MCLC: Li Bifeng reading (2)

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Martin Winter <dujuan99 at gmail.com>
Subject: Li Bifeng reading (2)
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Source: Martin Winter's blog (6/1/13):
http://erguotou.wordpress.com/2013/06/01/worldwide-reading/

Li Bifeng: A NOTE FROM PRISON

In the summer of 1992, in a vegetable garden on the roof of a shed housing
inmates of the Sichuan Province Prison # 1, I spent three days alone with
the old prisoner Zhang Fafu, who had been transferred to this prison at
Nanchong from forced labor at a coal mine. Our task was to build a wall
out of plastic parts and wire at the side where the roof garden faced the
bathing pool, to prevent other prisoners from secretly watching the women
taking their baths down below. I got this assignment at that time because
my sentence was short, I was working at the kiosk of my unit and wasn’t
considered a common criminal. So the cadre chose that old prisoner from
the coal mine and me.

From the second day on he told me everything about himself. From his
talking, I could feel the jolts in his soul. He had attended high school
before Liberation in 1949, he loved reading and understood a lot of
things; he even liked poetry. He asked me so often until I had no choice
but to give him one of the poems I had written. A few days later, I was
transferred. After I arrived at Prison # 3, someone from # 1 came to go
over my accounts. That’s when I heard something happened to Zhang Fafu. He
had taken the plastic parts from our wall, tied them to is arms and jumped
from a building. He wasn’t dead, but he became a vegetable.

I don’t know if he read my poem. Later, when I was released from Prison #
3 upon completion of my sentence, I stuffed the original manuscript of
this poem into a bamboo flute I had got from Liao Yiwu, and blocked the
hole at the bottom with soap. This way I got to take the poem with me. All
these years, whenever I think of Zhang Fafu, I think of our plastic wall.
It’s not the same as the wall in my poem, but now I cannot separate the
poem from Zhang Fafu.

Tr. MW, 2013

Translator’s note: Li Bifeng’s NOTE and the following poem
(http://wp.me/PczcX-zk)  are part of his novel Wings In The Sky (天空中的翅
膀). 
One chapter is available on the LIBIFENG2012 WordPress site. The main
characters are an old prisoner, a bird and a woman who lives in a shed not
far from the prison with her daughter. The plot is rather interesting.

Martin