MCLC: Memorial tribute to Liu Xiaobo

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Memorial tribute to Liu Xiaobo
With great sorrow I wrote this memorial tribute for Liu Xiaobo, which also bespeaks the guilt a Chinese Canadian feels at this moment.--Shuyu Kong
The Choices We Make When Candlelight is Forbidden…..
By Shuyu Kong
My lawyer friend in Beijing posted on Wechat a video of thunder and lightning at midnight on July 13, with the caption: “That martyr who dared to speak out for the masses must have risen to the Kingdom of light”.  She was careful not to mention any sensitive names, but through this “obscure” comment she both communicated her message and simultaneously suppressed her real anger and sorrow in a way that would strike a chord with most Chinese people.
This morning Chinese people around the world are divided into those who can publicly say goodbye to Liu Xiaobo and those who can’t. Even those who are physically outside mainland China but use Chinese social media apps such as Tencent Wechat or Sina Weibo (microblog) are restricted. A Hong Kong journalist deplored the fact that all her memorial posts on Weibo were deleted, with one-line message, “candlelight not allowed ” (candlelight is Wechat expression for commemoration).
And inside the Great Firewall, there is a deathly silence. Any online search containing the name of Liu Xiaobo returns “no result”.
None of my Wechat posts marked with his name got any response from friends within China.  Obviously they are blocked too.
Last night shows us once again that in China, where smart phones and social media have penetrated every corner of life, the power of technology is of little use for connecting people when humanity fails.
In the 1980s I had several opportunities to listen to Liu Xiaobo when he was a literature professor at Beijing Normal University. He shared his hopes of “changing peoples’ minds,” an idea inherited from China’s most uncompromising writer of modern times, Lu Xun. The ‘80s were  times of opening up and enlightenment in China, and we all thought humanists would become the vanguard of China’s new modernization.
All this idealism was shattered in that summer of ‘89, and that summer is where our paths diverged.
I fled China, did my postgraduate work in Canada and found a safe and comfortable position in Academia overseas. Many other Chinese also chose to leave China despite the country’s break-neck growth into an economic superpower.
Nobody can blame us for taking the easy way out. After 20 years of visiting China annually,  and witnessing the aspirations of the 1980s fading in the march toward a materialistic “Chinese Dream”, I feel I made the right choice.
In the decades since I left, that trickle of migrants turned into a stream, no longer just students and dissident intellectuals but encompassing people from all walks of life, if they could only afford it.  At the same time, a new group of “flexible citizens” emerged, securing their safety with foreign passports while maximizing their profits in the new Chinese marketplace.
Liu Xiaobo was one of the tiny minority who returned from abroad and remained in China despite the huge risks, without any lucrative business deal or privileged job offer in hand or in mind, and without a safe bolt hole to the West for himself and his family.
Five years ago, I organized a public reading event at Simon Fraser University where I teach, as a response to Berlin’s appeal for worldwide readings of Liu Xiaobo’s works. Our professors and students translated and read Liu’s work in French and English,  and I myself read on CBC Radio one of his love poems for his wife Liu Xia,  from the newly published translation of his essays and poems “No Enemies, No Hatred”.
But deep inside, I doubted the value of such a “distant” commemoration. I was disturbed by the guilty thought that the place I left behind is where these lines would sound most true in their original language, and where they were most needed. The place where a well-educated professional was beaten to death “accidentally” by police who were not punished even after a public outcry; where crony capitalism can take profits from private property in one hand and public property in the other; where the younger generation knows little of the Cultural Revolution and the June Fourth Student Movement, let alone Liu Xiaobo.
I have never regretted my choice to leave China, but I also know that this guilt will always follow us, we whose blessed lives overseas are forever shadowed by the darkness where candlelight is forbidden.
(Shuyu Kong is professor in Humanities and Asia Canada program, Simon Fraser University)
 
by denton.2 at osu.edu on July 15, 2017
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