MCLC: Liao Yiwu visits US

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: pjmooney <pjmooney at me.com>
Subject: Liao Yiwu visits US
***********************************************************

Source: China Real Time, WSJ (6/7/13):
http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2013/06/17/a-hundred-songs-exiled-chines
e-writer-liao-yiwus-rare-u-s-visit/

A Hundred Songs: Exiled Chinese Writer Liao Yiwu’s Rare U.S. Visit

For Chinese writer Liao Yiwu, the events of June 4, 1989, marked the line
between “before” and “after.”

Until then, he had taken little interest in politics. He was writing
avant-garde poetry, living with his wife A Xia in the Sichuan river town
of Fuling and spending time wandering and drinking with fellow writers.
But the crackdown on student pro-democracy protesters around Beijing’s
Tiananmen Square, during which hundreds are believed to have died,
prompted him to compose a poem, “Massacre,” and record it on tapes that
spread in the Chinese underground movement.

The poem, and a follow-up film project, landed him in jail for four years,
followed by decades of police surveillance and harassment until he escaped
China into Vietnam in 2011. He now lives in Berlin.

The prison years are the subject of his book “For a Song and a Hundred
Songs,” a dizzying, and often gruesomely graphic, testimony of vicious
brutality and indignities large and small. He was in New York for the
book’s U.S. release, with events including a recital of “Massacre” at the
New York Public Library this past week.

“In a Communist prison they ask you to start a new chapter, turn yourself
into a new person. In essence, this means turning a human being into a
dog,” Mr. Liao said in an interview.

Mr. Liao’s transformation began with his first meal in detention. He
recounts how four strips of meat are snatched from his bowl by another
prisoner who is then beaten by the guards: “The police slapped him this
way and that way. I could see blood oozing out of his mouth but he was
still chewing.”

Food becomes a stark symbol of power behind bars, the subject of much
bartering. And in the strict inmate hierarchy, a “menu” describes the
penalties a chief and his enforcers dole out to misbehaving underlings.
Among the menu items: Shish kebab in peppercorn sauce (The enforcer wedges
oil-soaked cotton balls between the inmate’s toes and sets them on fire).

“The most delicious items on the menu were the cruelest forms of torture,”
Mr. Liao said.

There are lighter moments around food. One day, the hungry prisoners hold
a competition for who can conjure the best imaginary meal. Suggesting the
slop bucket in the imperial kitchen, Mr. Liao wins.

But his own imagination is forever altered by the brutality of prison, and
he is no longer the same poet. He writes:

The inspiration confiscated during a police pat-down
Has never returned
Even memory
Bears the scars of metal chains.

Toward the end of his detention, Mr. Liao starts writing his memoir,
putting the prison stories on the record.

“There are many stories that are still vivid in my mind,” he said. “I
slept between two death-row inmates, and they kept telling me stories. I
said, ‘I don’t want to hear your stories.’ But they said, ‘You have to
listen to our stories because tomorrow or the day after we could be
executed.’ So I just listened to their stories.”

Writing the memoir has dominated his time since his release, not least
because he had to write the book three times. The first two manuscripts
were confiscated by the police, who he says harassed him throughout the
process. “Sometimes fear is like a drug,” he said. “The more fearful you
are the more compelled you are to do it.”

Calling himself “an author who writes for the pleasure of the police,” he
is among the Chinese artists and writers who accuse Mo Yan, the Chinese
writer awarded the Nobel Prize in literature last year, of being too close
to Beijing. Mr. Liao called the award to Mo Yan “a big mistake.”

“I see Mo Yan as a senior government official within the system,” he said.
“For example, he said that Mao Zedong is a very important historical
figure. To me, Mao Zedong is a tyrant.”
“You don’t even see this level of admiration from the Chinese government.
I just think he’s a Mao worshiper.”

Mo Yan has defended himself against such criticism, saying in a recent
speech, “I hate partisan politics and how people gang up on opponents
based on ideology,” according to the Atlantic
<http://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/05/mo-yan-i-just-want-to-wri
te-leave-me-alone/275751/>.

Mr. Liao, whose books are banned in China, has nevertheless enjoyed
literary success, including awards and times on bestseller lists in
Germany. The memoir is his third book after “The Corpse Walker,” a
collection of accounts of the lives of bottom-rung Chinese, and “God Is
Red,” which profiles Chinese Christians. All three have been translated by
Wenguang Huang, himself a journalist and writer and also at Mr. Liao’s
side to translate in New York.

Mr. Liao doesn’t hold out hope of wider political reform, or freedom of
speech, in China. Does he wish he had been born somewhere else? “When I
was a little boy my father asked me to read ancient Chinese texts. I
always wished I could have been born in ancient China.”

The title of Mr. Liao’s latest book is from the time a prison guard who
heard him sing required him, as a punishment, to sing 100 songs. When Mr.
Liao’s voice gave out after 20 or so songs he was severely beaten and had
an electric baton shoved up his body. “For a long time after when I
thought about singing I was really intimidated and scared,” he said.

Then a monk in prison taught him to play the flute. “He taught me how to
use my inner energy, Mr. Liao said. “Music is the way to heal my internal
wounds.”

The melancholy tone of his flute Thursday night at the New York Public
Library offset the great bursts of fury and fear during his recital of
“Massacre”—performed using Chinese ritualistic chanting and howling. After
the recital, Mr. Liao looked entirely drained, but he revived during a
conversation with the library’s Paul Holdengräber, especially after some
shots of Chinese baijiu on the table in front of him.

He told the audience, via his translator, Mr. Weng, stories that were both
horribly sad and sadly funny, like his worst memory in prison, when he
tried to commit suicide by hurling himself into a wall. After guards
patched up his bruises and returned him to his cell, his fellow inmates
taunted him: “You’re such an actor. You caused such a stir and you didn’t
even die.”

At the end of the conversation, his host asked whether he knew any English
words. Mr. Liao thought and responded in one fluid phrase: “Good luck to
you!”
“Good luck to you, too,” said Mr. Holdengräber.

– Sofia McFarland