MCLC: Buruma on Liao Yiwu

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: martin winter (dujuan99 at gmail.com)
Subject: Buruma on Liao Yiwu
***********************************************************

Source: The New Yorker (7/1/13):
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2013/07/01/130701crbo_books_bur
uma?currentPage=3

Prison of the Mind: A Chinese poet’s memoir of incarceration.
by Ian Buruma 

Spending time in jail is no fun anywhere, but each society has its own
cultural refinements of misery. The sadistic imagination of Chinese prison
authorities, though hardly unique, is often remarkable. But so is that of
the inmates themselves, who form their own hierarchies, their own prisons
within prisons.

At the Chongqing Municipal Public Security Bureau Investigation Center,
for example, also known as the Song Mountain Investigation Center, the
cell bosses devised an exotic menu of torments. A few samples:

SICHUAN-STYLE SMOKED DUCK: The enforcer burns the inmate’s pubic hair,
pulls back his foreskin and blackens the head of the penis with fire.

Or:

NOODLES IN A CLEAR BROTH: Strings of toilet papers are soaked in a bowl of
urine, and the inmate is forced to eat the toilet paper and drink the
urine.

Or:

TURTLE SHELL AND PORK SKIN SOUP: The enforcer smacks the inmate’s knee
caps until they are bruised and swollen like turtle shells. Walking is
impossible.

There are other tortures, too, meted out in a more improvised manner. Liao
Yiwu, in his extraordinary prison memoir, “For a Song and a Hundred Songs”
(translated from the Chinese by Wenguang Huang; New Harvest), describes
the case of a schizophrenic woodcutter who had axed his own wife, because
she was so emaciated that he took her for a bundle of wood. The cell boss
spikes the woodcutter’s broth with a laxative, and then refuses to let him
use the communal toilet bucket, with the result that the desperate man
shits all over a fellow-inmate. As a punishment for this disgusting
transgression, his face is smashed into a basin. The guards, assuming that
he has tried to commit suicide, a prison offense, then work him over with
a stun baton.

Alexis de Tocqueville came to the United States in 1831 to study the
country’s prison system, and ended up writing “Democracy in America.”
Observing the Chinese prison system from the inside, from 1990 to 1994, as
a “counterrevolutionary” inmate, Liao Yiwu tells us a great deal about
Chinese society, both traditional and Communist, including the impact of
revolutionary rhetoric, forced denunciations and public confessions, and,
as times have changed since Mao’s misrule, criminal forms of capitalism.
He ends his account by saying that “China remains a prison of the mind:
prosperity without liberty.”

Liao was incarcerated for writing a poem, “Massacre”—a long
stream-of-consciousness memorial to the thousands of people who were
killed on June 4, 1989, when the pro-democracy movement was crushed
throughout China. The poem, in its English translation by Michael Day,
begins as follows:

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.

Liao was not a political activist, or, strictly speaking, a dissident, and
his resistance had a spontaneous quality. Politics didn’t interest him
much, even during the nineteen-eighties, when many young Chinese thought
of little else. He led a rather dissolute life, wandering from place to
place as a “well-dressed hypocrite, a poet who portrayed himself as a
positive role model but all the while breathed in women like I was
breathing air, seeking shelter and warmth in random sex.”

Like many Chinese who grew up during the Cultural Revolution, Liao was
more or less self-educated in literature, although he received a grounding
in the Chinese classics from his father, a schoolteacher. His memoir is
sprinkled with the names of Western writers—Orwell, Kundera, Proust—some
of whose works penetrated even the prison walls in Chongqing. Among them,
amazingly, was Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four.” In Liao’s words, “On the
page was an imaginary prison, while all around me was the real thing.”

Unlike his friend Liu Xiaobo, a Nobel Prize-winning critic and a writer
with strong political convictions, Liao never wished to stick his neck
out. He describes himself as an artist who simply wanted to be free to
write in any way he liked. As recently as 2011, he told the journalist Ian
Johnson, “I don’t want to break their laws. I am not interested in them
and wish they weren’t interested in me.” But, in 1989, he put himself “on
a self-destructive path” by performing his poem in bars and dance clubs,
howling and chanting in the traditional manner of Chinese mourning. A
recording of the poem was distributed informally, and a film, entitled
“Requiem,” was made of his recitation by a group of sympathetic artists
and friends. None, according to Liao, could be classified as “dissidents”
or “democracy fighters.” But they were all arrested, their work
confiscated, and thus “the Public Security Bureau destroyed a vibrant
underground literary community in Sichuan.”

Liao’s time in prison didn’t turn him into an activist, either. He was
approached at one point by a fellow-“89er,” who planned to start an
organization of political prisoners. Liao refused to take part, and
explained the reason for his having written “Massacre” in the first place.
He “was compelled to protest,” he said, because “the state ideology
conflicted violently with the poet’s right of free expression.” To this,
he added in his memoir, “I never intended to be a hero, but in a country
where insanity ruled, I had to take a stand. ‘Massacre’ was my art and my
art was my protest.”

Several famous dissidents have written vividly about their prison
experiences. Wei Jingsheng’s “The Courage to Stand Alone” is an account of
eighteen years spent in prisons after he helped lead the Democracy Wall
movement, in the nineteen-seventies. Harry Wu’s “Bitter Winds” describes
his ordeal in forced-labor camps in the nineteen-sixties and seventies.
Their heroic stories bear a strong political message of standing up to
dictatorship. Liao is a literary man, and this actually makes his prison
memoir even more compelling. For one thing, he is ruthlessly candid about
his weaknesses, and his fears. There is nothing especially heroic about
him. Watching the guards in combat training on his first day in prison, he
“shuddered like a nervous rat.” Forced to sing songs over and over again
with a parched throat in the freezing cold to entertain the guards, he is
beaten with an electric baton. When he cannot go on any longer, he is
stripped and wrestled to the ground: “I could feel the baton on my
butthole, but I refused to surrender. The tip of the baton entered me. I
screamed and then whimpered in pain like a dog.” Liao tried to commit
suicide twice, once by bashing his head against the wall. This elicited
ridicule from his cellmates, who accused him of playacting, something they
thought typical of a bookish poet. If he had really wanted to smash his
skull, he should have made sure to use the wall edge.