The Banished Immortal Read online

  Also by Ha Jin

  Between Silences

  Facing Shadows

  Ocean of Words

  Under the Red Flag

  In the Pond

  Waiting

  The Bridegroom

  Wreckage

  The Crazed

  War Trash

  A Free Life

  The Writer as Migrant

  A Good Fall

  Nanjing Requiem

  A Map of Betrayal

  The Boat Rocker

  A Distant Center

  COPYRIGHT © 2019 BY HA JIN

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to The Permissions Company, Inc. on behalf of Copper Canyon Press for permission to reprint an excerpt of “Tu Fu to Li Po” from Cool, Calm and Collected: Poems 1960–2000 by Carolyn Kizer. Copyright © Carolyn Kizer. Reprinted permission of The Permissions Company, Inc. on behalf of Copper Canyon Press (www.coppercanyonpress.org).

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Name: Jin, Ha, [date] author.

  Title: The banished immortal : a life of Li Bai (Li Po) / Ha Jin.

  Other titles: Life of Li Bai (Li Po)

  Description: New York : Pantheon, 2019. Chinese versions of his poetry will be included. Includes bibliographical references.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018024328. ISBN 9781524747411 (hardback). ISBN 9781524747428 (ebook).

  Subjects: LCSH: Li Bai, 701–762. Poets, Chinese—Biography. Li Bai, 701–762—Criticism and interpretation. BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY/Literary. LITERARY CRITICISM/Poetry. HISTORY/Asia/China.

  Classification: LCC PL2671 .J554 2019 | DDC 895.11/3 [B] —dc23 | LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/​2018024328

  Ebook ISBN 9781524747428

  www.pantheonbooks.com

  Cover image: Portrait of Li Bai © British Library Board. All rights reserved/Bridgman Images.

  Cover design by Jenny Carrow

  v5.4_r1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Ha Jin

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prelude

  Chapter 1: Origins

  Chapter 2: Away from Home

  Chapter 3: Back in His Hometown

  Chapter 4: Leaving Sichuan

  Chapter 5: Dissipation

  Chapter 6: Marriage

  Chapter 7: Married Life

  Chapter 8: In the Capital

  Chapter 9: Away from the Capital

  Chapter 10: In the North

  Chapter 11: In the South

  Chapter 12: Moving to the Lu Region

  Chapter 13: Women

  Chapter 14: In the Capital Again

  Chapter 15: Political Involvement

  Chapter 16: The Meeting of Two Stars

  Chapter 17: Life in Transition

  Chapter 18: On the Road Again

  Chapter 19: New Marriage

  Chapter 20: On the Northeastern Frontier

  Chapter 21: Moving to the South

  Chapter 22: An Unexpected Guest

  Chapter 23: Escaping from the Rebels

  Chapter 24: Imprisonment

  Chapter 25: Disillusion and the End

  Chapter 26: Afterword

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  PRELUDE

  He has many names. In the West, people call him Li Po, as most of his poems translated into English bear that name. Sometimes it is also spelled Li Bo. But in China, he is known as Li Bai. During his lifetime (701–762 AD), he had other names—Li Taibai, Green Lotus Scholar, Li Twelve. The last one is a kind of familial term of endearment, as Bai was twelfth among his brothers and male cousins on the paternal side. It was often used by his friends and fellow poets when they addressed him—some even dedicated poems to him titled “For Li Twelve.” By the time of his death, he had become known as a great poet and was called zhexian, or Banished Immortal, by his admirers. Such a moniker implies that he had been sent down to earth as punishment for his misbehavior in heaven. Over the twelve centuries since his death, he has been revered as shixian, Poet Immortal. Because he was an excessive drinker, he was also called jiuxian, Wine Immortal. Today it is still common for devotees of his poetry to trek hundreds of miles, following some of the routes of his wanderings as a kind of pilgrimage. Numerous liquors and wines bear his name. Indeed, his name is a ubiquitous brand, flaunted by hotels, restaurants, temples, and even factories.

  In English, in addition to “Li Po,” he once had another pair of names, Li T’ai Po and Rihaku. The first is a phonetic transcription of his original Chinese name, Li Taibai, the name his parents gave him. And Ezra Pound, in his Cathay—his collected translations of classical Chinese poetry—called Li Bai Rihaku because Pound had translated those poems from the notes left by the American scholar Ernest Fenollosa, who had originally studied Li Bai’s poetry in Japanese when he was in Japan. Pound’s loose translation of Li Bai’s “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” has been included in many textbooks and anthologies as a masterpiece of modern poetry. It is also one of Pound’s signature poems—arguably his best known. For the sake of consistency and clarity, in the following pages let us stay with the name Li Bai.

  He also has several deaths ascribed to him. For hundreds of years, some people even maintained that he had never died at all, claiming to encounter him now and then.1 In truth, we are uncertain about the exact date and cause of his death. In January 764, the newly enthroned Emperor Daizong issued a decree summoning Li Bai to serve as a counselor at court. It was a post without actual power in spite of its high-sounding title. Yet to any man of learning and ambition such an appointment was a great favor, a demonstration of the emperor’s benevolence and magnanimity—and in Li Bai’s case, a partial restoration of the high status he had once held in the court. When the royal decree reached Dangtu County, Anhui, where Li Bai was supposed to be located, the local officials were thrown into confusion and could not find him. Soon it was discovered that he had died more than a year before. Of what cause and on what day, no one could tell. So we can only say that Li Bai, despite his renown, passed away in 762 without notice.

  However, such an obscure death was not acceptable to those who cherished his poetry. They began to give different versions of his death, stories spun either to suit the romantic image of his poetic personality or to provide a fitting conclusion to his turbulent life. In one version, he died of alcohol poisoning; this was in keeping with his lifelong indulgence in drink. Another claims that he died of an illness known as chronic thoracic suppuration—pus penetrating his chest and lungs. The first mention of this comes from Pi Rixiu (838–883) in his poem “Seven Loves”: “He was brought down by rotted ribs, / Which sent his drunken soul to the other world.” Although there is no way we can verify this claim, it sounds credible—such a chest problem could have been caused by his abuse of alcohol. In his final years, Li Bai’s drinking and poverty would have aggravated his pulmonary condition. But the third version of his death is far more fantastic: in this version, he drowns w
hile drunkenly chasing the moon’s reflection on a river, jumping from a boat to catch the ever-shifting orb.

  Even though this scene smacks of suicide and is perhaps too romantic to be believed, it is the version that has been embraced by the public—in part because Li Bai, as his poetry shows, loved the moon. Even in his early childhood he was fixated on it. In his poem “Night Trip in Gulang,” he writes, “As a young child, I had no idea what the moon was / And I called it a white jade plate. / Then I wondered if it was a mirror at the Jasper Terrace / That flew away and landed on top of green clouds.” In Chinese poetry, Li Bai was the first to use the image of the moon abundantly, celebrating its loftiness, purity, and constancy. He imagined the moon as a serene landscape with sublime dwellings for xian, or immortals, who are often surrounded by divine fauna and flora and their personal pets. The beliefs of the ancient Chinese did not separate divinity from humanity, and their imagined heavenly space resembled the human world, with similar (but more fantastic) landscapes and architecture and creatures. If cultivated enough, any human being could rise to the order of divinity, becoming a xian—many temples in China worshiped these kinds of local deities. Heaven was inhabited by these beings, who were somewhat like superhumans, powerful and carefree and immortal.

  The moon in Li Bai’s poetry is also associated with one’s home or native place, and as a beacon shared by people everywhere, universal and ever reliable—“Raising my head, I see the bright moon, / And lowering it, I think of home” (“Reflection in a Quiet Night”). The legend of his attempt to embrace the moon suggests an ultimate fulfillment of his wish and vision—a reversed spiritual ascent. Some of his contemporaries believed him to have been a star in his previous life, and so by joining the moon in the water, he returned to the heavenly space where he had once dwelled. The brief “Li Bai Biography” in the eleventh-century book New Tang History reads, “When giving birth to Li Bai, his mother dreamed of the star Venus, so he was named Taibai (Venus).”

  The poets who came after him have continued to celebrate his moonlit death: even though they know it may not be true, across the centuries they have eulogized the shining moment in their verses. Even today, lovers of Li Bai’s poetry indulge in the myth. One contemporary scholar writes that Li Bai “rode a whale, floating away with the waves, toward the moon.”2 This heavenward journey is presented from the distraught, drunken poet’s point of view so that Li Bai appears to be returning to his original, divine position. Such romanticization shows the nature of scholarship around Li Bai, which is partly based on legends and myths. Because people want him to have a glorious end, they have been eager to perpetuate the moon-chasing legend.

  However, for all the imaginative attempts to glorify him, a single clear voice spoke about his situation presciently when the poet was still alive and in exile. His staunch friend Du Fu laments in his poem “Dreaming of Li Bai”:

  冠蓋滿京華 斯人獨憔悴

  孰云網恢恢 將老身反累

  千秋萬歲名 寂寞身後事

  《夢李白》

  The capital is full of gorgeous carriages and gowns,

  But you are alone gaunt and sallow despite your gift.

  Who is to say that the way of heaven is always fair?

  At your old age you can’t stay clear of harm.

  Your fame that’s to last ten thousand years

  Will become a quiet affair after you are gone.

  ORIGINS

  When we talk about Li Bai, we should keep in mind that there are three of him: the actual Li Bai, the self-created Li Bai, and the Li Bai produced by historical and cultural imagination. Ideally, our ambition here should be to present the actual Li Bai as much as we can while also trying to understand the motivations and consequences of his self-creation. But we should also bear in mind that such an ambition is necessarily tempered by the relative scarcity of verifiable information on Li Bai’s life.

  Several chronologies of his life have been produced in recent decades. They are very similar in content and approach, listing the major biographical events mainly based on the information provided in his writings, the principal source of his self-creation. Every one of his biographers writing in Chinese has fleshed out Li Bai’s life according to these events, and these biographies have themselves built on each other over time. Three of the most prominent and most useful have served as my main sources: A Critical Biography of Li Bai, by Zhou Xunchu; A Biography of Li Bai, by Li Changzhi; and Li Bai: A Biography, by An Qi. In English, Arthur Waley published his The Poetry and Career of Li Po nearly seventy years ago; though the information in his slender book is incomplete and somewhat outdated, the monograph still shows solid scholarship and sound judgments, and I have sourced from it as well. In recent decades, the Li Bai Institute in the city of Ma’anshan has regularly published volumes of academic papers, some of which have also helped me construct my narrative. Like the writers of the chronologies, these scholars rely foremost on the original poetry—over the centuries people have created stories and episodes of his life based on the references provided in his verses. Still, according to Li Bai’s uncle, Li Yangbing, “nine out of ten of his poems” are lost. His writings that are available to us now are based on two collections of his works compiled by his disciple Wei Hao and Li Yangbing—about a thousand poems and essays—and they are only a small part of his total output.

  Although Li Bai’s own poems are our most important sources, a few of his friends also wrote about him. We have from them a handful of poems and short pieces of prose that depict his personality as well as his physical appearance. According to his contemporaries, he had striking features and an insouciant personality. Wei Hao describes him with flashing eyes and a powerful, energetic mouth: “His eyes were piercingly bright while his mouth opened like a hungry tiger’s. He often tied a sash around him, which gave him a casual but elegant manner. Because he had been inducted into the Daoist society in Qi [modern northeastern Shandong], he wore a black embroidered hat.”1 Such hats were characteristic of Daoist masters at the time. Throughout the centuries that followed this writing, some portraits of Li Bai have resembled Wei Hao’s description. Gao Shi’s verses evoke a tall, broad man with a commanding presence: “Duke Li has an innate grandeur. / He’s strapping with a straight back. / His mind wanders through different worlds / While his robe and hat fit the current fashion here.”2 Li Bai was cheerful and stylish; in fact, he often described himself as “a carefree spirit,” someone who could never truly fit the mold of the government official he had been expected to become. The stories of his legendary drinking also reveal a free-spirited nature. Du Fu praised him as an unshakable drinker, saying, “Even summoned by the Son of Heaven, / He won’t get on the boat.” In another poem, Du Fu writes that Li Bai had “a divine bone structure,” which matches Gao Shi’s line: “strapping with a straight back.”

  There is also a rare piece of material evidence that offers more direct insight into Li Bai’s personality and skill: we still have a small scroll of calligraphy inscribed by him, containing twenty-four words. This is the only extant calligraphy of his. It was loved by Mao Zedong, who kept it for years before surrendering it to the Forbidden City’s museum in 1958. In China, calligraphy has long been a common way of displaying one’s literary cultivation and artistic spirit, and handwriting is traditionally read as an index of sorts to one’s character and even physique. Bai’s small scroll states, “The mountain is high and the water long; only a vigorous brush can portray the beauty and grandeur. Inscribed by Taibai at Shangyang Terrace, on the 18th Day.” It is evidently an occasional piece, whose context is unclear. Yet the lettering is extraordinarily robust and beautiful and floating, displaying the writer’s innate radiance. These characters show the work of a master calligrapher with a striking, unique style. Judging by the bold beauty of his calligraphy, Li Bai must have been spiritually free and physically strong.

  There is
scant information on Bai’s childhood and family background. What we have is largely from the accumulated scholarship around him, which has striven to flesh out his life. In his writings, he almost never mentions his parents or siblings. Strikingly, he doesn’t say a word about his mother. It is believed that ethnically she was not a Han Chinese but from a minority tribe, probably a Turk. Mixed marriages were common in the far-flung land of China’s western frontier, where the Li family lived for two or three generations, and from where they later migrated back inland to Sichuan. China’s border was not clearly defined at the time, and the vast western region was inhabited by Mongols, Persians, Turks, and Uighurs. The borders continually shifted among those western kingdoms as well, some of which were formed by allied tribes. Wars were often fought, and states appeared and disappeared. As a result, people of different ethnicities mingled, and interracial marriages were inevitable. It’s believed that Li Bai was half Han and had foreign features—this has not been proved conclusively, though we do know that people of his time could tell that he was partially hu, barbarian. The Tang dynasty was a relatively tolerant regime—much more open than the China of our time—and foreigners could find suitable roles in society and government. Even some top marshals in the Chinese army were foreigners.

  Although Bai never speaks of her directly, it’s safe to say that his mother was a remarkably strong woman, full of vitality and endurance. She gave her husband several children, and Bai, despite having numerous older brothers ahead of him, was wild with energy and spirit. It is hard to fathom how strong the older sons must have been. We know that Bai had a younger sister, named Round Moon, who either came back to Sichuan with their family or was born inland, and who later married a local man. Her grave, which lies in the family’s Sichuan hometown of Jiangyou, is still well kept and surrounded by flowers and plants. Bai also had a younger brother, who might have been born in Sichuan. Before returning inland, the Li family had lived in the area of Suyab (modern Tokmok in Kyrgyzstan), which in the Tang dynasty was under the control of Anxi Circuit, a regional government, as well as a military command.3 Li Bai’s father was a successful merchant dealing in grains, fabrics, wines, dried foods, utensils, and paper. Paper was widely available in China at the time, and there were many kinds made from various materials, such as hemp, straw, and bark. Bamboo paper, durable and glossy, was by far the most precious. Through the Silk Road, the famous network of trade routes begun in the Han dynasty (206 BC–AD 220) connecting China, India, Central Asia, Arabia, Africa, and Europe, paper was introduced to Arabia and then to Europe. Li Bai’s father was one of those traders whose caravans of camels carried westward commodities produced in China. They also trekked inland with goods from the outlying western regions—mostly pelts, medicinal herbs, and dried fruits. The man often took his older sons on his trading trips inland and taught them how to conduct business. Along the Yangtze River the Lis had several trading stations and their enterprise continually expanded. The evidence suggests that they amassed a considerable amount of wealth.