MCLC: brilliant and disquieting Liao Yiwu

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: pjmooney <pjmooney at me.com>
Subject: brilliant and disquieting Liao Yiwu
***********************************************************

Source: Caravan Magazine (10/1/13):
http://www.caravanmagazine.in/books/prison-notebooks?page=0,2

The Prison Notebooks
The brilliant and disquieting non-fiction of Liao Yiwu
By HOWARD W FRENCH | 1 October 2013

A QUIP FROM ANOTHER ERA, usually attributed to Aldous Huxley, defined an
intellectual as someone—presumably a man—who discovers there are more
interesting things in life than women. Reading the exiled Chinese poet and
writer Liao Yiwu suggests a less sexist corollary to this badly dated
notion: the best writers are artists who have learnt that other people are
more interesting than themselves.

Liao, the author of a famous poem of dissent that circulated underground
after the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989, began his writing life as a
self-obsessed poet of uncertain quality, and underwent a prison conversion
to become a talented and inventive chronicler of the lives of others. His
work exhibits the wandering spirit of one of his early heroes, Jack
Kerouac, and some of the style of John Dos Passos and Studs Terkel, who
drew on the techniques of journalism to capture lives through interviews.
One also finds pungent notes of Ryszard Kapuscinski, the Polish writer of
errant political and social observations who, like Liao, was part
old-fashioned reporter, part fabulist. But these comparisons are only very
approximate, because Liao’s work is so original that it is hard to
pigeonhole except in the most generic way, as brilliant literary
non-fiction.

In books like The Soccer War, whose title story is about a military
conflict between two Central American states sparked by a football match,
and The Emperor, a work full of shadows and whispers about palace intrigue
during the slow-motion demise of the late Ethiopian ruler Haile Selassie,
Kapuscinski took historical events and heightened them through vivid acts
of license-taking re-imagination. In Liao’s best books, like The Corpse
Walker, a collection of 27 interviews that bore the subtitle “Real-Life
Stories, China From the Bottom Up”, he doesn’t wander the world as
Kapuscinski did. Instead he wanders the landscape of his own country,
paying little heed to current events, and ferreting out the stories of
people who are trying to piece their lives together after the shattering
of the Cultural Revolution and the equally radical decades of high-growth
state capitalism that followed.

Liao’s unwavering subject is man-made calamity under authoritarianism. His
characters are alternately mournful, deeply dazed or simply lost. Liao,
too, takes artistic license, heightening the absurdity of their lives by
processing his characters’ words through his own hyperbolic imagination
and profane tongue.

I was able to witness Liao’s process as a writer when I met him in his
hometown, Chengdu, in China’s western Sichuan province, right after the
catastrophic 2008 earthquake that killed nearly 70,000 people. I had flown
in from Shanghai, where I lived, and spent several days riding through the
devastated countryside with Liao and his girlfriend and assistant, Jin
Qin. Together we hiked through mountainous regions where destroyed roads
allowed no passage and interviewed stricken residents of villages who
camped  outside amid the rubble of their crumbled homes.

Liao was born in 1958, the year that Mao Zedong launched the Great Leap
Forward, whose famine killed as many as 40 million people and stands out
as the greatest man-made disaster of modern times. This seemed to have
somehow marked him as an author who would instinctively look for the hand
of the state in any catastrophe. In Sichuan that deadly summer, his
relentless focus was on the collapse of some 7,000 cheaply built schools,
whose flattening by the temblor entombed thousands of students; the
stories he gathered were published in Chinese in Hong Kong under the title
Chronicles of the Big Earthquake.

Liao, a short man with a shiny, shaved head and impish smile, was always
relaxed, even laid-back, in conversation, but when he began an interview,
his manner shifted to a kind of locked intensity as he generated a torrent
of questions. Early on, though, I noticed that he frequently declined to
use a tape recorder, and often took no notes at all. When I asked him
about this, he told me, with a little sign of defensiveness, “I do my best
to reconstruct what people tell me, but it is not 100 percent their own
words. That is not the only way to produce the truth.”

IN HIS NEWEST BOOK, For a Song and a Hundred Songs, Liao has taken up what
is for him an unaccustomed form—autobiography—and because the bulk of his
story takes place in Chinese prisons, this book is not hard to classify at
all. It is very much a prison memoir, and one that both the author and
publishers wish to position as a successor to the literature of the Soviet
Gulag, a desire made evident by the inclusion of a foreword by the
Romanian Nobel laureate Herta Müller.

It is not clear that this is necessary. Even when the parallels more or
less hold, what is most delightful about Liao’s voice, in this memoir as
much as in his non-fiction, is its sheer originality, including a
surprising detachment from political engagement for someone who is often
branded with the “dissident” label.
For a prison memoir, Liao takes his time putting himself behind bars.
First we must explore briefly his early life, as the son of a stern
schoolteacher and mother, who were both harshly persecuted as “class
enemies” during his childhood in the Cultural Revolution. Liao invokes the
hardships of the period, writing that he was undernourished and left
stunted, perhaps even slightly mentally impaired, as a result. For all
that, his father forced him to memorise classical Chinese literature in
great volume, an experience that seemed to him like a meaningless chore.

With his secondary schooling interrupted, he became a truant of sorts, and
a self-searching drifter, eventually driving long-haul trucks from his
native Sichuan province back and forth to Tibet. Somehow, from this
experience, Liao emerged as an attention-drawing poet of some promise in
western China. From there, his story fast-forwards to his dissolute early
married life, in which he takes callous advantage of his young wife, who
dutifully transcribes piles of his work while the writer drinks heavily
and carouses at will amid a moving feast of artsy pals and hangers-on.

A more solemn note arises early in the book, when Liao describes the death
of his beloved older sister, who was killed in 1988 in a minibus accident
on a mountainous road in Sichuan. “Careening down a ridge, [the bus]
teetered perilously on the edge of a cliff with its front wheel jutting
into the air,” Liao writes. “In the violent descent, Fei Fei was flung out
of the bus. Her body flew through the air until it impaled on a sharp tree
limb that cut through her waist. When they reached her, she was soaked in
blood.”

Here, the author reveals two important qualities that will come to
permeate the memoir. The first is a sense of “ravenous grief”—initially
over the loss of family, and later over the loss of nearly everything else
that matters to him, including his dignity, which he struggles mightily to
preserve while in prison—as perhaps the final redeeming quality to life.

The other element one first notes in the car accident is the cinematic
quality to Liao’s mind, in which almost everything worth describing has a
heightened, almost extreme quality to it. As with his literary
non-fiction, where he acknowledges having often taken authorial license,
this pushes anecdotes to the edge of literal believability.

Travelling from another part of the province, Liao arrived too late to
attend his sister’s funeral, and then found himself unable to properly
mourn. He found avant-garde artist friends to hang out and drink with
instead, and ended up having sex on the evening of his arrival with a
newlywed woman whose husband was away on a business trip. “We quickly
turned into two hungry wolves, as if trying to tear out each other’s
intestines and lungs,” he writes.

The outbreak of massive student protests at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in
the spring of 1989 imposes itself as a fateful inflection point for Liao.
Many forget that the demonstrations, and the state’s response to them,
unfolded slowly before culminating in the massacre of an indeterminate
number of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people on the night of 3 June.
Liao followed the events from his home in Fuling, a modest city in
Sichuan, made famous by Peter Hessler’s powerfully evocative 2006 memoir
of life there as an English teacher, River Town. Initially, Liao was
unmoved, perhaps unwilling to credit historical significance to something
he had been unable to witness or participate in himself. He mostly
followed the events indirectly, via updates from the BBC translated for
him by a visiting Canadian friend.

On television, though, he happened to see the final public appearance of
Zhao Ziyang, the doomed moderate Communist Party general secretary, who
used a bullhorn to make a tearful plea to students at the square, urging
them to disband before it was too late. Zhao would soon be placed under
house arrest for the remainder of his life. Liao flipped the channel. He
writes:

Now the sad and helpless face [of Zhao] morphed into the face of an
agitated student leader who raised her fist in the air, calling on those
innocent lambs to continue to wage their war against the jackals.

“If she were the premier of China, she would be more ruthless than Li Peng
[a notorious hardliner],” I thought. “What an evil troublemaker!”
I switched the TV off and murmured to myself, “It doesn’t matter if the
revolution succeeds or not, I wouldn’t benefit either way.” I dug out a
half-finished poem and began writing. The night was long. The bloodthirsty
moon sported a wolf’s beard. I could hear the echoes of heaven’s howling.

Two weeks later, the events at Tiananmen reached their brutal culmination,
as reinforcement troops called in from the countryside were ordered into
action, breaking through the barricades of the protesters and firing
indiscriminately into the crowds. Word first reached Liao via his Canadian
friend. “‘Those bastards,’ I mumbled and turned on the TV. The two
anchors, the best at the China Central Television Station, took turns
reading an announcement in a solemn and mournful tone—the Party would
resolutely crack down on the counterrevolutionary riot in Tiananmen
Square… There was no mention of casualties.”

Liao writes that he went to bed, but couldn’t sleep: “The bloody crackdown
in Beijing was a turning point in history and also in my own life. For
once in my life, I decided to head down a heroic path, one on which I
advanced with great fear, scampering at times like a rat with no place to
hide.” The result was an epic protest poem that he worked on through the
night, roaring, “whatever came to my mind” into a tape recorder. The life
of the dissolute poet had suddenly acquired an air of consequence:

And another sort of massacre takes place at utopia’s core
The prime minister catches cold, the people must cough; martial law
declared
again and again
The toothless machinery of the state rolls towards those who have the
courage to resist the sickness.
Unarmed thugs fall by the thousands; iron-clad professional killers swim
in a sea of
Blood, set tires beneath tightly closed windows, wipe their
army-regulation boots with the skirts of dead maidens.

In a moment of characteristic grandiosity, Liao made three copies of his
recording, and proclaimed them “sparks of fire”. If they didn’t exactly
set the prairie ablaze, the poem nonetheless achieved wide circulation
clandestinely, first in the form of painstakingly copied cassettes, and
eventually as a photocopied text, building an underground following for
Liao. Emboldened by his success, he soon abandoned his pregnant wife to
travel to Chongqing to make what was intended to be an avant-garde film
based on more of his protest poetry. There would be much partying first,
though, with a band of merry pranksters who turned casting calls and
nights out on the town into drunken orgies. Amid the foolishness, Liao had
no clue that the authorities were closing in on him. As he set off one day
for Beijing, he was arrested by a team of plainclothes police, who bundled
him off to an interrogation centre where he began four years of
incarceration.

SUCH WAS LIAO’S NAIVETÉ that he is shocked to learn, upon arriving in
prison, that writers are treated no differently than common criminals. He
protests that he is not a thief, only to learn that in the parlance of
jail, everyone is called a thief; the word serves as a sort of reverse
honorific. There are “hot water thieves” who supply cups of hot drinking
water to the upper-class prisoners, “floor thieves” who sweep the floor
multiple times a day and shine the shoes of their superiors, and even
“entertainment thieves”, who sing and dance and provide sexual services.
“In my cell, which was no bigger than two hundred and twenty square feet
for eighteen men, the rulers had created an exact replica of the state
bureaucracy outside,” he writes. “The leaders’ powers were clearly
delineated. Leaders and cellmates alike carefully observed the rules and
moved cautiously within the hierarchy. If someone accidentally strayed
from the path, he risked losing everything. Those in power enjoyed
unlimited privileges; the hierarchy even governed the usage of toilet
paper, much as in outside society: The chief could use scented napkins to
wipe his butt, but the slave thieves had to resort to using wrapping paper
or old newspapers.”

The rough process of coming to terms with this new world is punctuated,
meanwhile, by interrogations, which become affirmatory even as they mark
him as a recalcitrant inmate, ensuring even rougher punishment. Liao
clings stubbornly to statutory rights that go largely unobserved, and
takes visible pleasure in toying with the succession of men sent to
question him.

In one early session, he affects a reverential voice to invoke the name of
the “senior leader” of his supposedly subversive band, Ma Bufang.
“Ma Bufang? That name sounds familiar,” says the interrogator.

Liao describes him as a very well connected editor in the capital, who
will see to it that Requiem—the avant-garde film he made in Chongqing—gets
broadcast on national television.

“It suddenly dawned on the monkey that I was playing a joke on him. Ma
Bufang was a well-known Chinese warlord at the beginning of the twentieth
century.

‘You liar,’ the monkey banged his fist on the desk and stood up. ‘Liao
Yiwu, we represent the people. We are not to be screwed around with.’”
During a subsequent run-in, a frustrated officer fixes Liao and
pronounces, most aptly, “chicanery seems to be your speciality.” But it
would be wrong to suggest a lack of seriousness or moral clarity in Liao’s
vocation. He was never a crusading human rights figure, and admits to even
refusing to go on hunger strike in solidarity with other inmates who had
been branded as “counterrevolutionaries”, for their supposed association
with Tiananmen. “Greedy as a pig, I ate every last grain of rice, chewed
every shred of meat, and even licked the bowl.”

Nonetheless, he steadfastly played the role of moral burr and
conscientious objector. “I’m an individualist, with many incorrigible
habits,” he told a more politically militant fellow prisoner. “I was
compelled to protest and put myself on a self-destructive path because the
state ideology conflicted with the poet’s right of free expression. In all
honesty, I could not accept a murderous government that carried out a
bloodbath and covered it up. I’m in jail now and I have no regrets. As for
forming an organization, I lack interest and experience.”

Liao went into prison completely self-absorbed, overly impressed with his
own talents as a poet, and even more so with the social station that he
felt such a calling should provide him. During the process of being
shuffled through a series of prisons, though, a conversion steadily begins
to take hold, as he begins training his minute focus and often enough, his
empathy toward other characters. In this fashion, the gulag became the
midwife of a very estimable writer, someone able to establish real rapport
with selected fellow inmates for the intrinsic interest of their own
tragic and absurd lives. For a Song and a Hundred Songs therefore steadily
becomes less his own story, and more and more the story of the people he
lived with behind bars, who are sketched vividly and with affection.

Readers of Liao’s other books, particularly The Corpse Walker, will
recognise the style, and indeed some of the characters, whom he
reintroduces here. There is a safe cracker so motivated by the challenge
of cracking a lock that he forgets to get away, a cross-eyed robber who
accidentally bludgeoned his masked partner in crime, and the man so
opposed to China’s one-child policy that he declared his village an
independent kingdom, free from government rule, only to have troops sent
to arrest him on subversion charges.

When Liao first hears of this last case from another prisoner, even his
elastic credulity is stretched. “I swear it’s true,” the inmate says.
“You’ll meet him some day. He wrote his letter to the Chinese president
with a ballpoint pen and called it his ‘holy edict’. He brazenly addressed
President Jiang Zemin as his ‘loyal minister.’”

As I rode with Liao through the disaster zones of Sichuan, I asked him
about the purpose of what had by then become an almost obsessive
collection of personal stories and oral histories. He answered by invoking
Sima Qian, a second-century BC scholar regarded as the father of Chinese
historiography—and, more to the point, a scribe who broke with the
longstanding tradition of limiting history to dynastic accounts.

“According to Chinese tradition, our history is all about emperors, kings,
generals and chancellors,” Liao told me. “There is no history at all of
the little people, other than folk history or anecdotal biographies here
and there.” Later, in the same conversation, he added, “Chinese people’s
brains are always being washed, and no memory survives. What we are
concerned with is survival. My task is to recover this memory, to try to
describe the truth of these times.”

Two years ago, when I met Liao again in a dark restaurant in Berlin, where
he now resides after having been forced into exile, I broached what I
thought might be a delicate topic: Chinese writers in exile haven’t had
much success remaining relevant back home, or even staying in touch with
their society. How would someone like him, whose work was so rooted in
reporting, avoid that fate? “I have enough material to write 50 more
books,” he boasted. “For me, the hard problem is being quiet.”