The Banished Immortal

A Life of Li Bai (Li Po)

By: Ha Jin

Narrated by: David Shih

From the National Book Award-winning author of Waiting: a narratively driven, deeply human biography of the Tang dynasty poet Li Bai - also known as Li Po.

In his own time (701-762), Li Bai's poems - shaped by Daoist thought and characterized by their passion, romance, and lust for life - were never given their proper due by the official literary gatekeepers. Nonetheless, his lines rang out on the lips of court entertainers, tavern singers, soldiers, and writers throughout the Tang dynasty, and his deep desire for a higher, more perfect world gave rise to his nickname, the Banished Immortal. Today, Bai's verses are still taught to China's schoolchildren and recited at parties and toasts; they remain an inextricable part of the Chinese language.

With the instincts of a master novelist, Ha Jin draws on a wide range of historical and literary sources to weave the great poet's life story. He follows Bai from his origins on the Western frontier to his ramblings travels as a young man, which were filled with filled with striving but also with merry abandon, as he raised cups of wine with friends and fellow poets. Ha Jin also takes us through the poet's later years - in which he became swept up in a military rebellion that altered the course of China's history - and the mysterious circumstances of his death, which are surrounded by legend.

The Banished Immortal is an extraordinary portrait of a poet who both transcended his time and was shaped by it and whose ability to live, love, and mourn without reservation produced some of the most enduring verses.

©2019 Ha Jin (P)2019 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“The Tang-dynasty poet Li Bai, one of the most revered figures in Chinese literature, was torn between his ambition to become a great statesman and his Daoist aspiration to live a hermetic life. In this biography, the novelist Ha Jin tells Li’s story with insight and empathy. Born in 701, the son of a merchant, Li spent his life travelling in search of patrons to sponsor his political career and divine beings to help him transcend earthly knowledge. Instead, he met laborers ferrying goods along steep trails, young women waiting years for their betrotheds to return from mercantile expeditions, heroic soldiers stationed in the far north and forgotten by the court. Capturing such intimate longing and pain in his poems secured for Li the immortality denied him by politics and religion.” (The New Yorker)

“Ha Jin’s masterful style and deep affection for his subject make the book a pleasure to read - especially for those unfamiliar with Li Bai or Chinese poetry in general... The Banished Immortal liberally quotes Bai’s work, sometimes reproducing complete poems in translation to show the depth of his imagery and style. A number of readers will pick up this book knowing its author but not Li Bai, and Ha Jin makes sure they see Bai’s prodigious talent. Newcomers will be swept up in Bai’s personal history while fans of his work will enjoy Ha Jin’s own take on the man and his influence.” (Shelf Awareness, starred review)

“In China Li Po remains the bard of the land, if not the world - a most recognizable global brand, second only, perhaps, to Confucius. As with any cultural icon, beneath the shining veneer must lie untold stories, apocryphal or otherwise. In The Banished Immortal: A Life of Li Bai (Li Po), the National Book Award-winning author Ha Jin has excavated historical records and examined existing biographies, both in Chinese and English, to produce a rich, moving and titillating account of the poet’s life.... The Banished Immortal is a deeply empathetic portrait of a literary genius whose vicissitudes in life - filled with ambitions, frailties, losses and pains - would pale a Shakespearean drama.... Today, when power-grabbing politicians look out for themselves rather than the public, as they did in Li Po’s time, poetry has a herculean cleaning job to do. By giving us this mesmerizing biography, Ha Jin, who began his writing career as a poet and whose lucid narrative always contains a touch of poetry, sounds a warning gong for our troubled age.” (Yunte Huang, The Wall Street Journal)

Wonderful story!

The story is very well written and depicts the life of the great poet Li Bai in a very intimate manner while at the same time giving the listener a sense of a wider historical and cultural backdrop. Very inspiring and made even more interested in Chinese poetry and just poetry in general. Thank you for the great work!

Deep Dive Biography into Li Bai

Very well done. A biography of the life and times of Li Bai. With a cursory knowledge of Li Bai's poetry through translations into English, I had a romantic notion of this man. This biography gives an excellent account of the strenghts and weaknesses of the man. Also provides some insight into the Tang Dynasty which was also interesting. Recommended.

Standard Biography

This is a standard biography of a great historical figure in Chinese literature.

David Shih's narration is spot on.

An Absorbing Biography of a Great Poet

I’ve loved Ezra Pound’s translation of “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” ever since first reading it in university, but I’d never known much more about the writer of the original poem than that his Japanese name was Rihaku, his American name Li Po, and his Chinese name Li Bai. So I eagerly listened to and learned a lot from Ha Jin’s The Banished Immortal: A Life of Li Bai (2019).

It is hard to overestimate the importance of Li Bai (701-762) to Chinese culture. Liquor shops, temples, and factories, Ha Jin tells us, bear his name, and his poems are regularly quoted in Chinese TV dramas, children learn them by heart in school, and they appear carved in stone at tourist sites. Ha Jin acknowldges the difficulty of writing a biography of the most famous poet in Chinese history: a dearth of primary records and sources and a wealth of legends. He identifies three Li Bais: the actual man (revealed by a few records), the self-created man (projected through his poems), and the legendary man (imagined in centuries of popular episodes). Most biographers have focused on the second Li Bai, the image he created, as scholars have searched his roughly one thousand surviving poems (less than a tenth of his prodigious output) looking for clues about his life and personality. Ha Jin does that as well, but also relies on comments by Li Bai’s friends and on his own interpretations. The result is a fascinating look at the life of the Tang Dynasty super poet, nicknamed the Banished Immortal because people thought he’d begun as a star in heaven but gotten exiled to our mundane earth for some transgression. The manner and exact date of Li Bai’s death remain mysteries. A popular legend has him drowning while drunkenly embracing the reflection of the moon in a lake. Ha Jin says that the likeliest possibility is that he died of an alcohol-related disease.

The first movement of Bai’s life ran from his youth to middle age as he tried and failed to get a government position while traveling and drinking and making friends and enemies and writing poems about his travels and many other topics. His original genius at poetry, healthy ego, and impatience with fools repeatedly sabotaged his chances to get an official’s career, although he did make many friends who admired his abilities and bold personality, poetry, and calligraphy.

His fame as an original and brilliant poet finally won him what he’d thought was his life dream: a position at court. But he immediately learned that the Tang court was a den of corruption, that he could only earn money by accepting bribes for favors and access, and that he was not there to advise the emperor but to play the celebrity poet in the Imperial Academy, a menagerie of idiosyncratic entertainers, quacks, and conmen (like a self-proclaimed 3000-year-old man). Quickly making enemies of his fellow Imperial Academicians (by mocking them in a poem) and then of a powerful eunuch in charge of multiple armies and Emperor Shuenshong’s favorite consort, Bai soon had to resign and distance himself from court.

Bai spent the next phase of his life studying to become a certified Taoist monk, partly to put himself beyond the reach of his court enemies. The grueling qualification-initiation ritual permanently ruined his health.

His last years were ignominious, as he joined the losing side in a civil war of succession, resulting in his being exiled and reviled as a traitor. He was pardoned, but his final summons to return to court came after he’d already died in obscurity hoping for such a summons.

Bai was complex: he wrote wanderlust poems at home and homesick poems away from home, loved his first and second wives and kids and wrote poems for and about them but left them for long periods, and wanted to transcend the world to a heavenly plane but wrote poems about worldly concerns and cares. The biography is not a hagiography, Ha Jin calling Bai foolish and self-deluded for joining a rebel prince’s cause against his wife’s good advice. The irony of Bai’s life is that he wanted wealth, fame, and power on the one hand and transcendence on the other, failing at both and drinking too much to soothe his disappointment.

As he recounts Bai’s life, Ha Jin relates many interesting Chinese culture points, like the (still current) belief of poets, painters, and calligraphers that the best way to free up the creative powers is to get tipsy. Also interesting was China’s long history and familiarity with classics and famous figures from every period of it, such that in the eighth century Bai and his contemporaries studied and learned poetry from centuries before. Still more. During the Tang Dynasty people thought you could dramatically extend your life span by taking Taoist immortality pills (full of mercury and other poisons), the government was constantly worrying about barbarians on the borders, you could only get into the government by passing a test that only elites could sit for or by getting a connection to recommend you, and commoners couldn’t get within 100 feet of officials’ carriages.

One of the most interesting discoveries (for me) in the book is the great amount of occasional verse Bai wrote for family, friends, or officials about greeting, parting, missing, traveling, drinking, eating, thanking, apologizing, loving, requesting, as well as poems inspired by current events (like a failed war or corrupt officials), sublime views (of mountains, rivers, towers, etc.), pitiable scenes (of hardworking laborers etc.), or homesickness. Poems in the voices of women (courtesans, dancers, wives) and of soldiers on the frontier. Poems apologizing to his wife for being a bad husband or rhapsodizing about how sublime he is (a roc flying to heaven or a dragon dragged down to earth). Poems as letters, diary entries, essays, political critiques, or self-explorations. Chinese poetry must be very flexible to contain such a stunningly wide scope in content, style, and mood.

Ha Jin quotes excerpts from many famous (to the Chinese) poems by Bai, like one about his friend Haoran departing after a fine visit:

My friend is sailing west away from Yellow Crane Tower.
Through the March blossoms he is going down to Yan Cho.
His sail casts a single shadow in the distance, then disappears.
Nothing but the Yangtze flowing on the edge of the sky.

The audiobook reader David Shih is fine.

Anyone interested in Chinese history or world art and literature should find much nourishment in this book.

Bold and unstoppable, like an overflowing river

The 8th Century poet Li Bai is regarded in China as one of the all-time greats. He is presented here as a force of nature, a charismatic, “free-spirited and unbound” Taoist, who was also an excellent calligrapher and swordsman. Tragically, he spent much of his life struggling to earn a position as an official in a government plagued by intrigue. He was spontaneous, impulsive, irreverent -- everything that was frowned upon in the rigid, bureaucratic structure of that milieu. A flawed hero, he would sometimes come across as arrogant and was often drunk. Yet, he was appreciated as a genius for the inventiveness, immediacy and passion of his poetry:

“Lotus flowers come out of limpid water, / Natural, without any decoration.”

“Bright moonlight comes in straightaway, not allowing the mind to guess.”

This biograhy feels elegant and light, and reads almost like a children’s tale. It would transport me to the Tang dynasty and provide me with a welcome retreat from all the noise of modern day life. Narrator David Shih’s voice is serene and has just the right touch of innocence. (I’m glad that he can speak Chinese. He pronounces proper nouns — such as names of people or places — neutrally, but he uses the tones when he reads certain phrases that refer to Chinese concepts.)

I’m grateful for this audiobook. I got it based on a short article about it in the New York Times and it turned out to be a great find.

Exquisite balance

A remarkable balance of history, information and storytelling. Enhanced greatly by the sensitive, intelligent narration. What a joy to listen to! Like a erudite fairy tale as another reviewer has written.

Okay research, good writing, bad performance

Ha Jin is not a specialist on the Tang dynasty by any means, so his research on the historical context is often patchy. The writing is pretty good though, and his passion for Li Bai and his poetry is evident throughout.

It's too bad that this book is narrated by someone who speaks little to no Chinese. His pronunciation of Chinese proper nouns is very inconsistent, and his performance is bland overall.

Very dry and pedantic

I was not transported back to medieval China the way I hoped to be. I usually love the narration of David Shih, but even his voice seemed flat and disengaged. The poetry also seemed a bit repetitive. Some of the poems are remarkable mainly because of the very human personality which emerges. But the prose did not carry this forward. I had to give it up mid-way because of lack of interest on my part.

For the deepest lover

This is not for a passer by. This is for some with deep interest in China, Daoism or history buff.