Raymond Zhou

Everyone's a critic, but what is art?

By Raymond Zhou (China Daily)
Updated: 2006-10-14 06:30

A few years ago, Zhao Lihua scribbled down the following lines: "There's no question/That the meat pies I make/Are the best tasting/In the entire world."

Recently someone reposted this self-assessment on an Internet forum, setting in motion another storm in the teacup of online scorn and denunciation.

Zhao is no ordinary braggart. She is a "nationally ranked" poet who intended the four lines as a poem titled "Coming to Tennessee Alone."

Suffice it to say, it has been quite a while since a poem last fired up public imagination, unless you count the lyrics of pop songs.

Though to be precise, the public does not see Zhao's piece as a legitimate poem, but as yet another piece of evidence of the downfall of the "expert" or, even more cynically, of an authority figure found to have been wearing the Emperor's new clothes from the very beginning.

As you can imagine, the waves of mockery came crashing ashore, with numerous imitations and parodies.

User guides are created to provide how-to instructions for separating regular sentences into "Pear Blossom verse," a homonym referencing Zhao's given name.

China's netizens love to see bigwigs fall from grace. When economists or historians offer views that go against public sentiments, they are swiftly panned and vilified.

Filmmaker Chen Kaige played the perfect Goliath when he threatened the David of a young man who spoofed his overblown epic "The Promise." To the young generation, nothing feels more heartening than striking someone down from a pedestal.

If anything, Zhao Lihua was not a household name - well, not until now. The late Guo Moruo fit the role much better, with his constant doggerels that accompanied each shift in the political wind.

The youthful rebelliousness exhibited in these incidents drives a growing suspicion of anything labelled as authoritative.

With an ever more competitive job market and lofty housing prices, the young tend to blame previous generations for hogging all opportunities. The "experts" who represent the status quo are easy targets.

However, they are selective in choosing these targets. Zhao's verses look childish enough to be lampooned, but someone who shoots a movie with similar amateurishness is sometimes embraced as being avant-garde, especially after a foreign "expert" endorses it.

It is generally a good thing that the nation's young dare to raise their voices and question the authorities. But there is something unsettling beneath the thin layer of defiance - a new code of conformity that comes from a simplistic worldview.

They tend to perceive the world in either black or white, and whatever does not fit into their archetype of virtue is categorized as vice.

In this case, this approach fails to capture the "Pear Blossom" spirit. Unlike Chen Kaige, Zhao Lihua has no problem with spoofing. Furthermore, she explained that when she wrote the "meat pie" poem and other similar stanzas, she was experimenting with a colloquial style - which, I'd like to add, is quite common in English-language poetry.

In natural science, people endure many failures before making an earth-shattering discovery. Why should we begrudge a poet for trying out something simple or silly?

And when it comes to the definition of poetry, one cannot really argue that Zhao's composition does not qualify. You can say it is not a good poem, but that is a personal opinion. If you base your judgment solely on its conversational speech pattern, then even some of the greatest lines from Tang Dynasty poetry "guru" Li Bai belong in this category.

But let's not get into literary theorizing. The reason I side with Zhao Lihua is because she has given a rational and believable explanation while her detractors have chosen to ignore her better writings in their effort to make her the new Sister Hibiscus, last year's Internet-made clown.

It is truly an insult to compare Zhao to the lady who made her name mainly by shaping her contour in the S shape. You have the right to criticize or laugh at the poems you've read, but to prove the writer is as delusional and talent-free as Hibiscus, you'd have to first familiarize yourself with her whole body of work.

And isn't it ironic that pop singers who write even more idiotic lyrics are sometimes extolled to the sky? The difference is that they don't call themselves poets, who, in China, are implied to be perched on a higher dimension.

To laugh at others' foibles may be fun, but to judge them, one had better be prepared to be judged as well. A court jester probably understood this better than many of our netizens.

Email: raymondzhou@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 10/14/2006 page4)