MCLC: Liao Yiwu in Tainan

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: martin winter <dujuan99 at gmail.com>
Subject: Liao Yiwu in Tainan
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Liao Yiwu in Tainan

³My father made me stand on a table when I was small, and recite ancient
classical Chinese. I could only climb down after I was able to recite the
whole thing by heart. I was only 3 or four years old, maybe. I hated my
father.²This is how Liao Yiwu began to talk to the students and teachers
of National Ch'engkung University in Tainan, after he played a wooden
flute, a very basic instrument he had learned in prison. Very basic
sounds, mute and suppressed at times. Loss and regret. No uplifting fable.
³I am not going to tell you very much about the time when I went into
prison. You would have no way to understand everything. I was like any
young person. I didn't want to listen to anybody from older generations.
And I had gone through the Cultural Revolution, when my parents couldn't
take care of me. For me, classical Chinese belonged into the rubbish bin,
along with many other things. My father was 84 years old when he died²,
Liao Yiwu said. Or was it 88 years? Only a few hours of dialogue and open
exchange between father and son, in all those years.

Dialogue and open exchange. Between Sichuan and Tainan. Between Taiwan and
China. Between languages and experiences. Feeling lost, between clashing
dialects, conflicting histories. Feeling rooted, at the bottom of society.

On the podium, scholars of Taiwanese literature sat along with Liao Yiwu.
They spoke in Taiwanese. One professor recited a poem by a high school
student. Before Dawn, or something like that. About the massacre from
1947, February 28th. I didn't understand the words. But you could
understand the feeling. The answer is very simple, the professor said,
when a Hakka student asked what she should do, because the words and songs
of her grandmother would die with her. There were too few people who could
still speak with her in Hakka, she was afraid her mother tongue, her
grandmother's words would become extinct. The answer is very simple, the
professor said very gently. He spoke mostly in Taiwanese, so I didn't
understand it all. But he said you just have to study, you can even major
in Hakka now. It's not easy, but there is a common effort.

"It was very simple", Liao Yiwu said, when people asked him how he fled
from China. "I went to Yunnan province, bordering Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar
and Tibet. I had made lots of interviews there many years before, with
people at the bottom of society. You turn off your mobile. You could also
bring extra mobile phones. You get lost in small towns. And then one day I
was across the border in Vietnam, very wobbly on my legs. There was a
small train, like in China at the beginning of the 1980s. I knew such
trains from drifting around China when I was young. In Vietnam, I was
afraid of a lot of things, getting on the train, of simple things to eat.
But I could communicate by writing numbers on a piece of paper. 500, wrote
the innkeeper. 100, I wrote below. And so on. Finally I was in Hanoi, in a
simple inn. And then I went on-line and contacted my friends and family in
China. When I got on the plane to Poland, I was still afraid. The year
before, military police in full military gear had come and taken me out of
the plane in Chengdu. But then I realized, although this was a Socialist
country, I was in the capital of another country, not in China. And the
plane took off."

The lecture hall was full. I sat on the floor in the aisles, like many
others. It was a very welcoming atmosphere. ³We have a few books to give
away for students asking questions in the second part of the lecture.²
What is liulang? What is liuwang? What is lüxing? These three words sound
rather similar in Chinese. This was another professor speaking. He had
studied in Russia. He was from a Taiwanese faculty in Taichung, but at
this occasion, to clarify this question, he spoke in Mandarin. "What is
drifting about? What is exile? What is traveling? When you are drifting
around, you don't know where you are coming from, and you don't know where
you're going. When you are going into exile, you know where you are coming
from, but you don't know where you are going, where they will let you
stay. When you are traveling, you know where you come from, and you know
where you're going. Very simple differences. But what about us here in
Taiwan? Do we know where we are coming from, and where we are going? In
the 1960s and 1970s, many writers and intellectuals in Taiwan were in
prison. It was very hard, but you knew what you were fighting for. Just
like the writers and lawyers in China, they know they are fighting for
freedom. Now in Taiwan we are very free, in comparison. But we can still
be marginalized."

One of the professors was my landlord from 1988 to 1990 in Taipei. He is
the chairman of the Taiwanese PEN now. In 1988 he was a doctoral candidate
in history, and a stage decorator. We hadn't seen each other or heard from
each other for 22 years.

You can find a few traveling impressions from Tainan on my
<cid:part1.04030100.04090605 at gmail.com>blog
(http://erguotou.wordpress.com).

Martin