MCLC: interview with Liao Yiwu

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: christen cornell <cc.cornell at gmail.com>
Subject: interview with Liao Yiwu
***********************************************************

Source: ArtSpace China (11/29/11):
http://blogs.usyd.edu.au/artspacechina/2011/11/post_4.html

Writer as a Recording Device: Interview with Liao Yiwu
By Christen Cornell

Liao Yiwu is best-known for his book The Corpse Walker, a colourful
collection of interviews with oddballs, crooks, hustlers,
toilet-attendants, ex-landlords, so-called rightists, garbage-collectors,
and a variety of others whose voices are rarely heard in mainstream
Chinese history. First published in Taiwan in 2001, and later in a variety
of languages, The Corpse Walker quickly became a bestseller in the West,
its success fanned along by the news of the book’s banning in China and
Liao’s uncomfortable political position back home.Liao’s recent book, God
is Red, is another collection of interviews, this time with elderly
Chinese Christians whose faith has brought them into conflict with the
state. Published to an eager audience in the West, God is Red will be
supported with author tours and book signings not previously possible,
since in July 2011 – after seventeen unsuccessful attempts to leave China
– Liao Yiwu secretly emigrated to Germany.

Given his reputation as a political dissident, it would be fair to imagine
Liao Yiwu as a terribly earnest person. If he is this, it doesn’t come
across in a first meeting – at least not in the conversation my friend
Suna Xie and I had with him in Sydney last week. More than anything, Liao
made us laugh with his dry irreverence, and a tendency to see life as a
series of terrific stories. Even the sinister seemed darkly amusing in
Liao’s hands, as if life were a perverse comedy choreographed by money and
power. Read on …

Christen Cornell: I’ve read you saying that you’re not actually interested
in politics, you’re only interested in your stories. You weren't
misquoted, were you?

Liao Yiwu: I was never a pro-active person in the past, not like Liu
Xiaobo or Ai Weiwei who actively make political statements. I was more of
a passive person.

In the years after I came out of prison I had no way to make a living. I
had to find a way to get by, so I started to play music for small change.
I played in bars for two years or more – pop, folk, love songs, easy
listening. There’d usually be a few set songs that the boss would get you
to play and then the rest was up to the audience and their requests. I
played the Chinese flute, the xiao, and sometimes sang. Sometimes I used
the xiao to turn folk into rock and roll.

I remember some pretty funny things from that time. Like during the wee
hours, maybe 3am or 4am, there would usually be some people left in the
bar: depressed people, those with broken hearts, alcoholics with no home
to go to. They’d all hang around the bar, drinking, drinking, drinking …
And that was when I’d usually start to make some money. The bar would be
almost empty – just two or three sad sacks with their drinks – but the
sound of the xiao was so melancholy it made these people think of their
boyfriend or whoever … They’d call you over to play and I’d put on a real
show of sympathising with them. In those days a song might normally get 10
kuai, but at that hour I could get 30 kuai! [laughs]

This was in the 1990s, after I got out of prison. In Chengdu, mostly,
sometimes Beijing. I was just floating around, spending my time with
people on the fringes of society. If I made enough money one night I might
not work for the next two or three; I’d only go back to play again when
I’d run out of money. In those days I was just living in the moment, never
thinking about my next step. I never saved any money. Eventually, though,
I decided I should pick up my old professional writing again, that I
should publish and sell some books. All I knew was the stories of these
underground people, and the people I had met in prison, so I started to
recall them and write them down.

It was around this time that I started to get involved with politics. A
lot of people when they come out of prison decide that they want to start
afresh, but I wasn’t like that. After I came out of prison I was just
floating. I was friends with Liu Xiaobo. We were extremely old friends –
in the 1980s we worked together on some literature projects. He used to
write literature, I wrote poetry. These days his wife is also writing
poetry … but we all knew each other from that time.

So I was writing, and I was playing music, but at the same time Liu Xiaobo
was constantly asking me to sign his various petitions, and I signed them
out of friendship. He’d send me these petitions by fax and I’d sign them
and send them back. The faxes were so blurry sometimes I didn’t even know
what I was signing! The police would come asking whether or not I’d done
these things. [laughs] And each time they’d detain me for 10-20 days.

They’d take me to a guesthouse and ask what I’d been involved in, but most
of the time I couldn’t remember. [laughs] They’d often pull out the
petitions I’d signed and read them out to me, like an official
proclamation. [laughs]

Suna Xie: So have you always felt that your main drive was not political?

LYW: My performance last night …
<http://textpublishing.com.au/events/event/liao-yiwu-at-the-sydney-writers-
festival-surry-hills/> other people probably think it was political, but I
don’t see it like that at all. I just see it as common sense. I was only
saying what everybody already knows. As far as I’m concerned common sense
shouldn’t be considered political.

If you are afraid to say something then that is political, or you find it
difficult to explain something, it might be because it has some political
dimension or there’s some kind of pressure on you. And if you find
yourself in that situation then you’re not a pure artist. A real artist
says what he feels.

When I first started writing about these marginal people it never occurred
to me that it would become a problem. I was just writing about suffering
and shamelessness, the suffering and shamelessness of Chinese people.

When The Corpse Walker was published, it did very well. It was published
in more than forty countries – everyone made a big a big fuss and thought
it was amazing that someone was writing these stories down. Not long after
though: disaster! [laughs] It came from every angle. The government
apparatus came bearing down on me, someone who’d never really even thought
about politics. Without my ever meaning them to, the stories I’d been
working on had become a political act.

*

CC: Do you see yourself as a kind of oral historian?

LYW: I see myself as a tape recorder of contemporary history. My head is
like an old-fashioned tape recorder. Some of the old recordings, I erase;
some I keep. I’ve written about so many different kinds of people at the
bottom of Chinese society: those who’ve been wronged by the court system
and are appealing their cases; those affected by the Tiananmen Massacre;
people in underground religions; landlords who suffered during land
reform. I’ve written about all these different kinds of people. I’ve
written out more than 300 stories, so my head has turned into a recording
device.

Of course, I think a lot about how to retell the stories I’ve heard. If
you’re a tape recorder you have to let these people speak for the whole
afternoon, but most of what they say is not important. It’s up to you to
isolate their main meaning, to find their essence – the value in their
story. This is the job of a writer. If you have three people working on
the one story it will be unreadable. I'd say I'm a ‘documentary writer’.

*

CC: Your next book, God is Red, is about Christianity in China. Where did
that interest come from?

LYW: It began when I met a doctor who was working in the remote areas of
Yunnan, moving from village to village. This man had originally been the
vice-director of a hospital in the city. Later, he’d gone for a promotion
and had been told that if he wanted to become the actual hospital director
he’d have to become a member of the Chinese Communist Party. Until that
point the hospital hadn’t known the doctor was a Christian, but when they
asked him to join the Party he refused. He said: I already have my faith.
I have faith in God, so I can’t have a second faith in the Party.
After this he left the hospital and moved to the countryside to treat
people there. This man was an amazing person. The first time I met him was
in a very basic room where he was giving an old lady cataract surgery.
These two people were holding two torches, and that’s how they were
working. Almost in darkness, using torches to conduct cataract surgery!

Later, he told me that he knew a lot of Christians who had been wronged,
and asked if I wanted to go with him to meet some of these people and hear
their stories. Of course I was interested, so I went with him. I
interviewed many elderly Christians, heard many stories, and their stories
were extremely moving. The people in these stories weren’t like those in
conventional Christian church groups. Some of these Christians had been
killed for their beliefs, some had been imprisoned for years.

There was this one man called Wang Zeming, he was considered to be the
most compassionate, to have the greatest faith of all Christians of the
last century. He’d been officially recognised in a church in some English
city. His story was during the Cultural Revolution; he’d been told to
dance the patriotic ‘Mao Dance’ but he’d refused. He said, publicly, there
is no way that I can dance the Mao Dance, and there is no way I can
declare my loyalty to Mao, because I already have faith in God. He said
that publicly.

Of course he was immediately arrested, and for four years they tried to
change his views. They tried to brainwash him, but they couldn’t do it. In
the end they asked him: Are you going to change your views? Will you
declare your faith in Mao? And again, he said: I believe in God, so I
can’t believe in Mao. They took him to a denunciation meeting where there
were more than a million people. And shot him dead.

SX: So your interest in these Christians came from an interest in their
spirit, their strength …

LYW: I think that faith is an incredibly powerful thing, regardless of
what religion you find it in. I'm not Christian but I'm interested in
belief, especially the kind you find in very common people, in poor
people. I think this is an extraordinary thing. At first I was thinking
that if faith was this powerful it could inspire and motivate so many
people, but later I became extremely disappointed in other Christians, in
Christian groups in the cities and elsewhere. They were already a long way
from the original essence of their religion. I discussed this in America
too, the corruption of church institutions. They’ve turned God into
something for their own purposes.

The churches of the countryside and the cities are totally different.
Those in the countryside are very poor, and the people in them too. For
them, religion is an essential part of their daily lives, it brings them
together and inspires compassion. I think that religion is purest in the
most remote places. These people only have God, nothing else. That is a
real faith. The Christians in the city are different.

*

CC: What’s your next book going to be – do you know?

LYW: It’ll be about the 1989 protests at Tiananmen Square. The title is
going to be 六四我们的证实：中国大屠杀受害者寻访录 [rough translation: The
Proof of Tiananmen 
Square: stories from the victims of China’s Massacre].

I’ve been working on this book for years already. I just have to finish
the final part by April next year. The world is changing so fast these
days, people forget things just as quickly. It’s already been twenty years
since 4 June, 1989 – more than a whole generation. The people who
experienced Tiananmen will always remember, but those who weren’t there
probably don't even know about it.

CC: How will you continue your work of interviewing Chinese people,
collecting their stories, if you’re not living in China in future?

LYW: Already the raw material I have on my computer would take a lifetime
to write out. There are so many stories to write. I could write until my
hands were broken. For example, all the corrupt Chinese officials who
emigrate to America – to Los Angeles and San Fransisco … They cheat and
steal their way out of the country, and a book about this would make a
real impact I think. Then there are those young, glamourous girls you see
in the States; they’ve never worked, you wonder how they got the money to
be there. There has to be a story behind that. [laughs] Then there are the
people who use the excuse of being Falun Gong practitioners to emigrate.
There are plenty of stories in Chinese emigration, and more. For
documentary writers like me, the stories are endless.