The Golden Peacock: Selected Poems by Jin Zhong
The Golden Peacock is a bilingual collection of selected poems by Chinese poet Jin Zhong(pen name of Zhong Guo), written across nearly four decades, from 1987 to 2025. Moving between Harbin, Beijing, San Diego, Alaska, Ukraine, and the Far East, these poems trace the inner journey of a poet shaped by exile, history, memory, and survival.
Jin Zhong belonged to the generation of young Chinese poets whose lives were forever changed by the events surrounding Tiananmen Square in 1989. After participating in the student demonstrations while studying at Beijing Foreign Studies University, he was expelled from the university and later left China for the United States. Exile, displacement, and the search for spiritual refuge became central themes in his poetry.
Yet The Golden Peacock is not only a book about political history. It is also a book of snow, lanterns, rain, wolves, stone sculptures, daughters, bridges, and moonlight. These poems move quietly between personal memory and collective tragedy, between Eastern philosophy and Western literary tradition. The influence of poets such as Emily Dickinson, Anne Sexton, Lorca, and Brodsky appears throughout the collection, while the landscapes of the Far East and Southern California give the poems their own unique atmosphere.
In poems like Snow Doesn't Care, The Marigold Bridge, Yang Heshan's Umbrellas, and Copper Lantern, Amber Lantern, Jin Zhong transforms exile into a poetry of clarity, tenderness, and endurance. His language is restrained yet luminous, carrying the silence of snowfields, the sorrow of history, and the stubborn hope of survival.
The title poem, The Golden Peacock, recalls the bicycle brand the poet rode in his youth through the streets of Harbin and Beijing. In this collection, the golden peacock becomes a symbol of beauty preserved through hardship, memory surviving across continents, and poetry continuing to shine even after loss.
Both intimate and expansive, The Golden Peacock is a rare bilingual work that speaks to readers across cultures - a poetic record of one man's passage through history, exile, art, and love.
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