https://youtu.be/luVpsM3YAgw
Sunday, September 12, 2021
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Most Epic Photos: Tank Man | 1X57
Most Epic Photos: Tank Man | 1X57:
Source:
http://1x57.com/2011/08/04/most-epic-photos-tank-man/
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The incident took place near Tiananmen on Chang’an Avenue, which runs east-west along the south end of the Forbidden City in Beijing, on June 5, 1989, one day after the Chinese government’s violent crackdown on the Tiananmen protests.
The man placed himself alone in the middle of the street as the tanks approached, directly in the path of the armored vehicles. He held two shopping bags, one in each hand. As the tanks came to a stop, the man gestured towards the tanks with his bags.
In response, the lead tank attempted to drive around the man, but the man repeatedly stepped into the path of the tank in a show of nonviolent action.
After repeatedly attempting to go around rather than crush the man, the lead tank stopped its engines, and the armored vehicles behind it seemed to follow suit. There was a pause for a short period of time with the man and the tanks having reached a quiet, still impasse.
Having successfully brought the column to a halt, the man climbed onto the hull of the buttoned-up lead tank and, after briefly stopping at the driver’s hatch, appeared in video footage of the incident to call into various ports in the tank’s turret.
He then climbed atop the turret and seemed to have a short conversation with a crew member at the gunner’s hatch. After ending the conversation, the man alighted from the tank. The tank commander briefly emerged from his hatch, and the tanks restarted their engines, ready to continue on.
At that point, the man, who was still standing within a meter or two from the side of the lead tank, leapt in front of the vehicle once again and quickly reestablished the man–tank standoff.
Video footage shows that two figures in blue attire then pulled the man away and disappeared with him into a nearby crowd; the tanks continued on their way. Eyewitnesses disagree about the identity of the people who pulled him aside. Jan Wong is convinced the group were concerned citizens helping him away.
http://1x57.com/2011/08/04/most-epic-photos-tank-man/
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Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Local police stockpile high-tech, combat-ready gear | America's War Within
Local police stockpile high-tech, combat-ready gear | America's War Within:
If terrorists ever target Fargo, N.D., the local police will be ready.
In recent years, they have bought bomb-detection robots, digital communications equipment and Kevlar helmets, like those used by soldiers in foreign wars. For local siege situations requiring real firepower, police there can use a new $256,643 armored truck, complete with a rotating turret. Until that day, however, the menacing truck is mostly used for training runs and appearances at the annual Fargo picnic, where it’s been displayed near a children’s bounce house.
“Most people are so fascinated by it, because nothing happens here,” said Carol Archbold, a Fargo resident and criminal justice professor at North Dakota State University. “There’s no terrorism here.”
Fargo, like thousands of other communities in every state, has been on a gear-buying spree with the aid of more than $34 billion in federal government grants since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon.
The federal grant spending, awarded with little oversight from Washington, has fueled a rapid, broad transformation of police operations in Fargo and in departments across the country. More than ever before, police rely on quasi-military tactics and equipment, the Center for Investigative Reporting has found.
No one can say exactly what has been purchased in total across the country or how it’s being used,because the federal government doesn’t keep close track. State and local governments don’t maintain uniform records. But a review of records from 41 states obtained through open-government requests, and interviews with more than two-dozen current and former police officials and terrorism experts, shows police departments around the U.S. have transformed into small army-like forces.
Many police, including beat cops, now routinely carry assault rifles. Combined with body armor and other apparel, many officers look more and more like combat troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. The list of equipment bought with the federal grants reads like a defense contractor catalog. High-tech gear fills the garages, locker rooms and patrol cars in departments across the country.
Although local officials say they have become more cautious about spending in recent years, police departments around the country are continually expanding the equipment and tactics of their jobs, despite, in many cases, the lack of an apparent need.
The share of federal grants for Fargo and the county it anchors is more than $8 million, a considerable sum for terrorism defense given its remote location and status as one of the safest areas in America. Fargo has averaged fewer than two homicides a year since 2005, and there have been no prosecutions of international terrorism in the state for at least a decade, if ever.
North Dakota’s biggest city is a humble place set on plains so flat that locals like to say you can watch your dog run away for two weeks. Yet all patrol officers in Fargo now carry an assault rifle in their squad car.
Every community in the country has some explanation for why it needs more money, not less, to protect against every conceivable threat. It could be a shooting rampage at an amusement park, a weapon of mass destruction hidden at a manufacturing plant, a nuclear device detonated at a major coastal port. Nothing short of absolute security seems acceptable.
Law enforcement leaders nonetheless bristle at the word “militarization,” even if the defense community itself acknowledges a convergence of the two.
No one knows for sure the number of SWAT teams nationwide. But at a time when the crime rate has been dropping, the number of police associated with SWAT duties has gone up. The National Tactical Officers Association, which provides training and develops SWAT standards, has about 1,650 team memberships, up from 1,026 in 2000, according to Executive Director John Gnagey.
... a uniform message: The world is fraught with peril, and new high-tech gear is a solution.
Security analyst Dilip Sarangan of Frost & Sullivan, which tracks the homeland security industry, said security spending by governments and the private sector is “event-based.” Both are suddenly willing to budget more when tragedy ignites new anxieties, such as after the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre, the 2005 London train bombings, the Mumbai terrorist attacks and, most of all, the 9/11 hijackings.
The homeland security market for state and local agencies is projected to reach $19.2 billion by 2014, up from $15.8 billion in fiscal 2009, according to the Homeland Security Research Corp.
New opportunities are making major defense corporations more a part of our domestic lives.
In 2007, British defense giant BAE Systems spent $4.5 billion to buy a company called Armor Holdings, which had subsidiaries that made and supplied police equipment, such as riot shields, hard-knuckle gloves, Delta 4 tactical helmets and laser sight mounts for AR-15 assault rifles.
Minnesota-based Alliant Techsystems, the Army’s primary provider of small-caliber ammunition, acquired in recent years two major tactical equipment suppliers, Blackhawk Industries and Eagle Industries. Company executives told shareholders that Blackhawk was a “highly profitable business,” with $115 million in predicted sales this year.
While such companies also outfit sporting enthusiasts and the military, law enforcement agencies are cast by Alliant as essential customers “in the rapidly growing security market.”
Local officials assert that homeland security grants, used to pay for the type of equipment showcased in Chicago, have slowed. But the grants still add up to a lot of spending: The Department of Homeland Security awarded more than $2 billion in grants this year, and President Barack Obama’s 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act pumped more than a half-billion dollars into existing grant programs.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency is largely responsible for distributing homeland security grants. It operates a website known as the Responder Knowledge Base, which serves as a sort of war-on-terror catalog listing what local governments are allowed to buy with readiness funds.
Gnagey, of the tactical officers association, said there’s a sense among some local police that the price increases when makers know it’s being paid for with federal funds. The minute new equipment arrives, he joked, “if it’s painted black and called SWAT, the price doubles.”
But the evolution continues. In the Phoenix area, Sheriff Joe Arpaio claimed this year to have his own air armada of private pilots he could dispatch to monitor illegal border crossers. He called it Operation Desert Sky. Arpaio also picked up a full-size surplus Army tank, complete with treads.
The city of Ogden, Utah, is about to launch a 54-foot, remote-controlled “crime-fighting blimp” with a powerful surveillance camera affixed to its belly by the end of the year.
Standard-duty officers seen daily on the streets of Los Angeles were retrained to break in and kill terrorists without negotiating, under an assumption that the attackers could have a death wish and not be interested in resolving matters peacefully. Many officers were also equipped with assault rifles.
Las Vegas rushed forward as well. Everyday patrol officers were given additional training, and each shift now has “in-the-box” squads that can meet at a pre-determined location and respond as a group to would-be campus or casino attackers. Squad members carry additional gear in their cars, including gas masks, body armor and high-powered rifles.
Charles Ramsey, who was police chief in Washington, D.C., during 9/11, said officers in the nation’s capital began to train for multiple simultaneous attacks. The Mumbai bloodshed, which took place after Ramsey headed to Philadelphia in 2008, also served as a spur for him to make further changes and spend more money to up-armor his force.
Some 1,500 beat cops in Philadelphia have been trained to use AR-15 assault rifles – akin to the high-powered weapons issued to war fighters.
Fargo is not a place anyone associates with crime or terrorism. Its combination of friendly folk, low housing prices and high employment has garnered it recognition as one of the best places in the country to live. It is home to one of Microsoft's largest campuses and North Dakota State University.
Officials in Cass County, which includes Fargo, began buying gear in 2002. The spending on police gear rose from tens of thousands a decade ago to millions.
Police there said such spending is more than justified as a preventative measure. North Dakota has what could be perceived as targets, and the FBI established in Fargo one of its 104 Joint Terrorism Task Forces. Critical energy and agriculture sectors drive the booming economy in the remote border state. Drones used in the war on terror and homeland security are stationed at or operated from air bases in Grand Forks and at the local Fargo airport.
In addition, they say, some right-wing militias and white supremacists have been long-standing threats.
Other purchases, like the bomb-detection robots, are shared with federal agencies in Fargo that have outposts, but not the resources. The local police also say they’ve taken a regional approach to spend wisely, leveraging federal grants to buy equipment that has multiple uses.
This story was edited by Robert O’Harrow, Robert Salladay and Mark Katches. It was copy edited by Nikki Frick.
FBI warns of threat from anti-government extremists
WASHINGTON | Mon Feb 6, 2012 7:21pm EST
(Reuters) - Anti-government extremists opposed to taxes and regulations pose a growing threat to local law enforcement officers in the United States, the FBI warned on Monday.
These extremists, sometimes known as "sovereign citizens," believe they can live outside any type of government authority, FBI agents said at a news conference.
The extremists may refuse to pay taxes, defy government environmental regulations and believe the United States went bankrupt by going off the gold standard.
Routine encounters with police can turn violent "at the drop of a hat," said Stuart McArthur, deputy assistant director in the FBI's counterterrorism division.
"We thought it was important to increase the visibility of the threat with state and local law enforcement," he said.
In May 2010, two West Memphis, Arkansas, police officers were shot and killed in an argument that developed after they pulled over a "sovereign citizen" in traffic.
Last year, an extremist in Texas opened fire on a police officer during a traffic stop. The officer was not hit.
Legal convictions of such extremists, mostly for white-collar crimes such as fraud, have increased from 10 in 2009 to 18 each in 2010 and 2011, FBI agents said.
"We are being inundated right now with requests for training from state and local law enforcement on sovereign-related matters," said Casey Carty, an FBI supervisory special agent.
FBI agents said they do not have a tally of people who consider themselves "sovereign citizens."
J.J. MacNab, a former tax and insurance expert who is an analyst covering the sovereign movement, has estimated that it has about 100,000 members.
Sovereign members often express particular outrage at tax collection, putting Internal Revenue Service employees at risk.
(Reporting By Patrick Temple-West; Editing by Kevin Drawbaugh)
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Sunday, December 11, 2011
'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
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Friday, December 9, 2011
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.
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'
3, Autumn 2009
Wen Huang
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
'via Blog this'
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