The Unseen During The Olympics
Watching the Olympics in Beijing has got me to thinking about China again. I’d like to make a point about the legacy of the damage done in the last 50 years.
You might like to read “The Corpse Walker: Real-Life Stories, China from the Bottom Up” by Liao Yiwu.
Master Deng Kuan, abbot of the Gu Temple, established in the Sui Dynasty sometime around the turn of the sixth century, was 103 when the writer Liao Yiwu met him while mountain climbing in Sichuan Province, in 2003, and Yiwu’s oral histories begin with him.
This is from a review of the book by Howard W. French, a former career foreign correspondent for the New York Times, who covered China from 2003 to 2008 and who teaches at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism:
We know the Anti-Rightist Campaign of the late 1950s, the party went on a nationwide witch hunt for supposed liberals, reactionaries and capitalist roaders. Relating the Chinese experience amounts to a way of averting one’s eyes from something that may seem too hard to comprehend. It also encourages a kind of blurry forgetting, a storing away of things on a high, musty shelf that has been officially encouraged by China’s leaders, who are most keen to manage this story because they have the most to lose from a more vigorous and thorough telling. Thus the famous posthumous verdict by Deng Xiaoping, who judged that Mao had been 70 percent “correct” and 30 percent wrong. Yes, Mao’s errors, like the 30 million or more deaths from starvation caused by the crash industrialization of the Great Leap Forward, were doozies, but by and large he kept the country on the right path, avers Deng Xiaoping. Deng’s past has also benefited from studious airbrushing to avoid mussing up the standard portrait of him as a kindly, strong and nearly infallible second father to the nation. His enthusiastic role in violently suppressing “rightists” in the late 1950s has been placed out of bounds by the gatekeepers who determine which subjects can be researched and which cannot.
Master Deng’s life, and almost every other oral history in Liao Yiwu’s new book, appropriately subtitled Real-Life Stories, China From the Bottom Up , gives the lie to this entire vision, making this a deeply subversive book. I do not mean the reader should expect a tract or treatise on Chinese politics. Instead, Liao casts aside the official “facts” of events and replaces them with “memories”–with the resulting contrast between the censored record and interior consciousness revealing a post-1949 China that has never stopped being a traumatic place. At their root, all of Liao’s “real-life” stories share something fundamental: a fantastic, dreamy and nightmarish quality. Each story provokes a moment’s thought about its relationship to the truth.
When the Chinese army violently put down the student-led protests at Tiananmen Square, Liao wrote an epic poem, which he titled “Massacre.” However, in The Corpse Walker Liao’s interviews are presented in standard question-and-answer format.
As to what one should make of the result, Liao is a kind of pointillist, bravely doing what one writer can to fill in the vast blank spaces that constitute China’s modern artistic and social record. Since the revolution, Beijing has been obsessed with few things more than controlling China’s story, which runs the gamut from rewriting history to censorship of the news and exercising tight control over publishing to arresting, monitoring or outright “banning” writers who stray too far within, or often from, the official fold.
Liao has faced all these repressive measures. In its first edition, in September 1999, 30,000 copies of the book were printed by a medium-sized Beijing publishing house. The book was reprinted five times over the first few months, then was suddenly banned. Two years later, a large Chinese house published an expanded version under a new title, but it too was quickly banned. Liao’s other twenty-odd works were mostly published overseas in Chinese or self-published
through foreign websites. The government will not issue him a passport, preventing him from traveling abroad, and he has been reduced to the status of a nonperson by China’s domestic media, which amounts to a ban. Still, in a testament to his persistence and the ways of change in China, where the government, despite its best efforts, can no longer control everything, he is widely read within the country, his books published in black market underground editions.
Liao secures a small measure of safety, perhaps, in collecting the words of others, instead of describing Chinese society himself. Yet given the invisibility of nearly all but the sanctioned stories within China, out of the voices of Liao’s would-be ordinary folks emerges a powerful counterhistory, whose authenticity derives in no small part from his chosen stylistic format.
His stories go to the very nature of the China that we think we have known. The new new the booming post-reform China of seemingly unending high-speed growth, also comes across as a place of unrelenting trauma and even more craziness than the Cultural Revolution. Yes, this China is qualitatively different from the Maoist China of old–and certainly less violent–but it is just as disorienting, just as hard to fully come to terms with, for the Chinese and for foreigners.
The elderly in this book spend their time contemplating a past that is too mean and grotesque to digest properly. At one point Zhang Meizhi, the 84-year-old widow of a former local official in southern China who was executed, along with Zhang’s brother, in front of her during the 1952 Land Reform campaign, tells Liao, “I’m trying to make peace with the past.”
The rootless younger people who figure in this book spend their time trying to find a footing in a world stripped of the normal bearings. There is the migrant worker from Sichuan Province, who is an example of China’s new “masses,” those hundreds of millions of commoditized laborers who drift anonymously into the cities, hoping to catch a break. Zhao Er has toiled as a farmer, in a wildcat coal mine, as a construction worker and a restaurant hand, and has slept in a plastic tent in Chengdu owned by an enterprising woman who barks on the sidewalk at dusk each day to pile in as many short-stay “tenants” as she can.
He recounts the tale of a woman he knew from his village who masquerades as a shoeshine lady to cover for her real trade, prostitution.
One cannot read Liao’s book and not be impressed by how many people survive by lying, often confessing to imaginary charges or reciting accusations back to one’s accuser, accepting them as one’s own. This is brought to particularly vivid life by the story of Tian Zhiguang, a “grave robber,” or at least someone who has been arrested for supposedly robbing graves. “From the unexpected discovery of fortune to our sudden arrest, everything happened so fast,” Tian said, explaining how the discovery of antique gold coins buried beneath his house led to his arrest on a false pretense. Police dismissed his explanation with a laugh and carted him off to jail, where the inmates initially took Tian for the leader of a grave-robbing “triad,” or gang, and treated him with respect. Weeks later, when they learned he was an ordinary inmate, he was given a belated initiation, which consisted of vicious beatings while being forced to hoist a fully laden prison cell chamber pot on his head. This causes Liao, the author, to remark with bemusement, “I guess prisoners are getting more creative when it comes to torturing people.”
Two weeks after his initiation, Tian is offered a chance at redemption through the detention center’s “Confession Leads to Leniency” campaign. Three hundred inmates from nine cells are called into the courtyard to appear before local police and Communist Party leaders, who repeat over and over that “confessions will lead to reduced sentences.” Later, the bullying overlord among the inmates urges him to recant. “Those officials out there are all liars. Under normal circumstances, they trick you into confessing, promising you the reward of a reduced sentence. Once you tell everything, they never keep their promise. You probably end up with a bullet in your head. However, this campaign is different. The media has written about it. If those officials renege on their promises, they will lose face and credibility.”
Throughout his ordeal, Tian has remained scrupulous, and he responds by saying what he has told the authorities from the start: “I don’t really have anything to confess.”
And this is the point I want to make about the pressure and not only physical but mental brutality that millions of Chinese are under today:
The boss of the cellblock, sensing a chance to win points, orders his underlings to rough up Tian in order to change his mind. “The cell was like a classroom and every ‘student’ was asked to write a paper,” Tian relates. “Your confession needs to be sensational,” the boss tells them. “Don’t try to simplify and whitewash. The more serious your crimes are, the better it makes me look.”
Old Master Deng has a wonderfully pithy explanation for the toll that this kind of behavior has on a society–a toll that remains in China today, thick with rampant distrust and unmoored by the erosion of values one encounters at so many turns here. As Deng has said, “There’s a Chinese saying. When a snake bites a human being there is an antidote. But when a human being bites a fellow human being, there is no hope.”
I am confounded by the heroic strength of many Chinese today. At least all those unseen and unheard…not the billionaires that are recounted on foreign and domestic TVs. So it is no wonder that the people are starved for something to be proud of…their country. No wonder the Chinese have become defensive nationalists…intolerant of criticism…set up of course by the Party. But all the covering up of history…the denial…has a price. We don’t see all the suicides. I nearly cried when I heard that the entry fee for attending the Olympic opening was the equivalent of $600. The new China is not for the ordinary peasants even though they will tell you that China is going in the right direction…in the hope that one day day China will be for them too…if only for the corruption…while the Party turns a blind eye…because after all there is “progress” being made…much of it smoke and mirrors.
Tags: Beijing, China, Mao, Olympics, Reading
Zoe
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