The books that enlightened me in childhood were Three Hundred Tang Poems and Guwen Guanzhi (Anthology of Ancient Prose), which I recited ceaselessly. Yet before I had even come of age, I was dropped into a living hell, and so my verse took on an unconventional cast, and the feeling within it ran all the deeper. Now, as I draw near the River of Oblivion, I look back and find that what I have loved most in this life, beyond all else, is thermodynamics. In my early years I was struck dumb by her incomparable beauty; later, through the Cultural Revolution, I became entangled in a passionate devotion to her—risking death, yet unable to tear myself away. It was precisely in those blood-soaked years that Erwin Schrödinger’s insight into What Is Life? resonated with me profoundly. After the Gang of Four collapsed, two seven-character regulated versus once arose in my mind, inspired by this resonance—yet they were never committed to paper. I remember two lines in particular:
“Ten years of catastrophe dragged on, night heavy as a millstone weighing down.
The pen moves against raised entropy, yet my heart burned on.”
This captures me during the Cultural Revolution, becoming a portrait of my first half-live. And now, as I contemplate the roots of the world’s present disorder, that same line has become a spur that drives the remainder of my days.
After settling in America, I basked in the warmth of family, the goodwill of friends and neighbors, and believed I would pass my latter years in peace. But a gathering anxiety—born of an uncanny sense of déjà vu—came upon me in wave after wave and grew stronger with each passing day. And what made it more unbearable still was that, in this slumbering America, the faint warnings I had sounded over thirty years had largely dissipated like smoke on the wind. And so the desire to write came upon me. This is my mission. The spirits of those comrades who once labored with me at the bottom of the coal mines, who worked alongside me in the jungles of the Qinling Mountains, are calling out to me. This is my mission. Among the millions of persecuted “rightists,” I am one of the lucky survivors; I also feel the wordless entrustments of the innumerable souls destroyed by the Chinese Communist Party under one political campaign or another. God has preserved me to this day—there is a reason for that. But the process by which evil, through cultural distortion, destroys human civilization is deeply deceptive; even writing in my mother tongue, stirring the reader’s empathy is no easy matter. Yet the speed at which cultural distortion is spreading across the globe, and the alarming rate at which it worsens, compel me to make an even harder choice.
I must write first in English—because English is the mother tongue of those who, for over a century, have appeased the CCP, marginalized the Republic of China, and treated the Chinese people as pawns; and because the people who today have the capacity and have already begun to reverse this absurd tide are, for the most part, also native speakers of English. I must write first in English—because the decisive battlefield in the war between good and evil is now America; once that beacon of freedom is extinguished, the end of the world will not be far behind. Having long witnessed the accelerating decline of Western society, I have come to understand that I must help the generations who grew up in peace and leisure to recognize a world they have never truly known—and to remind them to reexamine the society around them that they believe they understand so well. Only thus can the free world defeat its most evil external enemy with greater effectiveness: the Chinese Communist Party.
The CCP is an international criminal organization that grew from a gang of local bandits and thugs. The Chinese people must settle accounts with it for its historical crimes: colluding with foreign anti-Chinese forces, subverting the legitimate constitutional order of the Chinese nation, and imposing an illegal tyranny upon the mainland. The Chinese people must settle accounts with it for its ongoing crimes of undermining the sovereignty of the Republic of China and sowing chaos in Taiwan’s democratic rule of law. The world must hold this criminal organization accountable for disrupting the international order, violating the Sino-British Joint Declaration, and persecuting the people of Hong Kong. The world must hold it accountable for allowing a virus to spread across the globe, devastating economies and endangering public health. The international community must investigate the CCP’s crimes of genocide against Tibetans, Uyghurs, and Falun Gong practitioners, and must investigate its crimes of cultural genocide against the Han Chinese people. The international community must investigate the CCP’s crime against humanity of forced live organ harvesting. The world will ultimately bring this international criminal organization to justice. This may be a long historical process—or it may not take so very long. Whatever the pace, righteous public opinion must be the vanguard of action.
From childhood I held the genuine insights of Western thinkers in the deepest reverence. How dismaying, then, to discover shortly after settling in America that a great number of classic works, and many truly learned scholars, had already been pushed to the margins. Far-left elitists were occupying the upper strata of society, energetically promoting socialist currents of thought. Their numbers are few, but their power is enormous. The shallowness of these social luminaries’ understanding of Chinese civilization is astonishing, and their arrogant condescension and hypocrisy are nauseating. The chaos that grips America and the world today appear, on the surface, bewilderingly complex—but if one traces the thread to its source, the path will, in the end, wind round to clarity.
For over a century, the CCP has grievously distorted the culture of the Chinese nation, and cloaked in the garb of an ancient civilization, continues to deceive and poison many Chinese people as well as the outside world. Yet the brave people of Taiwan and their elected government have long preserved the essence of this great civilization, for which I am filled with reverence and gratitude. The pure language and traditional culture of the Chinese people are things that haunt my dreams and hold my soul. I have never admired the so-called argument for “discarding the dross and wholesale Westernization”; still less do I have any regard for the opposite extreme of ignorant clamor that the CCP stirs up. Even viewing it from a purely moral standpoint, what the Chinese nation possesses is not limited to the virtues of benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom, and faithfulness, or the graces of warmth, goodness, respect, thrift, and modesty. What commands even greater awe is magnanimity, ease and freedom of spirit, the wisdom, and the courage that lie hidden behind cold irony and paradox. The traditional philosophy of the Chinese nation is a genuine treasure—it needs no polishing to shine with its own brilliance. The few such gems I have displayed in my book are meant simply to suggest that, beyond the civilizations of Greece and of the Hebrew tradition, Chinese civilization possesses enormous potential to reinforce the values upon which America was founded. After professional editing and proofreading, the English edition of Déjà Vu was formally completed as early as the end of 2023. But it then ran into further obstacles and setbacks, and it was only at the beginning of last year that it could finally be formally published. Amid the gratification, one regret lingers: of the several hundred poems that most fully express the pillar of spirit that carried a soul through purgatory by way of negentropic advance, only one has found its way into the book. This short essay hopes, through the fragmentary links of Selected Poems by the Author, to attract the help of readers fluent in both English literature and Chinese literature. Until that remedy can be achieved, I pray that Western readers may still sense, through the words of this book, the cultural resonance of traditional China. The deep convergence of great civilizations will surely influence the outcome of the present battle between good and evil.
In the first half of my life, I had thought that glib, two-faced scoundrels—fair of face, beastly of heart—were a phenomenon peculiar to the East; in the second half, I have watched their counterparts entrench themselves at the very pinnacle of Western society. The difference is that the latter are more hypocritical—though fortunately they are not so adept at the game of manipulating language as their ancient masters in Greece two thousand years ago. Looking back on the years since I came to my senses, I see that I was only ever trying to remind people not to be intimidated by the posturing of such scoundrels, not to submit to their bullying—yet this alone was enough to bring me a life of hardship and misfortune. I received my awakening at the age of eighteen, having endured to the bone the entire process by which the CCP’s Anti-Rightist Campaign snapped the spines of the intellectuals; through the blood and storm of the Cultural Revolution, I advanced by negentropy and was reborn from catastrophe; witnessing the traces of blood left by the massacre of June Fourth, 1989, I woke from yet another shattered dream, broke free from the CCP’s tyranny, and became a naturalized citizen of America. Now, in old age, I look back across the ocean: the CCP, in violation of international agreements, strangled Hong Kong’s supremely rational civic movement, while the West stood by with folded arms; the Republic of China, long treated as a discarded pawn, rose swiftly after Taiwan’s democratization, forcing Western nations to begin adjusting their policies in their own interests. Now, the revolution of common sense in America is setting off seismic upheaval across the globe—may it ultimately shatter the global spread of cultural distortion and restore the light of dawn to human civilization. The ordeals of my decades in the earthly purgatory have gradually faded into a deep-buried sorrow—though it never quite disperses, it is, after all, a faint haze at the bottom of the heart. The old scholar has grown old, and seems to have truly returned to the happy little sprite that lived in his mother’s heart. In the midst of this contentment, I still wish to do something more—but looking back, I find I have already reached the age of extreme old age. With the helplessness of one whose remaining days are numbered, I bid farewell to the reader with a poem written on New Year’s Eve more than a decade ago:
Each year this night brings forth a surge of feeling, A lifted brow, a lifted brush—the verses come of themselves. The spirit-mirror has no stand, yet the spirit-terrace is clean; What lies beyond the self—let it be cast beyond the self.
With stillness I meet all change, and keep an open valley; With heart attending to the heart, spring remains forever. One coat of mist and cloud, one road of a life entire— Let the wind and rain come; let the heart be open to them.
January 16, 2026
Postscript: At first reading, these words seem almost like the author’s last testament; on closer reflection, perhaps not entirely so. Though verse has moved ceaselessly through his mind since adulthood, he never committed it to writing—what remains now is only the helplessness of searching through memory for scattered fragments. Beyond the explanation of why he must write first in English, this essay offers a singular lens through which to see the author’s unconventional poetic life, and may perhaps also serve as a parting gift for the day when he truly steps onto the Bridge of Forgetfulness.