A Poet in Exile (2013)

"The dark night has given me dark eyes, yet I use them to search for light." In 1993, the poet Gu Cheng and his wife Xie Ye bid farewell to the world on Waiheke Island in New Zealand in an extremely tragic way. For more than 20 years, the controversy, rumors, evaluations and speculations about Gu Cheng have never stopped. In 2014, with the passing of Gu Cheng's lover Li Ying, we tried to restore a real Gu Cheng from the perspective of "human being", and the "Misty Poets" who were once worshipped by poetry fans. Looking back at the poems that "awakened the sleeping lion in the East" after the Cultural Revolution, and the 1980s, which was dubbed "the most liberal era after the founding of the People's Republic" by Chinese intellectuals. The glory and exile of that generation, as well as the development of each person's destiny, are just the epitome of the changes of a country and the times. Exiled in a foreign country, the fatherland is difficult to return, which has become a huge predicament before Gu Cheng's death. In the poet Yang Lian's own words, "Gu Cheng's tragedy was a personal tragedy, as well as an historical one".