dissent during the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations in China. Although Bei Dao strenuously disowns having been a leader of any movement, particularly a political movement, it was in part because his poetry was used as a political anthem that he was exiled in 1989, and aside from a brief visit in 2001 to Beijing for his father's funeral, he has not been allowed to return to live in mainland China. Since 2006, he has lived in Hong Kong and taught at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. In the intervening years, Bei Dao has continued to write. Of his works, seven collections of poetry, one collection of short stories, and two collections of essays have been published in English translation.

      Bei Dao wrote The Homecoming Stranger expressly for the second edition of his underground magazine, Jintian (Today), in 1979. The fiction Bei Dao both wrote for and published in Jintian became known as ruins fiction. Unlike the earlier scar fiction published in the direct aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, ruins fiction exposed the toll that upheaval took on individuals as well as analyzing the political and social forces that underlay the revolution. It is because Bei Dao insisted in his work on the legitimacy of the individual experience in a political system in which all thoughts, feelings, and needs of the individual were supposed to be subordinated to the state that he has been considered both artistically and politically dangerous.

      Author Biography

      Bei Dao was born Zhao Zhenkai on August 2, 1949, in Beijing mere months before the People's Republic of China came into being. His was a prominent family: his father was an administrator and his mother was a nurse who later became a doctor. Like most children of the ruling cadre, he went to the best schools. In the 1960s, like many students, Bei Dao joined the Red Guards and participated in Mao Zedong's civil war against anyone declared a member of the liberal bourgeoisie. Bei Dao became disillusioned with the violent tactics of the Red Guards and was banished to the suburbs of Beijing, where he spent eleven years as a construction worker. During the Cultural Revolution, all literature on subjects other than Marxism and Mao's thoughts were banned. In an

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