'Lunatic' Outcast - Liao Yiwu

Asia Literary Review - Asian writing:
3, Autumn 2009


Liao Yiwu - 'Lunatic' Outcast
Wen Huang


'THE POLICE had started to remind me of the anniversary in May. They came to see me frequently, telling me to be “low key” and not to do anything subversive. On the afternoon of June 1, public security officers invited me to their office and interrogated me. They had heard that I had written an article called “Nineteen Days”. They wanted to know what my motives were.’

That postscript to the piece Liao Yiwu wrote for the summer 2009 issue of The Paris Review underscores the uneasy relationship the poet, novelist and screenwriter has with the powers that be in China since he composed his poem ‘Massacre’, which portrayed with stark imagery the night that People’s Liberation Army tanks rolled into Beijing on June 3, 1989 and the killings that followed; his was as vivid a depiction as Picasso’s of the bombing of Guernica by the Nazis during the Spanish Civil War.

Liao knew his poem would never be published in China, so he recorded it on audiotape, using Chinese ritualistic chanting and howling to invoke the spirits of the dead. Copied and passed on, his words were everywhere.

We live under bright sunlight,
But we have lost our eyesight.
We find ourselves on a street, so wide.
But no one can take a stride.
We stand in a crowd, supposed to be loud.
But people open their mouths without sound.
We are tortured with thirst,
But everyone refuses water.

The tape of ‘Massacre’, as well as a film he made with friends of its sequel, ‘Requiem’, did not go unnoticed by China’s security police and, in February 1990, as Liao was boarding a train to Beijing, he and six others, including his pregnant wife, were arrested. Liao was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment.

In another poem written at that time, he described his sense of frustration at being unable to fight back.

You were born with the soul of an assassin,
But at time of action,
You are at a loss, doing nothing.
You have no sword to draw,
Your body a sheath rusted,
Your hands shaking,
Your bones rotten,
Your near-sighted eyes cannot do the shooting.


Much of Liao’s work is banned in China and he is forbidden to publish. He lives in Chengdu and is watched by the Public Security Bureau. He has been detained numerous times, for giving ‘illegal interviews’ and for exposing the dark side of China’s Communist society in his book Interviews with People from the Bottom Rung of Society.

* * *

Liao was born in 1958, the year that Mao Zedong launched the Great Leap Forward, a campaign aimed at industrialising China’s backward peasant economy. The forced collectivisation of agriculture and the blind mobilisation of the entire country to produce iron and steel led to a famine in 1960 – some thirty million people died. Liao, then aged three, barely survived.

In 1966, at the start of the Cultural Revolution, Liao’s father, a school teacher, was accused of being a counter-revolutionary. His parents divorced to protect their children. Life without father was hard and often brutal. When his mother tried to sell some cloth on the black market to buy food, he recalls, she was caught by the police ‘and was paraded, along with other criminals, on the stage of the Sichuan Opera House in front of thousands of people.

‘After several of my classmates who had seen my mother told me about it, I was devastated.’

Liao completed high school and went travelling around the country, working as a cook, and then as a truck driver on the Sichuan-Tibet Highway. He read western poets, from Keats to Baudelaire, and began to compose his own poetry. By the 1980s, he had become one of the most popular new poets in China and contributed regularly to influential literary magazines. His work also appeared in ‘underground’ publications that carried contemporary western-style poems deemed by the authorities to be ‘spiritual pollution’.

In the spring of 1989, two prominent magazines published ‘The Yellow City’ and ‘Idol’, in which Liao used allegory to criticise a paralysed system that was being eaten away by a collective leukaemia. He considered Mao to be a symptom of this cancer. The poems were deemed to be anti-Communist and police searched Liao’s home. He was repeatedly detained and interrogated. One of the magazines was closed, the other disciplined.

Liao’s imprisonment in 1990 for condemning what happened in and around Tiananmen Square was a defining chapter in his life. Ostracised and depressed during his four-year incarceration, he rebelled against prison rules. Punishment included torture with electric batons and being forced to stand in the hot summer sun for hours. On one occasion in solitary confinement his hands were tied behind his back for twenty-three days. By the end of this punishment, abscesses covered his armpits. He suffered several mental collapses and twice attempted suicide. But he refused to be cowed, and he became known among the inmates as ‘the big lunatic’.

In response to international pressure, Liao was released in 1994 for ‘good behaviour’ with fifty days left to serve out his sentence. He returned home to find that his wife had left him, taking their child. He was also unemployed, his city residential registration having been cancelled. His former literary friends avoided him. His only possession now was a flute, which he had learned to play while in prison. Liao became a musician on the noisy streets of Chengdu.

In 1998, he compiled an anthology of underground poems of the 1970s; The Fall of the Holy Temple included or made references to numerous Chinese dissidents. One of China’s vice-premiers ordered an investigation into the book, calling it a ‘premeditated attempt to overthrow the government, and … supported by powerful anti-China groups’. Liao was again detained and his publisher in China was forbidden to release any new books for one year.

Unable to find anyone willing to publish his work, and unable to secure steady employment, Liao struggled to survive, picking up odd jobs in restaurants, nightclubs, teahouses and bookstores, and learning first hand what life is like for the socially marginalised in China. He turned his experiences in prison and on the streets into a book, Interviews with People from the Bottom Rung of Society. In it, he told the stories of sixty people, among them a professional mourner, a murderer, a beggar, a fortune teller, a thief, a dissident, a homosexual, a pimp, a former landlord and a school teacher. Like the author himself, all were cast out of mainstream society during the various political purges of the Mao era or were products of the tumultuous generational changes sweeping China.

In 2001, the Yangzi Publishing House published a ‘sanitised’ version of the book and it became a best-seller. The independent Beijing literary critic Yu Jie called it ‘an historical record of contemporary China’. Another independent critic, Ren Momei, told Radio Free Asia, ‘All the characters depicted in the book have one thing in common – they have all been deprived of their right to speak out. This book is a loud condemnation of the deprivation of their rights to speak and an excellent portrayal of this group of unique individuals.’

Liao introduced the character di-ceng, meaning ‘bottom rung of society’, to the national vocabulary. The Department of Propaganda and the China News and Publishing Administration ordered all of Liao’s books off the shelves, punished the editor at the publishing house, and fired key staff at a popular Chinese weekly, The Southern Weekend, which had carried an interview with Liao and featured his book.

In 2002, Kang Zhengguo, a writer and lecturer at Yale University, met Liao in China and, with Kang’s help, the Taiwan-based Rye Field Publishing Company releasedInterviews in three volumes.


* * *

I first heard of Liao in June 2001 when I was asked to translate an interview he gave to Radio Free Asia not long after his book was banned in China. I read his book and it reminded me of Studs Terkel’s Working, which had been translated into Chinese in the 1980s. Working introduced me and many other Chinese to the real America and lives of ordinary Americans, about whom I knew very little. I believe Liao’s book serves the same purpose for western readers and helps them to understand China from the perspective of the ordinary Chinese.

It took me nearly two years to track down Liao, who was constantly on the move to avoid police harassment. I was told that one time, in Chengdu, he had to jump from a second-storey window to escape arrest after interviewing a member of an outlawed religious group.

In early 2004, I received an email from a friend, a former visiting scholar at Harvard. She said Liao had agreed to let me translate his work into English and gave me a mobile phone number to call. The area code was for somewhere near the China-Burma border.

Our first conversation lasted two hours, and over time we developed a system of collaboration that involved ‘coded’ conversations via email and telephone, and ‘drops’ by mutual friends.

In September 2005, the first issue of The Paris Review under new editor Philip Gourevitch included three interviews from our initial translation of Interviews with People from the Bottom Rung of Society.

Buoyed by its reception, we stepped up our work on The Corpse Walker – Real Life Stories: China From the Bottom Up (Random House, 2008), a selection of twenty-seven stories we hoped would be both representative of Liao’s work and of interest to western readers. The book, and here I quote the paperback blurb, which I rather like, ranges from ‘hustlers to drifters, outlaws and street performers, the officially renegade and the physically handicapped, those who deal with human waste and with the wasting of humans, artists and shamans, crooks, even cannibals’.

In May 2008, Liao went to earthquake-hit Sichuan, where he spent several months interviewing those who lived in the disaster zone, recording their fight to expose corrupt officials and seek justice. The stories gave rise to Chronicles of the Big Earthquake, published in Chinese in Hong Kong earlier this year.

Liao continues to write and his interviews, essays and poems are published on Chinese lauguage websites. He has been honoured by the Independent Chinese PEN Centre and Human Rights Watch. Barred from leaving China, he continues to be harassed by the police and subjected to short-term detention.

Recalling recently his prison days, Liao wrote:

Squatting like a dog, crawling,
The unwritten prison rules forbid
My back from straightening
Dynasty after dynasty, Chinese intellectuals
Spineless, never dared to stand up, back stretching.

How many times have our assholes been prodded,
By dynasties and regimes
Five thousand years, our spirit castrated
This nation
That procreates like ants
Produces no real men.

I’m the only man
With the ability to procreate
But this lone virgin
Violated, meeting the same fate.

Dear Heaven,
Cover me with darkness
Send me my fig leaf to cover my humiliation.

‘I am trying to overcome, little by little, the fear that’s been inflicted on me,’ he says. ‘By doing so, I try to preserve my sanity and inner freedom.’




POETRY

John Mateer, Gillian Sze, Catherine Candano, Madeleine Lee, Tammy Ho Lai Ming,David McKirdy, Phoebe Tsang, Ronny Someck 


'via Blog this'

TIBET: Pico Iyer and the Dalai Lama

Spring 2010
INTERVIEW | TIBET

Pico Iyer and the Dalai Lama

Ramona Koval


THERE ARE FEW INDIVIDUALS on the international stage more likely to rile China than Lhamo Thondup, better known as the fourteenth reincarnation of the Dalai Lama, spiritual leader of the Tibetan branch of Mahayana Buddhism and Tibet’s leader in exile since the 1959 uprising against China. His February meeting with US President Barak Obama at the White House predictably raised the hackles of China, with Beijing saying it ‘seriously harms US-China relations’. He understands political gesturing and pays it no heed. Many books have been written about the Dalai Lama, with and without his cooperation, the latest of which is The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama by Pico Iyer, author of two novels, seven works of non-fiction, including Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk and The Global Soul, and numerous essays for the New York Review of Books, Harper’s, the New York Times, and Time.

In this interview with ABC Radio National’s The Book Show, Iyer talks about his own quest as a writer for the contemplative life and his assessment of the Dalai Lama and light and dark sides of Tibetan Buddhism.

Iyer : My father was a professional philosopher and interested in many religions, including Buddhism, and so as soon as the Dalai Lama came out of Tibet and arrived in India in 1959, we were living in England, I think my father was one of the relatively few people who realised that suddenly for the first time in history this amazing repository of centuries’ worth of wisdom and tradition, who had always been completely secluded from the world, was available to the larger world.

So my father sailed all the way from England to India and requested an audience with the Dalai Lama in his first few months in India, and went up to visit him in the foothills of the Himalayas. They had a long conversation and my father, by good fortune, was deep in research on Gandhi at the time so I think the Dalai Lama felt that he had a lot to learn from my father, too, because he was newly interested in Gandhi and how to lead a non-violent resistance against an occupying power in Tibet.

And at the end of the conversation, maybe I suppose like any proud father, my dad said, ‘Your Holiness, I’ve got this little kid back in Oxford, England, three years old, and he took an unusually keen interest in the story of your flight across the mountains from Tibet into India.’ And so the Dalai Lama, I think with his perfect gift for the perfect gesture, found a photograph of himself when he was only five years old but was already on the throne in Lhasa and sent it through my father to me. Of course I was a typical three-year-old, so I didn’t exactly really know who or what a Dalai Lama was, but I think I could instantly make contact with this picture of a little boy not much older than myself, in a difficult position, living in something of a foreign country.

I can remember to this day that when I was growing up and I had that picture on my desk, every now and then I’d begin to feel sorry for myself, you know, here I am, Indian boy living in England by myself, life seems difficult, and then I look at this picture of a little boy, five years old, already ruling six million people, and I can’t feel sorry for myself again. So I made that contact with his image and the idea of him very young, and then I first met him a few years later when I was a teenager.

Koval: Just remind us again of the position of the Dalai Lama. He’s supposedly the fourteenth reincarnation of …?

Iyer : … of Avalokitesvara, who is the Tibetan god of compassion. But it’s interesting because, as you know, the Dalai Lama always makes a distinction between his position among the Tibetans, which is indeed their leader and the incarnation of their god, and his position among the rest of us where he always emphasises that he’s a fallible human. I remember once I was writing an article about him and I described him as a god-king, and the next time I saw him he was very impatient and he said, ‘No, I’m not a god at all, I’m just a regular human being, and to call me a god actually makes a mockery of the whole of Buddhism,’ which doesn’t necessarily believe in god.

He does feel convinced that he’s the reincarnation of this particular spirit and in some ways it’s like inheriting a company or inheriting a job from your parents, and so the Dalai Lama institution for him, I think, is a set of duties and especially responsibilities and certain customs. And he accepts that for Tibetans he does carry this superhuman significance, and he stands for something much larger than himself. But he feels that it’s important for non-Buddhists, who don’t subscribe to that religion, just to see him as a regular scientist or philosopher, and in fact he even describes the Buddha as a scientist, which is, as you said, one reason why he often says that if new science shows the Buddhist teachings (let alone the Dalai Lama’s teachings) to be imperfect or inaccurate … for him I think science always trumps faith.

Koval: He’s taken that back to the people who are responsible for the belief system, and changed a few things.


Iyer : He’s actually surprisingly radical. So he will startle other senior Tibetan monks by saying that the next Dalai Lama may be a woman, there may be no next Dalai Lama, that really anything is possible once science has shown it to be so. For example, I remember he was once pointing out to me some old Tibetan scrolls that showed the sun and the moon as equidistant from the Earth. He said, ‘Well, we now know that that’s not true. So they may have a symbolic value for certain other Tibetans and I respect that, but for me I really have no interest in those scrolls because they’re presenting a very inaccurate representation of the world.’ And I think maybe that’s one reason why so many of us from afar see the Dalai Lama almost as this fairy-tale figure from this very faraway kingdom who’s in possession of all these magical powers. And while some of that may be true, I think the Dalai Lama I see is really a realist. You’ll notice if you listen to him that at every point he’s always stressing investigation and analysis and research, including as to his own status. But whatever is going on he wants to take the scientific approach, I think.

Koval: You write about his most agonising and mounting conundrums, his decisiveness with respect to his opposition to Chinese oppression, his ideas about the religious principle of forbearance and looking for points in common. This puts him in a very difficult position when it comes to young Tibetans, for example.

Iyer : It does, especially because, as he is the first to acknowledge, his policy of forbearance and non-violence has actually borne no apparent fruit in the last fifty years. He has always extended the hand of forgiveness and friendship to the Chinese and all that’s happened is that the Chinese government has come down harder and harder on the six million Tibetans in Tibet. And so in fact when I travelled around Japan with him last year, over and over he said, ‘Well, my policy has failed. Please other Tibetans come up with different solutions to this problem.’

And I think he understands more than anyone that younger Tibetans, who’ve never even seen Tibet in most cases, feel the same impatience that you or I would feel if we were told just to sit in our rooms while our country was being wiped off the map and our cousins were being imprisoned and our parents were being killed, and they would say, ‘How can we begin to follow the way of forbearance when soon there will be no Tibet to protect?’

And I think the Dalai Lama has a very far-sighted and in fact a very pragmatic vision of things, and he realises that ultimately Tibet will be okay, but in the short run it’s heart-rending for him to see and hear his people express that very understandable frustration: ‘How, how, how can you ask us to practise non-violence when we’re being stripped of everything that human life consists of?’

Koval: But you also write about this idea of Shangri-La and the fairy tale and the myth of Shangri-La and that Tibetans know how to play the fairy tale.

Iyer : The Dalai Lama never plays that fairy tale and most of the more thoughtful and honest monks never would, but I spent a lot of time in Dharamsala in northern India where the Dalai Lama and his government in exile are centred, and it’s not so surprising that many of the Tibetans there have come over the mountains from Tibet, it’s difficult for them to find jobs in India, difficult for them to find lives anywhere and in some ways they’re severed from their homeland, and so the one thing that they have is this connection with the super-exotic place that the rest of the world has romanticised for so long, and the fact that many of them are nomads and come from a world that is hard for the rest of us to imagine.

So when you walk around the streets of Dharamsala one of the main things you see are these very, very handsome Tibetan guys with hair down to their waists and turquoise earrings and beautiful smiles and very sad stories, hypnotising really the young ladies of the world from Australia and America and France, because they’re very hunky and also because they come from this very poignant situation. And so like most of us, those guys know what their assets are and one of their main assets is to come from this fairy-tale land.

And so there’s an interesting kind of circle of dreams that you see in the Tibetan exile situation where most Tibetans are, of course, desperate to come to Sydney or New York or Paris, and many young people from Australia, America and France are desperate to partake of the mystery of the East, and so they circle around one another, each projecting his or her illusions a little bit upon the other. And then the Dalai Lama sits removed from all that, just working very hard to try to protect his people, and can’t really afford to be distracted by that dance taking place around his temple.

Koval: You write of Dharamsala, ‘I could be walking through a Buddhist text on suffering and need and decay and illusion.’ What did you find there?

Iyer : It’s a very poignant place because most of us from other countries race to Dharamsala because we think of it as little Lhasa, the closest we can get to this long-inaccessible kingdom of Tibet. But most of the Tibetans there are hoping that it will disappear. All they want to do is to go back to Tibet. So they’re there in a very reluctant and provisional and temporary fashion. What you see among the Tibetans, as among any refugee populations anywhere understandably, is restlessness, indirection, and they have the Dalai Lama to centre them and they cling to him, as to their culture itself. But apart from him, they don’t really know who or where they are, they’re caught up in that exile bind.

So I feel there’s a lot of longing and there’s a lot of illusion and obviously there’s a lot of wistfulness and projection in this city, which has been so wonderfully created by the Dalai Lama as a kind of Buddhist city on a hill, about cutting away illusion and looking past projection and seeing reality for what it is. And I think that speaks just for my larger sense, which is that to me he is an impressive man who has done almost everything he can to bring clarity and realism to his life and to the world, but we are human beings and it’s the nature of humanity to traffic in illusions and to have romances and not always to want reality. I think TS Eliot said humankind cannot bear too much reality. And so I see in Dharamsala almost this tug and tension between a very rigorous and clear-sighted philosopher and the confusion of the rest of us, including, of course, me.

Koval: Pico, let’s talk about the Dalai Lama and his family, which was another very interesting part of your book. His relationships between his older brothers and his sister … there seems to be some tensions in the family.

Iyer : Yes, again it’s an interesting illustration that even this very exalted person, as I see him, is surrounded by the regular stuff of human existence. So his eldest brother, who actually passed away last September, who was himself an incarnate lama, in other words a very high monk within the Tibetan system, he always felt that Tibet should completely hold out for independence, shouldn’t make any agreement with China at all, shouldn’t begin to come up with compromise solutions the way the Dalai Lama has. So the Dalai Lama’s own eldest brother was one of the Dalai Lama’s critics in terms of his policy of forbearance.

At the same time his second brother, who also of course is an elegant man who has seen a lot of the world, speaks fluent Chinese, was married to a Chinese woman, was largely based in Hong Kong and is one of his main unofficial emissaries to Beijing. So just within his two eldest brothers you’ve almost got the two extremes of the Tibetan situation; one person calling out for never even beginning to talk to China, the other holding out for a much more pragmatic response and saying we’ve got to find the common ground with China. And it’s just a small reminder of how almost unimaginably complicated the Dalai Lama’s life is.

It’s a wonderful thing that I think if you were to ask most of your listeners what they associate with the Dalai Lama, probably the first thing they’d say is his infectious laugh and his smile and his air of optimism, which I think is at the very core of him. But that’s more impressive to me because when you look at him close up you see how at every level, from his family to his community to, of course, his relations with China, he has the most difficult life of anyone I can imagine, more difficult than the Pope or than that of President Obama, I think.

Koval: You also remind us that if you dig a little deeper there’s a lot of group rivalry within the Buddhist groups, and quite a bloody history. Can you talk a little bit about that? The Shugden group rivalry, for example?

Iyer : Yes, it’s a very bloody history because Tibet until recently was living really in something akin to medieval times and fraught with all the tensions and rivalries, both philosophical and geographical, that we might have found in medieval Europe. And I think that’s why the Dalai Lama is always one of the first people to say, ‘I don’t want to go back to the way Tibet was in 1950, there was much that was wrong with it,’ and I think …

Koval: What was wrong with it?

Iyer : It wasn’t a very democratic society and also the eastern Tibetans were resentful of central Tibetans, and there were four main schools of Tibetan Buddhism and they were all going off in opposite directions. So in terms of the Shugden group, they are one small group that actually about fifteen, twenty years ago came into direct conflict with the Dalai Lama because he felt that they were more or less turning this very rational scientific philosophy of Buddhism into folk worship and simply trying to placate this supernatural deity, which went against the central principles of Buddhism. And he also felt that they were speaking for a much more divided Buddhism. They were saying ‘our group is right and the other groups of Tibetan Buddhism are wrong’.

So he asked his followers not to propitiate that deity and he said, ‘Those of you who do want to be part of that group, please don’t come to my teachings because it can damage psychically the people from other groups who are attending my teaching.’ And so they started picketing his teaching and calling him a tyrant for wanting to impose his vision of Buddhism upon all other Tibetans. And suddenly this conflict, which eighty years ago would have just been a remote thing that none of us would have heard about taking place in Lhasa, was of course playing out on a global stage and splashed across the newspapers of the world.

And I think as soon as the Dalai Lama came into exile, he saw this as an opportunity for Tibetans to band together, as they didn’t in old Tibet, and to begin to dissolve some of their rivalries because they all now have a common purpose in trying to keep Tibet going in exile. So he’s worked hard to bring all the four schools of Buddhism together, but it is an uphill task and there are always going to be other groups who of course have their own agendas.

Koval: You describe the daylight and the night-time side of Tibetan Buddhism. What goes on in the night-time side?


Iyer : Well, it goes back to what you asked so well a few minutes ago about his position on reincarnation, which is to say that the Dalai Lama, when he speaks to you or me in Australia or the US will always emphasise reason, science, the ecumenical side of Buddhism, but of course there’s a whole other series of … set of rites and customs and even belief within the Buddhist community itself that are much more esoteric and mystical and that make no sense to us.

Wherever he goes he travels with certain ceremonial objects that he downplays when he’s speaking to you or me, but that come from these mysterious rites that to us would seem to be the stuff of superstition, just like any religion, starting with Christianity. Christianity has the Sermon on the Mount and the gospels, which I think people from any tradition can respond to, but they also have Mass and the sacramental offerings that are very peculiar to Catholicism, which to an outsider they would think ‘Why are you drinking blood? Why are you taking that wafer to be the body of your saviour?’ And of course Tibetan Buddhism has its equivalents to that.

Koval: And do you know what they are?

Iyer : No, partly because I am not a Buddhist and not a Tibetan, but every now and then I get an intimation just of how little I know. I’ll even ask the Dalai Lama if what has happened to Tibet in its recent history is the result of karma (in other words, the law of cause and effect that is the central principle of Buddhism), and he’ll always say to me, ‘Well, it’s very mysterious’ or, ‘It’s very complex,’ which I think is his gracious way of saying, ‘It’s much too complicated for you as an outsider to understand, and to begin to understand it you’d really need to know the intimate mysteries of Buddhism.’

Koval: You say the Dalai Lama shields the wider world from esoteric Buddhism, the way one might keep a loaded gun in a locked cabinet so the kids don’t start to play with it and it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.

Iyer : Yes. For example, an important school within Buddhism is Tantra, which involves intoxication and sexual rites and all kinds of things that, taken out of context, are very, very inflammatory. If you are an extremely enlightened lama and you know how to use sexual intercourse as a means to enlightenment, then probably it makes absolute sense. But if it’s you or me who is dabbling in these practices that we don’t fully have an understanding or a context for, then it’s very likely to backfire.

I think that’s one reason why the Dalai Lama, when he travels around the world actually as the world’s most visual Buddhist, tells foreigners not to take up Buddhism because I think he’s seen so much get lost in translation, and he knows that if you or I were to reach for Buddhism today we might be reaching for the exoticism of it or for everything that we don’t understand rather than for what we do understand, and in the process we might damage ourselves as well as damaging Buddhism.

Koval: So he’s got two constituencies, he’s got his own people and the wider world.

Iyer : Yes, exactly.

Koval: And what about this idea about attachment and non-attachment, and being attached to Tibet?

Iyer : Yes, and I think he is strikingly unattached to Tibet in the sense that he always says that Tibet has everything to gain from being part of China, he doesn’t want to be separate from China. And he always stresses, too, that the most important parts of Tibet are invisible, having to do with sets of values and certain cultural traditions and language, that can be carried out in other countries as much as in the geographical entity of Tibet itself.

But again, his people are understandably attached to their country, and they’re like people who have suddenly been thrown out of their house and all they want to do is go back to their house. And he and other philosophical counsellors can tell them, ‘Well, you shouldn’t be attached to the house, the most important thing is your children or your community,’ but they’re regular human beings like the rest of us and do feel that attachment, even though the first law of Buddhism almost is that desire and longing bring suffering. So I think he’s like any religious leader really, trying to lay down reminders and principles, but aware that it’s always hard for all of us to listen to them.

Koval: Pico, you say you’ve spent much of your adult life in monasteries, what attracts you to these places and have you ever been tempted to join one?

Iyer : What attracts me might be all that boarding school training I had in England as an impressionable youth that formed or deformed me for life. I grew up as an only child, 6,000 miles away from the nearest relative, my parents were in California and my family was in India, so I’ve always had a very strong solitary tendency, which of course is ideal for a writer and a traveller. I have been tempted to spend time in monasteries.

In fact, I’ve probably made every mistake that I was describing earlier, which is to say, I was working for Time magazine in New York City when I was in my twenties and I left all that in order to come to Kyoto, Japan, to live for a year in a Zen temple. My year in the Zen temple lasted all of a week because as soon as I arrived I found that it wasn’t just depthless contemplation of the moon and writing haiku and pondering impermanence, it was scrubbing and cleaning and cooking and scrubbing and cleaning some more. So I didn’t last very long.

And yet a few years later I found a Benedictine monastery just up the road from my parents’ house in California, and now I do spend a lot of time there, without of course being a Benedictine. I think the reason I go to those places is that, especially as the world gets more and more accelerated and all of us know that we’re surrounded by beeping cell phones and twinkling laptops and more and more distraction devices, the greatest luxury of all for me us just stillness and silence.

Koval: And what’s your next work on?

Iyer : Well, it’s I suppose a bit of a sequel in that I’m writing a book on Graham Greene who has haunted and inspired me for many years. And I think, as you can tell from the way we’ve been talking, the thing that really impresses me about the Dalai Lama is that he’s never been a holy man up on the mountaintop, he’s always had to bring those high philosophical principles into the middle of the real world, realpolitik, as you said. And I think Graham Greene for me speaks for the same thing, which is how do you find any clarity or hope or faith in the middle of the confused, fallen world around us? So I see them very much in the same breath as people who have looked at the world very undilutedly and see it in all its confusion and silliness but also feel that there is a place for hope and a place for compassion in it.

Koval: Graham Greene was a man who had religion close to his heart but was kind of flawed; he never quite made the heights that perhaps he aspired to.

Iyer : ‘Close to his heart’ is a very good way of putting it. I think Catholicism was the mistress that he was constantly raging against but never fully embraced his entire life. Even at the end of his life he called himself a Catholic agnostic and said he wished he had faith but couldn’t get there.

This is an abridged transcript of an interview broadcast on ABC Radio National’s The Book Show. The full transcript and audio of Koval’s interview with Iyer can be found at www.abc.net.au/rn/bookshow/stories/2010/2786351.htm.

Liao Yiwu - 'Lunatic' Outcast Wen Huang

Asia Literary Review - Asian writing:
3, Autumn 2009

Liao Yiwu - 'Lunatic' Outcast
Wen Huang 

'THE POLICE had started to remind me of the anniversary in May. They came to see me frequently, telling me to be “low key” and not to do anything subversive. On the afternoon of June 1, public security officers invited me to their office and interrogated me. They had heard that I had written an article called “Nineteen Days”. They wanted to know what my motives were.’

That postscript to the piece Liao Yiwu wrote for the summer 2009 issue of The Paris Review underscores the uneasy relationship the poet, novelist and screenwriter has with the powers that be in China since he composed his poem ‘Massacre’, which portrayed with stark imagery the night that People’s Liberation Army tanks rolled into Beijing on June 3, 1989 and the killings that followed; his was as vivid a depiction as Picasso’s of the bombing of Guernica by the Nazis during the Spanish Civil War.

Liao knew his poem would never be published in China, so he recorded it on audiotape, using Chinese ritualistic chanting and howling to invoke the spirits of the dead. Copied and passed on, his words were everywhere.


We live under bright sunlight,
But we have lost our eyesight.
We find ourselves on a street, so wide.
But no one can take a stride.
We stand in a crowd, supposed to be loud.
But people open their mouths without sound.
We are tortured with thirst,
But everyone refuses water.


The tape of ‘Massacre’, as well as a film he made with friends of its sequel, ‘Requiem’, did not go unnoticed by China’s security police and, in February 1990, as Liao was boarding a train to Beijing, he and six others, including his pregnant wife, were arrested. Liao was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment.

In another poem written at that time, he described his sense of frustration at being unable to fight back.


You were born with the soul of an assassin,
But at time of action,
You are at a loss, doing nothing.
You have no sword to draw,
Your body a sheath rusted,
Your hands shaking,
Your bones rotten,
Your near-sighted eyes cannot do the shooting.


Much of Liao’s work is banned in China and he is forbidden to publish. He lives in Chengdu and is watched by the Public Security Bureau. He has been detained numerous times, for giving ‘illegal interviews’ and for exposing the dark side of China’s Communist society in his book Interviews with People from the Bottom Rung of Society.

* * *

Liao was born in 1958, the year that Mao Zedong launched the Great Leap Forward, a campaign aimed at industrialising China’s backward peasant economy. The forced collectivisation of agriculture and the blind mobilisation of the entire country to produce iron and steel led to a famine in 1960 – some thirty million people died. Liao, then aged three, barely survived.

In 1966, at the start of the Cultural Revolution, Liao’s father, a school teacher, was accused of being a counter-revolutionary. His parents divorced to protect their children. Life without father was hard and often brutal. When his mother tried to sell some cloth on the black market to buy food, he recalls, she was caught by the police ‘and was paraded, along with other criminals, on the stage of the Sichuan Opera House in front of thousands of people.

‘After several of my classmates who had seen my mother told me about it, I was devastated.’

Liao completed high school and went travelling around the country, working as a cook, and then as a truck driver on the Sichuan-Tibet Highway. He read western poets, from Keats to Baudelaire, and began to compose his own poetry. By the 1980s, he had become one of the most popular new poets in China and contributed regularly to influential literary magazines. His work also appeared in ‘underground’ publications that carried contemporary western-style poems deemed by the authorities to be ‘spiritual pollution’.

In the spring of 1989, two prominent magazines published ‘The Yellow City’ and ‘Idol’, in which Liao used allegory to criticise a paralysed system that was being eaten away by a collective leukaemia. He considered Mao to be a symptom of this cancer. The poems were deemed to be anti-Communist and police searched Liao’s home. He was repeatedly detained and interrogated. One of the magazines was closed, the other disciplined.

Liao’s imprisonment in 1990 for condemning what happened in and around Tiananmen Square was a defining chapter in his life. Ostracised and depressed during his four-year incarceration, he rebelled against prison rules. Punishment included torture with electric batons and being forced to stand in the hot summer sun for hours. On one occasion in solitary confinement his hands were tied behind his back for twenty-three days. By the end of this punishment, abscesses covered his armpits. He suffered several mental collapses and twice attempted suicide. But he refused to be cowed, and he became known among the inmates as ‘the big lunatic’.

In response to international pressure, Liao was released in 1994 for ‘good behaviour’ with fifty days left to serve out his sentence. He returned home to find that his wife had left him, taking their child. He was also unemployed, his city residential registration having been cancelled. His former literary friends avoided him. His only possession now was a flute, which he had learned to play while in prison. Liao became a musician on the noisy streets of Chengdu.

In 1998, he compiled an anthology of underground poems of the 1970s; The Fall of the Holy Temple included or made references to numerous Chinese dissidents. One of China’s vice-premiers ordered an investigation into the book, calling it a ‘premeditated attempt to overthrow the government, and … supported by powerful anti-China groups’. Liao was again detained and his publisher in China was forbidden to release any new books for one year.

Unable to find anyone willing to publish his work, and unable to secure steady employment, Liao struggled to survive, picking up odd jobs in restaurants, nightclubs, teahouses and bookstores, and learning first hand what life is like for the socially marginalised in China. He turned his experiences in prison and on the streets into a book, Interviews with People from the Bottom Rung of Society. In it, he told the stories of sixty people, among them a professional mourner, a murderer, a beggar, a fortune teller, a thief, a dissident, a homosexual, a pimp, a former landlord and a school teacher. Like the author himself, all were cast out of mainstream society during the various political purges of the Mao era or were products of the tumultuous generational changes sweeping China.

In 2001, the Yangzi Publishing House published a ‘sanitised’ version of the book and it became a best-seller. The independent Beijing literary critic Yu Jie called it ‘an historical record of contemporary China’. Another independent critic, Ren Momei, told Radio Free Asia, ‘All the characters depicted in the book have one thing in common – they have all been deprived of their right to speak out. This book is a loud condemnation of the deprivation of their rights to speak and an excellent portrayal of this group of unique individuals.’

Liao introduced the character di-ceng, meaning ‘bottom rung of society’, to the national vocabulary. The Department of Propaganda and the China News and Publishing Administration ordered all of Liao’s books off the shelves, punished the editor at the publishing house, and fired key staff at a popular Chinese weekly, The Southern Weekend, which had carried an interview with Liao and featured his book.

In 2002, Kang Zhengguo, a writer and lecturer at Yale University, met Liao in China and, with Kang’s help, the Taiwan-based Rye Field Publishing Company releasedInterviews in three volumes.

* * *

I first heard of Liao in June 2001 when I was asked to translate an interview he gave to Radio Free Asia not long after his book was banned in China. I read his book and it reminded me of Studs Terkel’s Working, which had been translated into Chinese in the 1980s. Working introduced me and many other Chinese to the real America and lives of ordinary Americans, about whom I knew very little. I believe Liao’s book serves the same purpose for western readers and helps them to understand China from the perspective of the ordinary Chinese.

It took me nearly two years to track down Liao, who was constantly on the move to avoid police harassment. I was told that one time, in Chengdu, he had to jump from a second-storey window to escape arrest after interviewing a member of an outlawed religious group.

In early 2004, I received an email from a friend, a former visiting scholar at Harvard. She said Liao had agreed to let me translate his work into English and gave me a mobile phone number to call. The area code was for somewhere near the China-Burma border. 

Our first conversation lasted two hours, and over time we developed a system of collaboration that involved ‘coded’ conversations via email and telephone, and ‘drops’ by mutual friends.

In September 2005, the first issue of The Paris Review under new editor Philip Gourevitch included three interviews from our initial translation of Interviews with People from the Bottom Rung of Society.

Buoyed by its reception, we stepped up our work on The Corpse Walker – Real Life Stories: China From the Bottom Up (Random House, 2008), a selection of twenty-seven stories we hoped would be both representative of Liao’s work and of interest to western readers. The book, and here I quote the paperback blurb, which I rather like, ranges from ‘hustlers to drifters, outlaws and street performers, the officially renegade and the physically handicapped, those who deal with human waste and with the wasting of humans, artists and shamans, crooks, even cannibals’.

In May 2008, Liao went to earthquake-hit Sichuan, where he spent several months interviewing those who lived in the disaster zone, recording their fight to expose corrupt officials and seek justice. The stories gave rise to Chronicles of the Big Earthquake, published in Chinese in Hong Kong earlier this year.

Liao continues to write and his interviews, essays and poems are published on Chinese lauguage websites. He has been honoured by the Independent Chinese PEN Centre and Human Rights Watch. Barred from leaving China, he continues to be harassed by the police and subjected to short-term detention.

Recalling recently his prison days, Liao wrote:

Squatting like a dog, crawling,
The unwritten prison rules forbid
My back from straightening
Dynasty after dynasty, Chinese intellectuals
Spineless, never dared to stand up, back stretching.
How many times have our assholes been prodded,
By dynasties and regimes
Five thousand years, our spirit castrated
This nation
That procreates like ants
Produces no real men.
I’m the only man
With the ability to procreate
But this lone virgin
Violated, meeting the same fate.
Dear Heaven,
Cover me with darkness
Send me my fig leaf to cover my humiliation.

‘I am trying to overcome, little by little, the fear that’s been inflicted on me,’ he says. ‘By doing so, I try to preserve my sanity and inner freedom.’ 



Memories of My Flute Teacher 

Liao Yiwu - 'Lunatic' Outcast Translator Wen Huang introduces Liao Yiwu’s 'Memories of My Flute Teacher'




'via Blog this'

Memories of My Flute Teacher

Memories of My Flute Teacher
Liao Yiwu



SIMA WAS the oldest inmate at Tumen prison, which is up in the Daba mountains in the southwestern province of Sichuan; he was eighty-four when I met him. He had a janitorial job at the clinic where, for more than a decade, he could be seen holding either a broom or a xiao flute with eight holes. His sweeping was precise, measured, and during breaks he would sit out in the courtyard and play his flute, as though emptying himself of desolation and loneliness. The sadness that came from that hollow bamboo stick seemed out of character for someone who was, or at least had been, a Buddhist monk, supposedly detached from worldly suffering. The other prisoners used to mock him as an illiterate, ‘That old monk probably doesn’t know how to read, so he thinks if he plays his flute it will make up for not studying scripture.’

Monk Sima’s past was a mystery to me and to the others, although there was much speculation; one version had the ring of truth: formerly abbot at a nearby temple, he was accused by the government of belonging to a huidaomen – ‘superstitious sect’ – that was rumoured to be still active in many parts of the countryside, even though huidaomen were declared illegal as ‘subversive’ cults after the Communists took over China in 1949. When Monk Sima’s case was first brought to police attention in 1982, investigators initially doubted a venerated abbot could be a cultist, but under interrogation Sima refused to speak, so he was deprived of sleep and tortured. After a month, he gave them just three sentences: ‘I have committed sins. So have you. We are all sinful.’ The court sentenced him to life imprisonment.

Our paths first crossed one winter morning in 1992, soon after I was transferred to Tumen from a detention centre outside a big metropolis in Sichuan. I had been sentenced to four years’ prison for condemning the government’s crackdown at Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989. The prosecutor called me a counter-revolutionary.

It was a transitional period in my life. I was recovering from the injuries and trauma inflicted upon me during my incarceration at the detention centre and, as part of the healing process, I had begun writing what would become volume one of my autobiography, To Live. I was in prison and would need to look inward for freedom. As I hunched pen over paper on my bunk and immersed myself in my thoughts, what my mother called my wind-catching ears picked up the almost imperceptible sounds of weeping on the breeze that reached through the tiny window of my second-floor cell. I rose from the bed – not weeping, but a flute playing music unlike anything I had heard in concert halls.

I took a half-carton of cheap cigarettes from my locker and went down to the courtyard, where I bribed the guard to tell me where the music had come from – the clinic, he said, and tucked the cigarettes inside his jacket. Through an archway off the courtyard, I followed a long corridor that, after three turns, led me to an open space. To the right was the entrance to the prison clinic. I winced at the stench of pungent antiseptic mixed with that of a nearby ditch of excrement.

I found the flautist leaning against a steep wall topped by tendrils of barbed wire and ivy reaching into the sky. His big round bald head sat atop an emaciated body. He seemed oblivious to my presence. As he blew, his shoulders heaved up and down inside his blue cotton-padded uniform jacket. The tune meandered like a mountain stream, its volume surging in parts, then trickling away to become almost inaudible, drying up into virtually nothing, because while I could see him playing I could not, then, hear any sound. What I heard on that day was actually a short tune, but it wound on and on, unrushed, as if it would take a lifetime to finish.

Time glided by and soon I felt the dampness from the frozen ground travel up through my body, and seep into my bones. My knees began shaking, my teeth chattering. Though the upper half of the prison walls was bathed in sunlight and several sparrows perched quietly on the barbed wire, it was shaded and cold where we were and a sharp wind blew.

The old monk wiped away what seemed to be tears, from the cold wind or the raw emotion I could not tell, and wrapped his flute in a ragged piece of worn cloth. He raised his head and smiled at me, an idiotic young man shivering but happy. I smiled back. I guess that was karma.

‘You want to learn how to play?’ he asked.

I nodded.

‘You need to find a decent flute,’ he said, then turned and hurried away. I guess, in Buddhist terms, I was to be his student and he my teacher. As it were always thus.

I walked back to my cell in what I can only describe as a trance, the monk’s bamboo flute dancing in my mind. For a whole day, that black shining wooden stick wouldn’t go away. I drew it on a piece of paper with some instructions and mailed it with a letter to my mother, who said she had run around the city for several days and managed to find five flutes of different designs, which she brought me on her next visit.

‘None of these works,’ the old monk said, barely glancing at them.

A month later, my mother came back with five more. The monk examined each of them carefully and selected one he said might make a ‘half decent’ sound. He had me soak the flute in water for seven days, scrape the paint and ornaments from the surface, bury it in the snow for a couple more days and then let it dry out in the wind.

On a sunny day following a big winter storm, we began. He was in the courtyard. I could see him from my cell. I put my hands in front of my chest, palm to palm, and prayed silently. When I opened my eyes again, I saw my teacher raise his flute to his lips.

‘Breathe …’ he instructed. I needed to take the air I inhaled and direct it to my ‘dantian’, a place beneath my lower abdomen, and then gradually let it out. The process, well paced and controlled, would transform the air inside my lungs into an energy flow, which could circulate through my body and heart.

I put aside my writing.

At the beginning, the bamboo flute was stubborn; no matter how hard I blew into it, no sound came out. When I finally managed to produce some awkward notes, they reminded me of the noise villagers make when they blow through a hollowed bamboo stick to fan the flames in the cooking stove. Even so, the noise brought me hope and encouraged me to blow harder. Soon I felt a pain in my chest, my head was about to explode. The monk stood outside my window: ‘Control your breathing,’ he said. I grew despondent.

I was focusing on my flute when my cellmates from the night shift swarmed in. As they disrobed and lay down on their bunk beds to sleep it was made clear that I should leave. I took my flute and went down to the courtyard where, looking directly at the dazzling sun, I saw seven or eight images of my teacher within the blinding fireball. The cold unceasing wind massaged his face. ‘You are such a wimp,’ he said inside my head. ‘You don’t even have the strength to make the flute work.’

An inmate I knew as Crazy Wino was jogging around the courtyard, his feet pounding on the snow-covered ground. He ran all year around, always wearing the same cotton-padded hat with ear flaps and a scarf. Everyone compared him to Hua Ziliang, a character in a well-known revolutionary novel about a group of underground Communists in the 1940s. In the book, Hua was imprisoned by the Nationalists but refused to betray his comrades and to protect himself feigned insanity by jogging up and down the courtyard all day long in all weather. I wonder what Crazy Wino was up to and decided to join him. I easily outpaced him and then began lapping him around the courtyard. We soon drew a crowd. ‘Wow, there is another crazy hero here, an iron man!’ They wooed and wowed. They applauded each lap I gained and I was basking in their attention when Crazy Wino turned around and began running toward me. Before I knew what was happening, a row of yellow teeth flashed in front of my eyes and sank into my forehead. Crazy Wino was an angry rabbit gone wild. We fell in a writhing mass into a pile of snow and a roar went up from the crowd. It took several of my fellow 1989 counter-revolutionaries to break up the fight. Crazy Wino wore a mad smile on his face, his protruding teeth showing traces of blood.

I picked up my flute and walked away tending the wound on my forehead, but felt nothing of what should have been its searing pain.

The fight got me into trouble with the prison authorities. ‘A country is governed by law and the prison is managed by rules,’ the warden told the assembled prisoners soon after the courtyard incident. ‘Liao is a political prisoner but he should be subjected to the same punishment accorded a common criminal.’

Amid thunderous applause, two inmates came forward, shackled my hands and feet and escorted me from the well-lit common areas of the prison to a section shrouded in darkness. I was pushed tottering along a corridor that reeked of mildew and urine. My escorts turned on a flashlight as we passed a row of doors, behind which those who violated prison rules were locked.

At the end of the corridor a door clanked open and in I went. My head hit the low damp ceiling, sending cold shivers down my spine, and as I reached up to touch it drops of water ran like a slimy snake into my sleeve. I was trembling. ‘Hello? Anybody in here?’

The door clanged shut and, after the sound of footsteps was gone, there was nothing but silence, and emptiness. I felt around me and touched on a stone bed. I sat. I could hear rats squealing and jumping, and as I swept the floor with my foot the shackles around my leg caught a metal toilet container, knocking it over onto the floor.

Several hours must have passed. The rancid air was stifling. Bugs were biting all over my body and my scratching became incessant. I grew as hungry as the insects.

We were fed twice a day – a small bowl of rotten rice – and the hunger gnawed at my stomach. I wrapped myself in a quilt, assumed the lotus position, and took to meditating. ‘Breathe,’ the monk whispered in my ear. I inhaled, trying to push the air down deep and then carefully exhaled. Again. Again. Again. Cold sweat trickled down my spine, the bugs droning around me. I suppressed the urge to gag at the stench as I held my imaginary flute, fingers pressed to the holes, and began to play. The world was nothing.

In ancient times King Wen, imprisoned in a cellar for three years, took to observing the movements of the sun and the moon through an air hole no bigger than his fist. His perseverance gave birth to a masterpiece, the I Ching, which revealed a comprehensive system of divination.

‘Am I to compose my I Ching in music?’ I wondered.

Between my exertions I lay down on the stone bed, at rest like a pool of still water hidden inside a deep dark cave. Inside this big stomach called the Universe the Earth was only a tiny pearl of undigested grain, human beings merely the grain’s molecules. Breathe. I drifted into unconsciousness.

I spent two weeks in the dark. Outside, there was nearly a riot as my fellow 1989 counter-revolutionaries went on a hunger strike in protest against my punishment. When I emerged, like a veteran soldier returning from the battlefield, I was given a hero’s welcome, my fellow inmates piling on my bed food they had saved for me from their daily rations. ‘We will always act as one,’ said Lao Lei, a big brother among our group, as he shook my hands. I was overwhelmed with gratitude.

I now had the cell to myself for long periods during the day and I directed my attention to the courtyard outside – everything seemed so familiar, the tall drab walls, the entangled barbed wire, the stern-looking guards and their patrol dogs. Once, for a moment, I saw the back of a woman flash by. It had been so long and I was tortured with desire. The woman’s buttocks inflated in my mind. Slapping myself, I took up my flute to the sound of a weepy tune in the distance. ‘Teacher,’ I called out.

It took three months, but I learned to master the flow of air and energy inside my body. If nothing else, my circulation had improved and my face glowed with health. My job was to get up early, register the names of inmates working at the prison factory and then deliver lunches of rice and soup to them. Under normal circumstances I would finish my duties by early afternoon and then devote the rest of my time to the flute. Every few days, Monk Sima would appear outside my window, gesture some brief instructions to me and then leave. Not long after I would hear a tune rising from the place where I first saw him. I would listen, trying to appreciate and absorb the essence of the piece.



* * *



When my younger sister, Xiao Fei, came to visit, bringing packages of food, before saying goodbye she told me, ‘Mum and dad hope you don’t give up your writing.’

Yu Tian, a poet friend, showed up unexpectedly, arguing and begging his way past the guards. He told them I was his cousin.

‘Your cousin is doing pretty well here,’ Yu Tian was told. ‘He plays the flute every day, like some free-spirited deity.’

I hadn’t seen Yu Tian for many years and his visit brought back a flood of memories. ‘You still have this long beard,’ I greeted him.

‘Where’s yours?’ he said, proudly playing with his own.

‘It’s all gone.’

Yu Tian filled me in on what news and gossip he knew of our former poet friends. ‘By the way, your old mistress has been asking about you,’ he said. ‘She insisted on coming along. It took me quite a while to get rid of her … Hey, how come you act so indifferently to everything now?’

‘All the things you just told me … don’t seem to have anything to do with me anymore,’ I stammered. ‘I feel like I have no past.’

‘No past?’ he barked. ‘You are in jail because of your past.’

I took in his dishevelled hair, his tired bloodshot eyes, not knowing how to respond. He had travelled thousands of miles to see me, a disgraced poet, who used to be like him. How disappointed he must have been in me.



* * *



In April, green vines crawled over the prison walls. The sky was a clear blue. And Monk Sima almost succumbed to an often fatal disease. I was not allowed to look after him, but I made sure he received some of the food my family sent. Returning one afternoon from my usual lunch delivery duties, I snuck into the ward to see him and was surprised to find he was sitting outside, dozing in the sun, his flute between his knees. He woke at the sound of my approaching footsteps. I bowed, gently shook his hands, and asked about his health.

‘I was about to play a tune to let you know that the illness has receded,’ he said.

He struggled to his feet and raised his flute, but seemed to lack the strength to begin. After failing several times to draw a sound, he flung the flute against his chair. ‘You and I have accompanied each other for decades. You, damn fucker, are now taunting me for getting old.’

When he tried again the flute came to life, the jagged and blunt notes conjuring up the image of an aging warrior sharpening his knife by the river; even though a glimmer of the setting sun highlights the rusty surface of the sword, the warrior’s mind remains sharp. As the tune wavered in the air, I cringed. ‘Teacher, don’t be too hard on yourself.’

The old monk sighed, ‘I don’t care if I’m alive or dead. I have to play a couple of tunes a day before I can calm down and rest. Oh well.’

And with that, he returned to his chair, placing the flute horizontal on his lap. Teacher and student sat silently, face to face. I could see he had reached the autumn of his life and thought to try to lift his spirits. ‘Teacher, the tune you just played was about autumn. Why not perform something for the spring?’

‘What are you talking about?’ he replied. ‘There is no season here. For the flute, it is always autumn.’

‘Can I name this tune, then, “Autumn”?’

The monk dismissed my suggestion. His laughter embarrassed me. Sweat beaded on my forehead.

‘You are flattering me. Secular tunes popular in the rural areas are what I play. They’ve been passed down from generation to generation; most don’t have proper names. I’m sure you will preserve them and pass them on. I am a monk, but you are a man with a heart and feelings.’

‘What do you mean “heart and feelings”?’ I asked.

‘Worldly feelings,’ he answered.

His words came as a revelation to me. ‘I understand. Thank you for reminding me, teacher.’

I thought about what my sister and Yu Tian had said to me. I knew that I probably should resume my writing, but the flute prevailed over my pen. I sensed a conflict within me, a conflict between spiritual yearning and worldly ambition.

With the arrival of summer my musical technique improved. I practised afternoon and evening, my repetitions annoying inmate and guard alike, to the point that the merest peep of a note was met with loud protests. I moved my practice sessions to the latrines, where I hoped to cause less of an inconvenience. One evening, someone squatting over the pit called out mockingly for a popular romantic tune to help ease his bowel movement. I took the request seriously and played ‘My Home Bathed in Moonlight’. Midway through the piece the moon broke through the clouds and those out strolling in the cool air, on hearing my music, were drawn toward the latrines. I was surprised by their applause when I reached the end of the tune. An inmate at the urinal slapped his stomach and went about his business.

A joke quickly spread about how my music ‘stinks’ and my sessions in the latrines began to draw crowds. Someone would ask for their favourite tune and, if I knew it, I would comply, if I didn’t, I promised to learn it for the next time. It was suggested that I join some of the other musicians among the inmates – players of the guitar, the erhu, and even the suona, though I couldn’t recall ever hearing any horns played in the prison. When we were asked to rehearse a concerto and present the piece at a holiday celebration party to showcase our talents and please the authorities I abandoned whatever dignity and principles I had left and performed like an ingratiating dog.



* * *



The first sign of trouble was a growing tension. It was sensed by all. Then came the armed guards, rounding us up, ordering us to sit. Minutes passed. A precise tromp echoed from the corridor and the warden emerged, accompanied by the Party secretary and a squad of police. He called out the name ‘Lao Lei’, a fellow political prisoner, who stood and was taken away.

The following afternoon we were summoned for a public meeting where Lao Lei was paraded along with several others accused of violating prison rules, their hands tied behind their backs, their ankles shackled. Lao Lei looked dejected and miserable as he stood before the podium. The Party secretary said he had been writing secret letters to a British spy agency.

How could that be? Was Lao Lei insane? Was he mentally ill? He had to have known that no letters left the prison unchecked, and even outside there was no respect for privacy; postal inspectors opened all mail sent abroad.

What had happened, we later found out, was this: Lao Lei had written a short letter in English to a foreign professor who used to teach at his college. The letter was no more than a few lines of simple greetings but, with the prison short on language talent, the Party secretary had sent it to the county tourist bureau for translation and, to protect himself, sent Lao Lei to the ‘dark hole’. That much we understood, but two weeks passed and Lao Lei was still in the hole. A secret meeting of the 1989 counter-revolutionaries was called during a break and plans were laid for a hunger strike.

The protest began on the day we received our only meal with meat for the week, a special day for everyone. My comrades each collected their lunchtime meal – fragrant rice and the saliva-inducing meat – and gathered in the middle of the courtyard where, one by one, they left their untouched bowls and retreated to their cells. I was not among them. A despicable traitor, greedy as a pig, I ate every last grain of rice, chewed every shred of meat, and even licked the bowl. I wiped my mouth and went to practise the flute.

It was Li Bifeng, a fellow counter-revolutionary, who snatched the bamboo flute from my hands. He was furious, and so, he said, were all the other political prisoners. I could only apologise. ‘I suffered acute hunger as a child and at the detention centre,’ I said, by way of explanation. ‘Just the thought of a hunger strike gives me headaches and an irregular heartbeat.’

Li was unimpressed and launched into an angry tirade. ‘When you were locked up in the dark room, everyone else showed solidarity …’

I cut him off. ‘I’ll do anything, anything, except a hunger strike.’

Li Bifeng glared at me, but could see the strength of my resolve and knew better than to waste his energy on my stubbornness. He was clever at finding compromises. ‘Right, then; you can represent all of us in negotiations with the prison authorities for Lao Lei’s release. We will not accept anything less.’

I was now committed to an impossible task, and recalled an old saying: ‘A man honours his credibility more than life.’ I abandoned all thoughts of practice and sat down to consider the problem, and that’s when I remembered reading something about prisoners’ rights in the People’s Daily, the Communist Party newspaper. I tracked down an old copy of the paper, and in it a report that said inmates found to have violated prison rules should be subject to solitary confinement for no more than fifteen days. I counted on my fingers. It had been eighteen days since Lao Lei was taken away. I was sure I had them.

‘Are you the representative sent by the 1989 counter-revolutionaries?’ the Party secretary asked as I stood before him.

‘I represent only myself,’ I said, ‘and under the law, every prisoner is entitled to question the actions of the prison authorities.’ I then set out my case, that our very own People’s Daily supported the argument that Lao Lei had been punished enough and should be released from the hole immediately.

‘Let me be clear. We will strictly apply the law to anyone who dares to organise and conspire to sabotage and undermine the rules and regulations here. How did you manage to become their representative? Is it because they like how you play the flute?’

‘I represent only myself,’ I repeated.

‘Then if it’s just you, I can have you locked up in the dark room too.’

‘If you try, I will have to dash out to the balcony and jump to my death.’

With both hands, I held above my head the crumpled copy of the People’s Daily and shouted, melodramatically, aping those revolutionary heroes in old Communist movies: ‘I’m willing to defend with my blood and my life the purity and dignity of our country’s socialist law!’

The Party secretary did not like being challenged, but at the same time he couldn’t suppress his laughter, clearly seeing the absurdity of my tactic. In the end, he relented and Lao Lei was released that night. My comrades proclaimed me a hero.

I often wonder if I have ever been in control of my own life. Always I seem to be led or pushed into doing things that, on reflection, were not altogether wise. Take the spring of 1989 and the protest movement that sprang up around Tiananmen Square. When students took to the streets I was merely an indifferent onlooker. But after the bloody crackdown, I couldn’t contain my anger. I worked through the night composing my poem, ‘Massacre’, then read it into a tape recorder and had copies distributed across the country. That tape formed the basis of the charges against me: counter-revolutionary instigation and conspiracy. The media crowned me ‘a poet with dissenting views’, but, to be honest, I wasn’t even sure what my political views were. I know now – four years of prison life have a way of forming and hardening one’s political opinions.

I must admit I got drunk on my new ‘hero’ status and the exhilaration of my unexpected victory. Brandishing my flute, I played light-hearted tunes with vigour, gyrating like a rock musician, eyes closed and head bobbing up and down, soaking up the applause. We human beings can be so frivolous.

Monk Sima was clearly not impressed by my new swagger; gently, he asked me to put my flute down. ‘You have established quite a reputation lately.’

It was like a bucket of icy cold water pouring over my head.

‘Life in prison is really no different from life outside,’ he said. ‘Here, the circle that confines you is merely smaller.’

I stared down at the mouth of my flute. A thousand words clogged my throat, but not a single one came out.

‘You can go now,’ my teacher said. I turned like an automaton and left.

For days after, I felt lost.

I don’t know who is blowing smoke, I thought. If the whole world is another prison, a bigger circle of confinement, what’s the point of living?

What I had failed to grasp was that Monk Sima had resigned himself to playing the flute. I, on the other hand, in my prime, my blood boiling inside my veins, had a choice. I realised that I could not hope to inherit his techniques and philosophy because we were on different sides of the river of age. We could build bridges to span that river, but there could be no crossing them. I began to approach my music from a different, if not opposite, direction.

‘Your music radiates vitality and energy,’ the old monk said when our paths crossed in the courtyard. ‘You must be serving out your sentence soon.’

‘Yes, teacher.’

‘What are you planning to do when you leave here?’

‘Find something to do so I can make ends meet, I suppose,’ I said. ‘Now that I have learned how to play flute from you, what else can I do?’

‘You are lighting fake incense in front of Buddha,’ he smiled. ‘Your music conveys a different story, one of more aggressive impulses.’

I was taken by surprise. ‘Please, offer your guidance,’ I asked.

‘I’m not blaming you for your worldly ambitions. I have had fourteen students. You are the fifteenth. They abide by the rules; none dare to commit blasphemy and step outside the boundaries. Therefore, none has gone or will go anywhere. You will preserve and pass down the tradition and carry it to fame and success.’

I bowed my head.

‘You are educated and intelligent. You still need practice and guidance in your technique, but you give meaning to meaningless tunes and vitality to the tired and familiar. That’s pretty good … really good. You can be on your own now.’

I buried my head between my knees. After that, I was too embarrassed to look my teacher in the eye. Our relationship had come to an end.



* * *



Monk Sima stopped coming to the courtyard to give instruction; I no longer heard his flute. He shut himself in his room, refusing visitors, and even my attempts to see him ended with disappointment. I practised alone in the snow, consumed by sadness, until my energy was gone and I lay shivering in bed, my temperature soaring. ‘Our lunatic iron man is finally wilting,’ the inmates joked as they exchanged news of my worsening condition, their concern tempered by the excitement my illness injected into the tedium of prison life. Old Yang, the nurse, came by and prescribed some herbs and antibiotics. He told Li Bifeng to give him regular updates.

Li Bifeng stood by my side for hours at a time, like a loyal guard of the imperial army, moistening my lips with drops of water, forcing me to swallow tonics of herbs to make me sweat out the fever. I was covered with a heavy quilt and several times my temperature climbed precipitously, then plunged. My undergarments were soaked and had to be changed every few hours until I simply wrapped myself naked in the quilt when cold, and threw it off when the heat became unbearable, at which Li Bifeng would climb up to my bunk bed, pin me down like a slab of meat to be butchered, and wrap me up again. Soon I would be too weak to struggle and, panting for breath, surrendered.

At one point I asked for my flute, which hung on the wall near my bed, and hugged it to my chest. Li Bifeng morphed into Monk Sima and I pleaded with him, ‘Teacher, you made me what I am now. When you play, you play you. I am me and can only play me.’

Li Bifeng told me I went on and on about ‘Su Wu Herding the Sheep’ and how Monk Sima played it back and forth with dozens of variations of rhythms, making it heart-wrenching, yet uplifting, and transformed the famous tune he had acquired from his own teacher by infusing it with his own life until it was not Su Wu, of the ancient legend, who tended the sheep while exiled in the remote enemy land, but Monk Sima himself.

‘I’m sure it made sense to you at the time,’ he chuckled.

My fever broke, but I was very weak and when I was finally able to slide off my bunk and stand before the window, I realised seven days had passed and I had been given an insight into life. I felt transformed, that I was starting afresh. I tried my flute but my lungs were weak, my wind little more than a wisp.

I thought I would jog around the courtyard but was gasping for air after only two circuits, then racked by a coughing fit. When it passed, my eyes streaming with tears, I heard the familiar flute music, but it sounded … empty, devoid of any worldly feeling or attachment. ‘The monk is only an illusion,’ I said to no one. ‘He doesn’t belong to this world.’

As my lungs recovered I resumed my practice, and gradually I felt my music rise more and more from my heart. ‘A tune is like a corpse,’ I told myself. ‘Once you blow your essence into it, it comes to life and dances at your will.’ I tried my hand at the popular revolutionary song ‘The East is Red’. Li Bifeng told me I had turned our Communist anthem into a memorable rural funeral requiem.



* * *



On January 31, 1994, a week before the New Year, I was informed I was being considered for early release. I emptied my wallet buying dried sausages and beef, and began planning a big party for my fellow 1989 counter-revolutionaries to mark the holiday. I heard nothing more until, late one evening, the guards fetched me from my cell and took me to a room packed with police. I was puzzled. ‘What crimes have I committed this time?’

An officer patted me on the shoulder. ‘No crimes; your family is here. Let’s go meet with them.’ I feared this was a trick. ‘Prisoners are not allowed to step out of their cells in the evenings,’ I said. Everyone laughed, and one of my guards said, ‘When did you start to understand the rules so well?’

I was escorted outside, through several check points and down a slope to the path that led to the outer buildings of the prison. It was a windy night and I crossed my arms tightly over my chest to hold closed my winter coat. My eyes darted among the shadows cast by the dim lights around us and I drew my head down into my collar, fearful I was being led into a death trap. When we approached the prison administrative building, I realised that I had stopped breathing. We took the stairs to the third floor and an office from which emerged a bright light.

I did not see my relatives in the room. Instead, the Party secretary sat behind a big desk, waving and beckoning me forward. I was thirsty and he handed me a glass of water. I gulped it down. I could feel the heat of the high-powered camera lights scorching my head.

‘How are things going with your flute?’ He had a big smile splattered across his face. He gave me no time to respond. ‘Do you want to spend the New Year’s holiday with your family?’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘But I still have forty-six days to go and, before I leave, I want my diploma.’

‘Diploma?’ The Party secretary looked puzzled.

‘Yes, a diploma, to show I have served out my sentence. In this life, I didn’t have the luck to attend a real university. Instead, I got this prison. I’ve been here for four years. That’s equivalent to an undergraduate degree. I want my diploma.’

‘You do have a good sense of humour,’ the Party secretary said, but his smile had vanished. He shuffled some papers on his desk. ‘Okay, let’s get down to some serious business. During the past four years, you have abided by the rules and done a good job in reforming yourself. Based on your good performance, the government has decided to grant you an early release. Before we proceed, we need your cooperation on a couple of things.’

‘I said before and I will repeat again: I refuse to write a confession.’

‘No one is asking you to give up your previous views and opinions, but you need to express your willingness to change.’

It is easy to say one is willing to change; whether one actually does so is entirely another matter. So, standing to attention, I said smartly, and the Party secretary took it as assent, ‘I am grateful to the government for releasing me ahead of schedule.’

‘What are you planning to do after you get out of here?’

‘Make a living and support myself.’

‘How would you describe your life in here?’

‘Better than life at the detention centre.’

‘Is there anything you want the government to do?’

‘I want to move in with my parents. I hope the government can transfer my city residential card from Fuling to Chengdu.’

‘But your wife and daughter are in Fuling. You also had a job there.’

‘My wife and children have left me, and that city has given me only nightmares.’

I don’t know how long the ‘interview’ lasted. We were being filmed the whole time and under the camera lights I felt like I was sitting too close to a fireplace. When I thought I could smell smoke, I removed my winter coat to find there was a charred patch on the back. I glared at the cameraman, downed another glass of water and stood. Sweat streaming down my cheeks, I asked permission to leave. The Party secretary waved his hands, said yes, and the show was over.



* * *



We didn’t return to my cell. Instead, two guards escorted me to the prison guest house where I was given a single room, all to myself. It was the first time I had slept alone since my arrest. It was a deep sleep. The next morning, I got up and went outside for my routine exercise. The guest house stood wedged between two parallel walls that separated the prisoners from the administrators and the outside – worlds within worlds.

Two of the inmates delivered my things and, while the guards weren’t watching, one of them slipped me a scrap of paper. ‘We have moved all your manuscripts to a safe place. Someone will deliver them to you later. Don’t worry about us. Your friend, Xu Wanping.’

I felt at once grateful, and guilty. I also felt solidarity with those brought together by the Tiananmen Massacre, bound by the same faith.

Three days and three nights passed. I played the flute, read, stared at the sky, at the tall walls that still held me. My mind was a jumble of prison memories so sharp and vivid that my head ached. Monk Sima, his flute as a walking stick, came to me. I grabbed the front of his shirt, but it changed into a long umbilical cord in a tangle of all my prison memories. Like a clam, heaven and earth sucked my whole being into its shell.

‘Teacher!’ I screamed, and woke from a high fall. It was nothing I had ever experienced before, nor expected to again, no matter how long I lived. The world outside my window resembled a mirror; the moon a placenta in a shiny glass bottle. There was frost in the air, whitening the leaves in the yard. I took up my flute, weathered with time, and wetted its mouth, innocent and tender like the mouth of a newborn baby. It tasted salty. Did amniotic fluid taste of salt? I sat facing the prison clinic and played a tune named ‘Guest’. A fat shiny bug squirmed up an old tall tree. My heart danced wildly and my ear drums popped. But all I could hear was nothing. I played ‘Yearning’, and sat still for a time, twenty minutes that felt like two centuries. I wasn’t sure at first of the faint sound that reached my ears. But floating out and over the mountain-high walls, the tune was unmistakable. It was ‘World Unity’, or ‘Opening the Gate’.

Tears welled in my eyes.

Go.

Go until you disappear into oblivion.

From The Editor





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