In 724 A.D., the twenty-three-year-old poet Li Bai got on a boat and set out from his home region of Shu, today’s Sichuan province, in search of Daoist learnings and a political career. He wasn’t headed anywhere in particular. Instead, he began a life of roaming—hiking up mountains to Daoist sites, meeting men of letters all over the country, and leaving behind hundreds of poems about his travels, his solitude, his friends, the moon, and the pleasures of drinking wine. In the centuries since, Li’s verse, by turns playful and profound, has made him China’s most beloved poet.
In “The Banished Immortal,” a biography of Li, the novelist Ha Jin narrates the poet’s unusual life with erudition and empathy. Jin, a National Book Award-winning writer, is most known for his fiction, which is largely set in China during the Cultural Revolution and in Chinese immigrant communities in the U.S. One might easily take “The Banished Immortal,” his first work of nonfiction, as a departure from his previous work. But a close reading suggests that it is a return to his early themes, and a tribute to the poet he was before making his mark as a novelist. In some ways, the banished poet’s life even mirrors the biographer’s.
That mirroring, though never made explicit, arrives early in the book. Jin, recounting Li’s leaving his home town and venturing into the wilderness, writes, “As he was sailing down the Yangtze, he must have sensed that he was about to become rootless. He would have to accept his homelessness in this world.” This is a striking observation, especially from Jin, whose controlled prose usually avoids speculation. One suspects that the sentiment comes not from the established writer Ha Jin but from the wounded immigrant poet he was, in the nineteen-eighties, when he first came to the U.S., for doctoral work. At the time, Jin was in his twenties, and, in 1989, he watched the Tiananmen Massacre from afar—not knowing what would happen to his home, and, like Li, not knowing if it was home anymore.
Li Bai lived most of his life during the peak of the Tang Dynasty, an era known for its openness, commerce, and thriving literary scene, and his travels included a string of meetings with state officials. Li was convinced after each of these meetings that he’d soon launch his political career. But what made him a poet might have ruined him as a politician. He lived unconventionally—drinking wine into the night, wandering around after curfew, mingling with people from all walks of life. He was always deemed too free-spirited to be a safe candidate for office. Even Jin’s restrained tone can’t obscure Li’s extravagant life, which saw the poet ping-pong between pawning clothes for cups of wine and having the Emperor serve him a ladle of soup. In times of disappointment, his faith kept him afloat. He wrote, “Heaven begot a talent like me and must put me to good use / And a thousand cash in gold, squandered, will come again.” Sometimes his confidence seems close to egomaniacal: when a summons from the imperial court came, he gloated, “laughing out aloud with my head thrown back, / I walk out the front gate. How can a man / Like myself stay in the weeds for too long?”
Li’s fortunes soured in 755, when the general An Lushan began a rebellion that would lead to a period of profound political instability. Amid the conflict, the Emperor’s sons vied for the throne; one of them, Prince Young, recruited Li to be a top adviser, which Li hoped would be his big break in politics. But he was joining the losing side. Prince Young’s elder brother, Emperor Suzong, prevailed, and Li was captured and eventually banished. Believing that he was treated unfairly, Li was also disillusioned by the corrupted court, where the suffering of common people was rarely acknowledged. He didn’t write many poems after that, but, when he did, he often shifted his focus from heavenly images to earthly scenes. Once, when staying at an old acquaintance’s house, he observed the harsh life of an ordinary family: “The peasant families have to work hard. The woman next door keeps pounding rice in the cold. My hostess kneels to serve me wild rice, Moonlight shining on the full white plate.”
For Jin, Tiananmen marked a similar disruption, both in his life and in his work. After the massacre, he hastened to bring his family Stateside. When his six-year-old arrived, he and his wife were forced to explain the move; in a poem, Jin recalls his wife telling their child, “They killed people like us.” When Jin later tried to visit China, his visa was repeatedly denied. He finally gave up when his mother, who hadn’t seen him for almost thirty years, died in 2014. Around the time of Tiananmen, Jin also decided to begin writing in English, and many of his later novels (“A Map of Betrayal,” “A Free Life”) see him inhabit Chinese-Americans thrust into a confrontation with their homeland.
In 1993, when Jin graduated, with a Ph.D. in English, he fantasized about a future rich in opportunity. Reality soon intervened: he landed only one interview and didn’t hear back. It was then that he thought of Li Bai (or Li Po, as the poet is known in the West) and began to see hardship as a path to literary excellence. In a poem called “Gratitude,” Jin writes:
He continues:
In the same poem, Jin found something else in common with Li: “Those ancient masters were also forced to leave home.” The state of exile, even when chosen, came with mourning. Li Bai’s poems are filled with reunions and partings, rapture and sorrow, and they tend to suggest that we are alone and lost in the world. When seeing off his friend, the prominent poet Meng Haoran, Li conjured this image: “His sail casts a single shadow in distance, then disappears, / Nothing but the Yangtze flowing on the edge of the sky.” Li, like Jin, never returned to his home. But he certainly missed it. One of his most celebrated poems sees the writer contemplate a quiet night:
Ha Jin might have thought of this poem during cold nights outside Boston. (In “To an Ancient Chinese Poet,” he imagines Li Bai on a drunken night with a shy moon. “What’s the use of fame as a poet?” Jin hears the poet pondering. “It’s a silent affair a thousand years after me.”) And yet Jin’s work usually rejects such nostalgia. In his book of essays, “The Writer as Migrant,” from 2008, he writes, of those who can no longer return to their homes, “Their ships are gone, and left on their own in a new place, they have to figure out their bearings and live a life different from that of their past.” Once the migrants have left, they must embrace their plight. “The acceptance of rootlessness as one’s existential condition,” Jin writes, “exemplifies the situation most migrant writers face.”
Although both Li Bai and Ha Jin accepted their rootlessness, they had different ways of coping with it. Li sought constantly to cloak his pain; he chased the joy of encounters and used wine to suspend his dread. (“The fine wine of Lanling gives off a fragrance— / Held in a jade bowl, it shines with amber light,” he once wrote.) Jin, meanwhile, believes that the past—and one’s home—become a part of you, no matter the distance. In one poem, Jin writes about his grandmother, who passed away in China and spoke English to him in a dream. “No, no, you couldn’t pick up / foreign stuff over there / You must have been here, / here, in me,” he writes. “The Banished Immortal” is a biography, but it is also a document in which a rootless writer nods to the past inside him. Writing about Li Bai—his life, his work, and his country—Jin finally returns home.
