Essay On A Perpetual Stranger By Bei Dao

As once said, “Congratulations, you have survived the war. Now live with the trauma.” When it comes to revolutions, wars, battles, or any sort of conflict can affect many people in many different ways. For author, Bei Dao, he was traumatized, in one way or another, and used writing as a way to cope. Bei Dao was grew up in the midst of the Communist Revolution and witnessed the worst excesses of the Culture Revolution. The Culture Revolution lasted from 1966 to 1976, and was a movement that tried to remake Chinese society by destroying all vestiges of intellectual and cultural life. Dao’s poetry became a part of the reaction of the revolution in the late 1970’s (Dao, 145). The effects of the revolution caused Dao to lose himself and to combat his emotions and the government, he wrote. Traumatic situations can create

Lines four and five tied into lack of opinionated communication by saying, “my silence it can’t comprehend all we have to exchange” (Dao, 147). These lines make it very prominent that a person can lose themselves because they do not talk about how they feel. As discussed in the previous paragraph, without speaking you lose your say on the government and how to combat it. The poem then goes to state, “a perpetual stranger I am to myself” (Dao, 147). This shows how they only view themselves as a stranger because they do not know who they are. During the Culture Revolution, silence was the main reason people did not know who they were. A voice and an opinion makes a person who they are. Line thirteen and fourteen wraps up A Perpetual Stranger with, “my shadow is my beloved heart the enemy” (Dao, 147). They only have themselves and the government is the enemy that caused that. In the end, they are faced with loneliness because there is a lack of speaking how they feel. Overall, the government narrowed how people felt and viewed