City Gate, Open Up - Softcover

“Written with honesty, conscience and courage, this is a powerful account that merges personal memories with the collective history in the making of modern China, and inspires the reader to consider the many important social and political concerns in Chinese society that still remain today.”
- Asian Review of Books

“The language of Bei Dao’s memoir, seamlessly translated by fellow poet Yang, is elegantly simple and guilelessly accessible....Winter white cabbage, vinyl records, pet rabbits, banned books, and first and last “I love yous” provide intimate glimpses that “open up” to reveal extraordinary, immediate testimony of challenges survived in a life intensely lived.”
- Terry Hong, Booklist

“City Gate, Open Up is an ocean of recollections. Bei Dao's impressionistic account of his childhood and youth in Beijing, is unlike any book he has ever written. He builds an imaginative city that readers can actually inhabit, much like his early poetry creates concepts worth living for. -- Ratik Asokan, Caravan Magazine”
- Ratik Asokan, Caravan Magazine

“A nuanced account of China in the era of the Cultural Revolution, seen through one young man’s eyes. Since that young man became a poet, it is also beautifully textured, full of the sounds, sights, and scents of a Beijing that is no more.”
- Publisher's Weekly

“Bei Dao uses words as if he were fighting for his life with them. He has found a way to speak for all of us.”
- Jonathan Spence, The New York Times Book Review

“Bei Dao's writing provides ample evidence of the written word's potential to effect political change.... Few living writers possess a voice as elegant.”
- Andrew Ervin, The Philadelphia Inquirer

“In 18 essays, crafted with poetic precision and enriched by Jeffrey Yang’s assiduous translation, Bei Dao depicts a cast of memorable characters with humor and insight: a tenacious family nanny always on the lookout for revolutionary opportunities; a talented schoolmate who sneaked across the border to Burma to join guerrilla forces; and the author’s father, a former government propaganda official and a moody authoritarian at home... [These] essays are clear and intimate, like the black-and-white snapshots scattered through the text. While the descriptive opulence of his prose evokes Beijing’s sights, sounds and smells, it can be overwhelming at times... Poignant.”
- Wenguang Huang, Wall Street Journal

“What a fine book! Funny, astute, touching, subtle, personal, widely human.”
- Gary Snyder

“With precise lyricism, Bei Dao resurrects a vanished city and time in China, creating a rich literary-cum-historical record of the world’s greatest national transformation. But this tender memoir by a great poet also describes the poignant longings, small joys and sorrows of all of us who grew up in places called ‘underdeveloped.’”
- Pankaj Mishra

“The soul of post-Mao poetry, Bei Dao reveals in this intimate, lyrical memoir a China that still haunts us with its brutal past and aching humanity. Like Balzac's Paris, Dickens' London, and Pushkin's St. Petersburg, Bei Dao's Beijing is a microcosm caught in a time warp, forever titillating our imagination.”
- Yunte Huang, Editor of The Big Red Book of Modern Chinese Literature