year, Bei Dao took up an appointment as the Lois and Willard Mackey Chair in Creative Writing at Beloit College. During that year, an essay collection, Blue House, and a poetry collection, Unlock, were published in English. In 2001, after his father became seriously ill, Bei Dao was granted permission to visit him in Beijing; his visit in December of that year marked his first time in China since 1989. The experience prompted him to begin work on a memoir about his youth. In 2002, Bei Dao joined a delegation from the International Parliament of Writers—including Russell Banks, José Saramago, Wole Soyinka, Breyten Breytenbach, Vincenzo Consolo, Juan Goytisolo, and Christian Salmon—for a visit to the poet Mahmoud Darwish in the Palestinian territory of the West Bank. The visit caused a diplomatic row between Israel and Portugal after Israel objected to José Saramago's public characterization of Israeli policy toward Palestinians. The visit garnered further attention when the delegation met with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Bei Dao described the trip in an essay, "Midnight's Gate", which became the title of a collection of essays that appeared in English in 2005. Between 2002 and 2005, Bei Dao was based primarily in New York City. He taught at Stony Brook University, and spent a semester as a visiting writer at the University of Alabama. During this period, he remarried and had a son. From 2005 to 2007, he was a writer-in-residence at the University of Notre Dame. Hong Kong and latest work In 2006, the Chinese government allowed Bei Dao to return permanently to China. However, in 2007, he moved to Hong Kong instead, where he was offered a permanent faculty position at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His visits to the mainland have been rare. For example, in 2011 he made a surprise visit to the Qinghai Lake International Poetry Festival, where he was swarmed by admirers. In 2009, he became a naturalized American citizen. In 2010, his memoir, City Gate, Open Up, appeared in Chinese (it appeared in English in 2017), and in the same year a retrospective of his poetry, The Rose of Time: New and Selected Poems, was published in English. Beginning in 2014, Bei Dao served as editor for a series of books for children, an initiative he undertook after he was disappointed by the quality of poetry his son was taught in school. In addition to his