China let go of a bold and brilliant genius when Huang Xiang left the country. But actually, the story is darker than that.

Huang Xiang (sounds like Hwang Shang) was born into a landowning family in China in 1941, eight years before Mao Zedong assumed power. Huang’s father, a general in the nationalist Kuomintang army, was captured by the Communists and executed in 1951. For the sins of this heritage, young Huang was barred from school at age 11. Instead, he stole into the family attic and devoured the books of Chinese masters he discovered there: Lao Tzu, Li Bai, Du Fu, as well as translations of Western equals, the likes of Emerson, Whitman, Lincoln, Freud, Kant. Somehow still a dreamer and free spirit, he began to write poetry.

Huang says in the Youtube video embedded below that it was a bit of romanticism in the poetry he wrote as a teenager, the innocent-sounding story of a “meeting a shepherd girl, who had come down from a snowy mountain, while singing a song” that earned him his first sentence to prison. That was 1959, and the first of 6 different imprisonments totaling twelve full years between then and 1995. “I lost both freedom of expression and physical freedom because of my dreams,” he says in Chinese in the video.

By 1968, Huang’s poems became darker and wilder. One was in fact called “Wild Beasts”; its translated text is below.

In 1978, Huang and three of his friends traveled from his hometown in Hunan province to Beijing. The Cultural Revolution was over, but in a moment that Huang describes like an epiphany, he felt he must “let the whole world hear his roar.” He painted an image of a huge torch on a wall in Beijing and wrote the character for “Enlightenment.” Then, physically protected by a spontaneous young crowd that had encircled him, he began reciting his powerful poems.

People reacted. The Communist Party reacted. (They sent a plane to fetch his files from his home in Hunan.) It was the beginning of a nationally changing mood and a movement called the Democracy Wall Movement. Huang became, in too-sterile words, an advocate for democracy and human rights. In 1986, Huang was sent to a forced labor camp for 3 years for “disturbing social order.”  In 1997, fearing more imprisonment, he managed to leave China with his wife, Zhang Ling. Through his years of imprisonment she had safeguarded his poems, none of which have ever been published in mainland China. The years of hardship and punishment had cost him broken bones, much of his hearing, and his teeth.

Huang Xiang was granted asylum in the U.S., and that is how he ended up in Pittsburgh, in a place called the City of Asylum, which I first heard about from our friends at ArtPlace America.  There are Cities of Asylum all around the world, founded about 20 years ago to provide sanctuary for exiled at-risk writers. A couple from Pittsburgh, Henry Reese and Diane Samuels, happened to hear Salman Rushdie speak in town. When he happened to mention the Cities of Asylum in Europe, they were interested. To say “interested” is an understatement.

For six years, Reese and Samuels asked the network in Europe to let them create a Pittsburgh City of Asylum. One day they got a call back: yes. The Pittsburgh agreement would be unusual, as other centers were organized with institutional sponsorship, mostly universities. Pittsburgh, as a community, would go it alone. Reese, who had run successful businesses involving coupon books, telemarketing, and call centers, and Samuels, who is a visual artist, pulled together a group of friends and donors to give it a try for two years. They would need to raise money to provide housing, medical benefits, a living stipend for the writer.

They bought a former crack house on a small lane called Sampsonia Way and fixed it up. The lane feels like a Midwest version of a hutong in old Beijing. It sits in the close-in north side section of Pittsburgh known as the Mexican War Streets (with street names from battles and generals from the Mexican American War), a kind of gentrified Bohemian row-house neighborhood with many writers, artists, eclectic personalities and interesting people. Reese and Samuels live there, too.

Huang Xiang and his wife, Zhang Ling, arrived. Then the magic began to happen. No one had any rules for how this was supposed to work, so they all learned from one another.

Huang Xiang was full of ideas and energy. As Reese describes it, Huang was fairly bursting to let loose with all that had been pent up for so many years. Huang didn’t just recite a poem, he danced, shouted, waved, and lived that poem with his entire body and spirit. He was a master of performance.

Reese’s and Samuels’s default was to say yes to everything. When Huang saw Pittsburgh's Mt. Washington and said he'd like to carve a poem into the mountain, in the tradition of Chinese poets, Samuels didn't blanch but suggested he might paint his poems on the outside of his house instead. So they set up scaffolding around the frame house and Huang went to work, painting his poems in his own "grass style" calligraphy. He was “writing his house” as they now describe it. People could not help but notice House Poem. Before long, neighbors who didn’t even understand a word of Huang’s Chinese poetry, began to slip notes through the mail slot, with poems they had written themselves.