Liao Yiwu

Liao Yiwu, the writer, has a lot in common with Ai Weiwei so I thought that by talking to him I might be better able to put Ai Weiwei and his fellow dissidents in some sort of context. For one thing Liao Yiwu has been arrested because of his writings and he has spent time in jail, in his case more than three years. He is also from the same generation as Ai Weiwei and so he and his family went through all the horrors of famine and the Cultural Revolution. And also like Weiwei, he understands the power of the most simple gestures and his unadorned writing, which is banned in China and which so infuriates the authorities that he has suffered imprisonment and torture, really consists of nothing more than pointing out: "Hey! Listen to what this perfectly ordinary person has to say about tehir experience of life in China today." He is like the little boy who points out that the emperor has no clothes; the Chinese Communist Party cannot bear it.

Like Ai Weiwei, he is constantly at loggerheads with the regime because he speaks his mind and rejects the Communist Party's view of reality, instead articulating his own vision of Chinese society and the vision of the people that he meets. He is indefatigable and personally courageous.

At the time I went to find him, in April 2011, Liao was living in Dali, an ancient and extremely beautiful city that sits on the shores of Lake Erhai, at the base of the sacred Mount Cangai. One of the most amazing things about China is its vastness and consequent incredible variety: variety of languages, of peoples, of landscapes. There are jungles, there are deserts, there are glaciers; there is the Tibetan Plateau, the oasis towns of the northwest; there are villages without electricity and then there is Shanghai's Bund. China is diverse in its diversity because it is one hundred countries yoked together.

Dali, in the province of Yunan, is as different from Beijing as a small town in Romania is from London or Frankfurt. Its city walls are short by Chinese standards, only six kilometres long. The landscape here is mountainous but the vegetation is subtropical -- forests of emerald green -- and the soil is as red as the face of Mars. Flying into Kunming, near Dali.

It was Liao Yiwu's epic poem 'Massacre', composed in response to the 1989 student uprising, that landed him in jail. A howling dirge -- part funeral oration, part shamanistic chant -- it was passed around literary circles in Beijing on old-fashioned magnetic cassette tapes. Magnitizdat, this was called in the Soviet Union: the technological extension of the samizdat culture. From the perspective of the internet age it was unbelievably labour-intensive.

When Liao finally got out of prison and made his way home to Chengdu, he discovered that his wife had left him and taken their infant son; his former friends were too frightened to speak to him; his registration permit had been cancelled, so he couldn't find work and he could at any moment he expelled to the countryside. He was penniless and his only possession was a wooden flute that he had made in prison. So began Liao's new life as an itinerant busker on the streets of Chengdu.

One of the characteristics that most defines Liao is his incredible resourcefulness, or rather not so much resourcefulness as his ability to continue his work without any resources at all. Just prior to his imprisonment, Liao's writing had taken a new turn: he had begun to interview ordinary Chinese people, people with poor chances in life, the diceng as the Chinese call them: those on the bottom rung of the ladder, the innumerable dispossessed and hopeless whose stories no one ever hears. The reality of everyday life for the mass of ordinary Chinese citizens is not something that the government wants to see portrayed. Prison was intended to bring to an end Liao's subversive activities but instead he simply began to interview his fellow inmates, and when he was finally released to wander the streets of Chengdu he quickly befriended the prostitutes, beggars and restaurateurs of his new milieu and set about interviewing them as well. It is a shared characteristic of many of the brave and inspiring people I met in China that even in the depths of despair they still attempted to preserve their individual voice (though I should point out that while in jail, Liao was subjected to such inhuman treatment that he did attempt to commit suicide on two occasions). One month before I met Liao the government had imposed yet another travel ban on him to prevent him from attending the International PEN Festival in New York.

Today, Liao's writing only has an audience at all because of the efforts of a handful of total strangers, devoted people who have ever even met Liao but who found themselves deeply moved by his work and who were determined that it should see the light of day. Wenguang Huang, a Chinese American, first heard of Liao's stories on public radio in 1990 and immediately recognised its freshness and significance. He wrote to Liao and offered to translate his work, and to find it a publisher in the west. For years, they collaborated without having a chance to meet. But they were both crystal clear about what they were trying to do: show China as it really is, not as it is presented in the government-controlled media. Then came Peter Bernstein, a New York literary agent and the son of Robert L. Bernstein, who founded Human Rights Watch and Human Rights Watch China. Though Wenguang Huang and Liao Yiwu were unknown in the US, Peter Bernstein took Wenguang's approach seriously and instantly recognised the quality of Liao's work. The third angel of serendipity was Philip Gourevitch, a New York-based writer who at the time had just been made editor of the Paris Review. Gourevitch read a story by Liao that Wenguang sent him and decided that it had to be published. None of these three men has met Liao but thanks to their efforts on his behalf, Liao's work has now been widely disseminated. His collection of interviews with diceng, with the translated title The Corpse Walker: Real-Life Stories, China from the Bottom Up, was published in the US in 2008 by Pantheon Books (a division of Random House), translated by Wenguang and with a foreword by Gourevitch. The interviewees include "the professional mourner", "the leper", "the peasant emperor", "the retired official", "the mortician", "the former red guard", "the Tianamen father", "the Falun Gong practitioner", "the illegal border crosser", "the grave robber", "the safecracker", "the migrant worker" and "the survivor". As Gourevitch writes in his foreword:

[Liao Yiwu] is a medium for whole muffled swathes of Chinese society that the Party would like to pretend do not exist: hustlers and drifters, outlaws and street performers, the officially renegade and the physically handicapped, those who deal with human waste and with the wasting of humans, artists and shamans, crooks , even cannibals -- and every one of them speaks more honestly than the official chronicles of Chinese life that are put out by the state in the name of the "people."

It is no exaggeration to say that Liao is a totemic figure among certain sections of the community of Chinese writers. And thanks to Bernstein, Wenguang and Gourevitch, and others who have backed his work in the west, he is now rated, as Gourevitch explains, with writers "as diverse as Mark Twain and Jack London, Nikolai Gogol and George Orwell, Francois Rabelais and Primo Levi".

On the way to Dali I had been overtly followed and as we made our way to a cafe, we were joined by two secret service agents. It was only Liao Yiwu's aloofness and utter contempt for them that steeled my nerves. The interview, which I had hoped to conduct in the same way that Liao conducts his own interviews with the diceng -- that is to say, in an informal manner that encourages the interviewee to explore even the most troubling aspects of his or her life -- ended up being somewhat surreal, and not just because it was being overheard by two members of the secret police. 

Because Liao's English is even worse than my Chinese, and I didn't want to misrepresent his words in any way, I had decided that we would need a translator. There was no way to arrange this from Hong Kong so I had gambled on finding someone in Dali. It is a tourist resort, so I hoped there would be plenty of English speakers around. However, this was a risky strategy for two reasons: first, I only planned to be in Dali for a few hours. The light aircraft that I'd flown in on, bumping over mountain tops like a rollercoaster, was returning to Kunming at midday. The second problem was that there was a distinct possibility that as soon as anyone started translating Liao's words they would realise who he was and the risks they were taking in helping him to talk to a foreigner, and they would stop. The two secret policemen weren't helping either. We made a strange-looking group as we shuffled through the old city searching for a translator: Liao slightly hunched, with a permanent expression of weary defiance; myself tall, white, more and more paranoid as the minutes passed; and then the two policemen skulking along behind us.

Thankfully, as this was Yunan province and we were far from Beijing, the police were comparatively relaxed. Liao told me that occasionally, depending on who was tailing him, he could persuade them o have a drink with him. After half an hour, just as I was beginning to panic, we found a youth hostel in a large, elegant old Qing dynasty-style villa, threadbare but copiously decorated with carved wood and red lacquer. I approached the manager, a middle-aged man with a kind, sensitive face. Although the weather was mild he was wearing a heavy brown leather jacket. His English was excellent and he agreed to translate. However, at this point, he still didn't know who Liao Yiwu was, though I did try to explain, to give him the chance not to get involved if he didn't want to risk it.

We sat down at the coffee table. The police agents, who hadn't taken off their coats, sat down at the next table. "Can you tell me your earliest memory?" I asked Liao. It's a question that he often asked his own interviewees. The translator duly translated the question, Liao nodded and paused and then said something back in Chinese. The translator, looking a little shocked, turned to me:

"He says his earliest memory is almost dying of starvation during the Great Leap Forward. Famine came and he was only four years old and he swelled up like a loaf of bread. Everyone thought he was going to die but then his mother took him to see a doctor and the doctor held him over a boiling cauldron filled with herbs. The herb steam cured him."

The translator glanced at Liao again -- who was sitting patiently, waiting for the next question -- and then he turned back to me and said, "Who is this guy?' I tried to explain again that he was a writer who had suffered at the hands of the government and whose work had been censored and suppressed. I thought that the interviewer would now call it a day but he didn't; he only became more interested, and he too was strangely unmoved by the presence of the secret police.

The questions continued and Liao's stories became more and more incredible. "The corpse walker," he said, "whose job it is to carry the dead body back to its final resting place in its home village, has a special code for communicating with hotel owners in rural Sichuan. They knock on the door and then shout out in a loud voice, "The god of happiness is here." That way the hotel is warned that the prospective guest has a dead body strapped to his back, hidden under a cloak, and he can either turn the corpse walker away quietly, or give him a room at the back and charge some extra dough. After the Cultural Revolution the Communists tried to crack down on this but of course it still goes on all the time because it is very important that they take their dead home for burial, whatever the Communists like to think."

I asked Liao about the people that he had interviewed. Several of his interviewees had made a particularly strong impression on me. Two of them he had met while in jail; one 'the peasant emperor', was an old man who claimed to be the emperor of China and insisted on everyone, prison staff included, addressing him as 'Your Highness'. He explained to Liao that he was in prison voluntarily as it was the only way for him to escape the constant and exhausting sexual demands that were otherwise made on him by the young women of his kingdom.

Another interviewee whose story had particularly compelled me was 'the safecracker'. His account of his own life was especially moving because it was quite clear that he was a highly intelligent, sensitive human being who had fallen into a life of crime because of a complete lack of opportunities. He was a very good safecracker and he was also charismatic and highly resourceful. At one point in his colourful career he was caught and sent to prison. It was one of the old prisons built by the Nationalists during the war and it had high, strong walls but the safecracker was determined to escape. Finally he figured out how to do it. Over the wall, he could hear the cleaners when they came to empty the prison toilets. He deduced that the cleaners didn't need to enter the compound because the cesspit beneath the toilet holes extended right under the walls, so that it could be accessed from the street outside. Unappealing as the prospect was, it was obvious to him what he would have to do to escape and so the next day, during the exercise period, he went to the toilet and then squirmed his way through the toilet hole and dropped like a bomb into the murk below. Luckily his theory was correct and he only had to swim for twenty feet, although he said that it felt like a lot further than that at the time and he thought he was going to go mad. He clambered out the other side onto the street, ran down the mountainside and eventually found his way into a student dormitory where he showered and stole some clothes. He went back to safecracking and became a rich man, with lots of villas in the north and more money than he knew what to o with. But he was bored and depressed. Because he was an intelligent, thoughtful man, he felt his life was shallow and worthless. Eventually, on a job in Beijing he had to crack the newest and best kind of safe. Naturally, he succeeded, but for some reason that he couldn't explain he just sat there with the safe door open, slowly setting fire to the bundles of money. When the police arrived, he went with them without complaining.

I asked Liao what had happened to the safecracker -- was he still in touch with him?

"He was executed," said Liao bluntly, drawing his finger across his throat.

As the interview went on, the translator became more and more involved. I would ask a question and he would translate it for Liao and then Liao would answer back in Chinese, but instead of immediately translating Liao's answer back into English, the translator would ask his own question and after a while the pair of them would be deep in conversation. Occasionally, they would remember my existence and the translator would turn round and summarise some aspect of Liao's life or thoughts for me.

"Lao Liao [lao means old and is a mark of friendly respect] says that many of the dissidents today start out as ordinary people with an ordinary gripe. Take for example the protests over the polluted baby formula milk. The parents who dared to complain and insist that the government do something were slapped down but they had lost their children and so they were angry and they didn't care any more about government threats and instead of being quiet they began to support other people's causes as well. You see the government creates dissidents out of people who have legitimate local grievances. Lao Liao says that they do this again and again because they can't handle even very minor criticism and so they end up turning anyone who opposes them into an extremist, even though all these people wanted in the first place was to complain that their cooking oil was full of shit or that the local Party had sold off a corner of their field to a property developer or something simple like that. It's the same with the case of Ai Weiwei. He was so shocked by the earthquake that he went down to Sichuan and spoke to the mothers and fathers. He heard about the poor-quality tofu-dregs houses and about the corruption and kickbacks to local politicians. He got involve and tried to help. Then the police attacked him and gave him a beating and he almost died and because of this he became even more of a rallying point and everyone wants to listen to his criticisms of the government. They are control freaks who can't handle criticism.

"Lao Liao says all he wanted to do, the only thing, was to describe what he saw around him every day. He wasn't calling for the overthrow of the Party, or demanding for the laws to be changed. He is just a historian a chronicler. A chronicler in cold blood who will say what he sees. But the government hated that so much that they threw him in jail. So then he wrote about what he saw in the jail. That made them even more mad. All he wanted was to be like Sima Qian, the old historial who wrote Records of the Grand Historian. Sima Qian was very objective and he wrote the first good history in China and he wrote lots of honest biographies of people. Nothing more. But the government can't bear Lao Liao saying out loud what is happening in front of everyone's noses. They are embarrassed  and ashamed. And when Ai Weiwei started to do it they couldn't bear him either. First they beat him, then when he doesn't stop but instead starts to criticise them for other things as well, they arrested him. But all they had to do was listen in the first place, then they wouldn't have created an international dissident."

Liao said he would show me his rented room, which was in a block a little way up the hillside. The translator came with us, but strangely the secret police didn't follow us there. When we left the cafe, I expected them to come along, but after a while I realised they had gone elsewhere. Liao's room was very peaceful, and from the balcony there was a view over the old city, all the way to Lake Erhai. At my request, Liao took out the bamboo flute that he had made in prison and played us a couple of tunes. I asked him how well he knew Weiwei and he said that he didn't know him well at all but he he met him in Chengdu in 2008, just after the Sichuan earthquake, when they had both gone there to investigate what lay behind the official government story. A mutual friend had introduced them.

"The mutual friend has since been disappeared," said Liao, matter-of-factly.

It was time for me to leave. I thanked Liao and then walked back with the translator to the youth hostel.

"He's an incredible man," said the translator. "That generation has been through so much."

With the help of a Chinese lawyer, Liao Yiwu is now suing the government for human rights abuses. His determination is undimmed: "I am trying to overcome, little by little, the fear that has been inflicted on me," he is quoted as saying in Wenguang Huang's translator's introduction to The Corpse Walker. "By doing so, I try to preserve my sanity and inner freedom."

Not long after our meeting, Liao left Dali and went by bus to a small village near the Chinese border with Vietnam. Following in the footsteps of one of his most famous interviewees, 'the border crosser', Liao packed a bag with supplies and headed off into the jungle. The border crosser had stumbled into a camp filled with remnants of the ultra-red Chinese forces, preparing for the next leg of a war that ended decades ago. He was forced to become a soldier until he finally managed to retreat back to China. Liao had obviously learned from this unfortunate man's blunder: after a journey the details of which have still not been fully clarified, though it includes transfers in Hanoi and Warsaw, Liao arrived in Berlin on 6 July 2011.