Chinese Lesson
BORK, ELLEN
Chinese Lesson The other side of life in the People’s Republic. BY ELLEN BORK Last December, public security offi cials in Beijing picked up the writer Liao Yiwu to prevent him from...
...Forced to choose between love and a future in the party, he chooses love...
...To this day the regime classifi es the protesters as counterrevolutionary criminals, refuses to account for the deaths, and keeps a dozen in jail nearly 20 years after the massacre...
...Informed that his son had been killed, the father goes to Beijing but is not allowed to take the body home...
...One version of these interviews was banned in China...
...Underneath the robe “there are two bodies: the corpse and a living person who carries the dead one on his back...
...It’s not hard to see why the party has found an enemy in Liao...
...Expelled from the party, he tracks down his beloved in remote Xinjiang and raises a family with her...
...The Corpse Walker collects 27 of these encounters with a public latrine attendant, street musicians, a member of Falun Gong, crooks, a leper, political outcasts, a self-proclaimed emperor, and others...
...In remarks he had intended to deliver, later published by the Paris Review, Liao paid tribute to “my enemies, my teachers...
...It was better for us to sacrifi ce her to save the rest of the family...
...The Retired Offi cial” explains the disastrous planting methods and a cover-up that leads to massive starvation in the Great Leap Forward...
...A guide walked ahead with a lantern, strewing fake money to ease the way into the next world...
...For some, however, the toll of the party’s misrule is too monstrous...
...With bitter irony, Liao explained that he has repaid the “kindness” of his government by interviewing more than 300 victims of its persecution...
...Liao’s style is unobtrusive and Wen Huang’s editing, translation, and introductions enhance the material...
...homelessness while drifting around the country...
...Local offi cials assigned to prevent stealing of food in Sichuan spot smoke from a peasant’s chimney: “We just boiled our three year old daughter,” says the peasant...
...BY ELLEN BORK Last December, public security offi cials in Beijing picked up the writer Liao Yiwu to prevent him from attending an informal dinner where he was to receive an award from the Independent Chinese PEN Center, a small but staunch group of writers and intellectuals who defend freedom of expression inside the People’s Republic...
...Ellen Bork works on human rights at Freedom House...
...Students’ cremations are expedited so the Party can cover up their deaths...
...and prison, where he spent four years for writing an epic poem, “Massacre,” about the crushing of the 1989 Tiananmen democracy protests...
...Unlike him, however, it does not see its enemies as teachers...
...The Tiananmen Father,” whose own education was cut short by political campaigns, warns his son not to get involved in the democracy movement of 1989: “One minute, the Party seems to relax its political control...
...the lack of a residential permit, an instrument of totalitarian control, a status he fi rst acquired when his father, a teacher, was arrested during the Cultural Revolution...
...Does the corpse walker of the title represent the Chinese people, carrying the putrefying corpse of the Communist party, or the souls of its dead victims...
...Initially, the government media called the student demonstrations a patriotic movement...
...Death and suffering at the hands of the regime suffuse The Corpse Walker...
...Don’t worry, I won’t mess up...
...The thing was covered with a huge inky-colored robe...
...I have to say that right now I’m pretty contented,” he tells Liao...
...In the 1950s, he tells Liao, “I was strolling along the village road when a bulky, black object suddenly passed me, sending a chill down my spine...
...Then, on April 26, the People’s Daily carried an editorial, calling the movement a riot...
...It is diffi cult, but not impossible, to resist being dehumanized by the party and its ideology...
...I don’t even have time to take a shit...
...After the young man stops writing letters home, the family waits...
...The result is a set of authentic and engrossing stories...
...Liao remained skeptical until an old family friend assured him the stories are true...
...It’s too hard to be a human being...
...The father manages to take photographs of the body, which show several bullet wounds and a gash from a bayonet...
...We just hope she would reincarnate into something else in the next life...
...They were hunger, into which he was born during the famine which accompanied the Great Leap Forward in the early 1960s...
...We were in a state of feverish fear, like ants crawling on a hot tin pan...
...Those bastards...
...When he tries to ensure the correct spelling of his son’s name on the paperwork, the overworked crematorium clerk becomes agitated: “Just stop pestering me, OK...
...The title comes from stories Liao has heard about “corpse walkers,” people hired to return bodies to their home provinces for burial...
...Transcripts of interviews might make for tedious reading, but these are not...
...The Rightist” cared for a woman whose father was a landlord and uncle a Nationalist offi cial: “We used to hear phony stuff like ‘Soandso has been nurtured by the Party and the People.’ What do the Party’s breasts look like...
...Once you let down your guard, they come out to get you...
...I haven’t slept for two days...
Vol. 13 • July 2008 • No. 43
