Kwang-chung Yu: Nostalgia (1972)

In the wake of the Chinese Civil War, over one million people fled from mainland China to Taiwan in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Among them was Kwang-chung Yu (1928–2017), a renowned poet, essayist, and translator, who settled in Taiwan in 1950 after spending a year in Hong Kong. The profound sense of displacement and rootlessness in a land that often marginalized exiled mainlanders (waishengren) and the uncertainty of returning to his ancestral homeland across the Taiwan Strait fueled an enduring sorrow of nostalgia. After over two decades of yearning for his lost homeland, Yu found an outlet for his deep and distilled emotions and thoughts in poetry, composing his seminal work Nostalgia in just 20 minutes in 1972. Translated into 17 languages and included in the standard literature curricula in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, the poem resonates deeply with the Chinese diaspora due to its vivid imagery, rhythmic elegance, as well as its poignant exploration of both nostalgia and the search for belonging and home far away from home. While exile has been universally acknowledged as a “potent, even enriching, motif” in modernist literature, as F. M. Chen, among others, pointed out in 2019, what makes Yu’s work unique is his fusion of traditional Chinese literary imagery with Western modernist aesthetics, shaped by his critical approach to Western modernism, a movement that was introduced inTaiwan in the 1950s.

Nostalgia as Historically and Contextually Specific

Nostalgia, structured in four stanzas with 16 lines and 88 words, captures four pivotal life moments in Yu’s life, namely childhood, youth, adulthood, and the present, and is marked by its “symmetrical beauty of neatness and balance” as Y. H. Xie said in 2019. Moreover, the poem is infused with what historian Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang describes as a “historically and culturally conditioned memory.” Yu transforms the abstract diasporic feelings of nostalgia into vivid imagery: “a tiny stamp” symbolizing correspondence with his mother while attending a boarding school, “a narrow boat ticket” marking his return to his wife after studying in the U.S., “a low, low grave” signifying his mother’s death, and “a shallow strait” indicating the division between his motherland and Taiwan. The repeated use of “here” and “there” in each stanza underscores the spatial and temporal distance between places and conveys a melancholic yearning for bygone times. Although Nostalgia references the Taiwan Strait and was written during the Cultural Revolution, Yu insisted in an interview with People’s Daily in 2014 that the poem was apolitical and merely conveyed his cultural nostalgia for the people, geography, history, and culture of China. Despite its politicization across mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, the poem remains the embodiment of an “everlasting longing for an abstract cultural homeland; one that he cannot return to” as D. H. M. Yang wrote in 2020. Such mainlander cultural nostalgia also resonates with Taiwanese novelist Hsien-yung Pai, who explores similar themes in Taipei People and claimed in an interview in 2025, “My homeland is Chinese traditional culture.”

Homecoming as the End of Nostalgia? 

During Yu’s four-decade estrangement, mainland China underwent economic, political, social, and cultural transformations. He returned to the mainland in 1992 after the travel ban was lifted in 1987. Over the next two decades, he visited it approximately 50 to 60 times. In 2008, he expanded Nostalgia: “In the future, nostalgia is a long bridge / I come to this end / You go to that end.” These words suggest a reconciliation with nostalgia through the act of homecoming. Yet, they raise deeper questions: Was Yu’s nostalgic dream realized when he returned to modernized mainland China? Or did his return shatter that dream when he found his motherland changed so profoundly as to feel foreign? Can homecoming truly resolve his enduring sorrow of nostalgia? Empirical studies suggest that homecoming often engenders feelings of being “out of place,” new displacement, or even a second exile, as the present can never fully recapture the bygone past and the imagined homeland. Homing is never a complete process; its temporality and processuality are precisely what make nostalgia and homecoming inexhaustible themes in literature.

Heidelberg, July 2025
Shasha Lin, TP B04

Text Sources:

Chen, F. M. (2019). Yu Guangzhong’s modernist spirit: From in Time of Cold War to Tug of War with Eternity. In P. Manfredi, & C. Lupke, (Eds.), Chinese Poetic Modernisms (pp. 132–152). Brill. 

Li, Y. L. & Zhao, X. B. (2014, March 1). Poet Guangzhong Yu’s Nostalgia. People’s Daily. https://paper.people.com.cn/rmwz/html/2014-03/01/content_1425503.htm

Luo, X. & Ma, H. L. (2025, May 6). Exclusive interview | Pai Hsien-yung: My homeland is not a specific place, but Chinese traditional culture. The Paper. https://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_30770697 

Xie, Y. H. (2019). A comparative study on rhetoric expressions and effects of fifteen English versions of Nostalgia. Frontiers in Educational Research, 2(1). 21–33.

Yang, D. M. H. (2020). The great exodus from China: Trauma, memory, and identity in modern Taiwan. Cambridge University Press.