by Liao Yiwu
You are so miserable, Li Qi.
I didn’t feel miserable, because I owed Xiaoxiao. The first time I went back to the school where I had been teaching, dressed up in all that nonsense, I found out that I had been fired. My secure source of income was gone. I braced myself to go to the street committee office to check my household registration and apply for a temporary residence permit. The police in charge told me in front of everyone I would have to report on my “thinking” to their office once a month. I accepted it. That was what society was like after June Fourth. No flowers, no applause, no demonstrations in the streets or yelling of slogans. In an instant the wind started blowing in the opposite direction. Everybody forgot everything.
Xiaoxiao arranged for us to go see her family. My mother-in-law laid a nice spread with food and drink and we sat around the table. Each spoke up in turn offering advice, saying things like “Li Qi, you’re thirty years old. Now that you’ve learned your lesson, you should live a peaceful life.” Or: “Your wife had a hard time. She not only suffered herself but had to take care of the child on her own while she waited for you.” Or: “People with education are clever. They certainly can make a lot of money. Let’s drink a toast to the future wealthy man Li Qi!”
I kept drinking alone until I collapsed. They carried me off to bed. In that half-conscious state, I heard someone say, “Get over this bump in the road and start a new chapter free and clear. Put the brains you’ve spent on writing poems to work earning money.” I was forced to whore myself out.
Literature was fashionable during the 1980s and business was fashionable in the 1990s. Times change.
Yes, the gunfire of June Fourth woke a lot of people up from a dream. They couldn’t afford to love their country, or thought, or literature. Money was the only thing that overrode country, social status, literature, something they could devote themselves to completely.
Who wants to live for money? At first I couldn’t find work. People weren’t so open-minded in 1991 and 1992. Once they heard you were involved in the disturbances, they didn’t dare hire you. I explained over and over how I had been wronged. They said without a letter from the public security bureau they couldn’t consider me.
Chongqing was an old center of the Communist Party back in its underground days, so once people have a few drinks, they get frank. But they clam up completely as soon as you follow up with them on anything they promised over drinks. I wasted more than six months this way. Xiaoxiao suggested that I write to earn money. I got in touch with twenty or thirty periodicals all around the country. Some of my old contacts had moved up to deputy editor, director, or a similar position. In those dark days as a freelance writer, I devised seven or eight pen names for myself and, employing my old skills as a poet, started writing all kinds of articles. At first I was very exacting, weighing every word carefully, and I restricted myself to the literary world, writing lyrical prose, light essays, thoughtful pieces, book reviews, and short novels. I wrote at most two or three pieces a month, about 10,000 Chinese characters total. It was hard and thankless work. Editors kept rejecting my articles.
“Write something fashionable and send it to entertainment magazines,” Xiaoxiao advised me. “Write about fashion, or makeup, or write love stories, or tragedies. It doesn’t matter as long as the magazine pays well.” I told her I couldn’t do that, but that same evening I watched her churn out three 1,000-character essays about makeup in one sitting: “Why I Don’t Worry as the Years Go By,” “Twelve Secrets for Taking Care of Wrinkles,” and “The Subtle Interaction of Perfume and Mood.” I was astonished. If I could match her incredible pace of three articles a day, I would be a wealthy man within three years.
Everything I wrote from then on was trash. I could no longer express myself. Finally I stopped writing, not knowing what to do. I would sleep late and read literary classics until gradually I felt some creative inspiration. I started to write about my experiences in prison. Even though I had been out a long time, I always felt unsettled about it. I would often dream I was back in jail.
Although I wasn’t the main person charged in the case, my scars are deeper than yours, Liao. You are destined to go down in the history of literature. In the future, in any discussion of the literature of June Fourth, “Massacre” and Requiem will have to be included. But as for me, my more than half a year in jail would be for nothing. If I didn’t write about it, nobody would pay any attention to me.
Call it “history panic syndrome.”
History always drowns out the voices of all but a few. Everybody has the right to struggle for himself. If I can manage to leave behind a book for my descendants to read, who knows, maybe it will become a bestseller and I will have become an essential part of that episode of history.
People who have been in prison are meticulous. Writing every day while Xiaoxiao was out, I would lock it all up in a drawer afterward. One day I forgot to remove the key from the drawer and went out to buy food. That was the day that Xiaoxiao happened to come back from work early. She looked around and dashed straight to my desk drawer. My forbidden literature was immediately discovered by the “home police.”
I remember that when I got home and entered the room with pork and vegetables, my manuscripts had already flown all over the room and were strewn about the floor. “You cheater! Haven’t you hurt me enough?”
She sat like a little girl among the scattered papers, crying bitterly, each cry stretching out into a long wail. I had never heard such miserable, desperate cries like that before. I was beside myself. I knelt before her like a criminal apologizing for his crime and begged her to forgive me. She just pushed me away and randomly picked up a page of criminal evidence to wipe her tears and her nose. She repeatedly muttered, “Do you know that the police are coming, coming to arrest you? Do you know that?”
We kept at it until late that night. Finally Xiaoxiao got up and stood at the dressing table wiping her face and fixing her makeup. Then she got her bag and turned to go out the door. I rushed to embrace her. No matter how hard she punched and kicked me, I wouldn’t let go.
“I want a divorce!” she shouted.
“I won’t allow it,” I said.
“I’m afraid of you, Li Qi.”
I gritted my teeth and said, “I’ll burn it,” but what I was really thinking was, Can’t I just bury it instead? Can’t I just dig a hole and bury the manuscript in it?
But I really burned it. Xiaoxiao stood watch in the bathroom, staring at me as I lit page after page. Then she took the black ashes, mixed them with the water in the toilet, and flushed down over a hundred pages. My eyes were bloodshot and my face was twitching. But I loved Xiaoxiao, that tyrant. I really was finished with all of it for the rest of my life.
For a long time after that I was very depressed. Xiaoxiao wouldn’t talk to me. She would just assign me one fashionable topic after another to write about and say that it had to be finished within a certain amount of time. My mind, though, was filled with the destroyed manuscript. The flying ashes filled my brain like cancer cells, making it impossible to write anything else. “You have to earn your living,” said Xiaoxiao. I still loved her, and the desire I felt for her increased with each passing day.
I deserved to be mistreated. For a whole month we had no sex. I was like a lion pacing back and forth in a room. I desperately wanted her to cause trouble and hit me. Late one night I woke up with strong desires and couldn’t help putting my hand under the covers to touch her. With great trepidation my hand stopped for a moment on her breast. She didn’t move, so my hand continued downward. When my hand reached her lower abdomen, she still didn’t move. When my fingers slid into her panties and touched her, I was surprised she was wet. I was ecstatic. Tears rained down my face. Xiaoxiao was stirred by feelings of passion but she repressed them. The cold war between husband and wife was as thin as a piece of paper! So I cast the covers aside and, brimming with confidence, entered.
We’ve all had this experience, so there’s no need to go into
specifics.
You got all excited, didn’t you? Was it like watching an erotic drama? Or a pornographic film? But this is the scene that followed. Xiaoxiao put up one of her legs to block me, saying, “I don’t want to make love with you. My body feels it, but I don’t want to do it.”
“But you’re all wet!” I exclaimed.
“I repeat,” she replied, “I may be wet but I don’t want to do it. Get off me.” I became enraged. We started hitting one another and fell off the bed. I nearly tore her clothes to pieces and forced—
That’s enough.
Yes, that’s enough. When it was over, we didn’t have anything to say to one another. After that we lived apart for two months and got a divorce by mutual consent. Our property and our child—it all went to her. I pay child support every month. And just like that, I became a bachelor wandering around without a penny to my name.
Do you still love her?
Feelings have their limits. Once you exceed the limits, the world changes.
You had changed.
Now I eat, drink, whore, and gamble. I swindle. I know all the tricks. I wrote for an independent book publisher for over a year and earned over 20,000 yuan. I decided that I would try to become a book publisher myself. I soon exhausted all my capital, so I borrowed money. I even cheated my mother out of her retirement pension. When she realized what I had done, she ran out the door and looked all over for me in the streets for a whole afternoon, crying and screaming. Fortunately, she wasn’t hit by a car.
The first book I made money on was about the Indian meditation technique OSHO. I made 70,000 to 80,000 yuan on that. That book practically had me drowning in money. The famous poet N helped me get the book number the Chinese government requires for a book to be published. From the 1950s up to today, he has published several dozen poetry collections, so he knows the publishing world the way a fish knows water.
One day he invited me to come to his home after dinner to discuss something. I didn’t realize that I would be entering a smoke-filled room with two mah-jongg tables. N didn’t raise his head or give me a glance but just said casually, “You’ve come,” and continued to rub his mah-jongg pieces. I stood to the side serving tea and pouring water, just keeping him company and smiling. That continued until the night was over and dawn broke in the east.
Finally N stretched and said goodbye to his mah-jongg friends. I was the only one left in the living room. I didn’t know whether to stay or to leave. I gathered up my courage and grabbed my mentor, who was about to go off to his bedroom, and told him that I was there for business.
“Let’s talk later,” said N impatiently. “Call me this afternoon.”
I went home with aching muscles, cursing in my head N’s ancestors back eighteen generations. But unexpectedly the book number came through. If I had been a little impatient, I would have ruined a big deal.
Now that you’ve earned enough money, will you write your memoirs?
That kind of thing feels more and more distant to me now. It’s like the way a child drops his beloved old toy in the water. The toy drifts away, never to be retrieved again. The child is still standing on the bank or running alongside it, chasing after the toy. I won’t cry the way the child would, but the pain I feel deep in my soul, the pain from invisible but omnipresent fear, comes out of my prison experiences and my divorce. Talking with you about it today feels like a kind of emotional release or liberation, because there isn’t anyone in the “alternative book industry” who understands these things.
One day, when I don’t owe anyone anything anymore, I’ll go off to be a hermit and really learn how to write. For now, all I can do is count money. Probably nothing would make Xiaoxiao happier than knowing that.
The Poet
One summer night in the prison yard, the poet Li Bifeng and I were gazing at the stars, discussing important issues like whether freedom is possible in the universe. The other prisoners were watching a classic movie from the revolutionary era. Out of nowhere, Li brought up a thousand-line poem he had written. Would I be interested in reading it and giving him some advice? I inhaled sharply and nodded.
Li, who had worked at the State Administration of Taxation, is one of the most talented writers of those imprisoned after June Fourth. He works in many genres: poems and songs, novels, plays, philosophy, political commentary, and letters of appeal. In between interrogations, he would sit in his pitch-black cell and ponder: Who invented mosquitoes as a weapon? He has a touch of the old Greek philosopher about him.
Of all of Li Bifeng’s poems, the one that moved me the most is this one, which he wrote while he was in jail:
Winter comes too soon.
Our trees begin to wither,
since we can no longer feed them.
Our black hair frosts white,
in the years of passing snow
our skin cracking like parched earth.
Winter is here,
we all love to hibernate.
Our hearts are tired,
our blood is tired.
We hibernate under snow.
In a country like this,
all we have is hibernation.
The poem takes me back to the eighties, when I read the Russian poet Sergei Yesenin. In the prime of his youth, Yesenin wrote about the Russian winter and its clear bleak skies with metaphors like “patched calico” and “soiled kerchief.” I also thought of the Chinese poet Hai Zi (Zha Haisheng), who threw himself under a train when he was only twenty-six, and of my own poetry, which used to pour out faster than I could write. Now even a single line is beyond me.
Shortly after Li Bifeng was released from prison, I went to interview my old friend the poet.
* * *
In the blink of an eye, your seven-year prison sentence is over and done with. I heard that you wrote over two million words while you were in there.
Li Bifeng: Most of it was confiscated, but I managed to hold on to several hundred thousand of them.
The more you suffer, the more imaginative you become. But how did you get involved in June Fourth?
The 1989 student movement spread first from Beijing to Chengdu and then from Chengdu to Mianyang. In May the university and polytechnic students were demonstrating in the streets. Seeing them there was very moving, so we hurried to the construction materials school in the Mianyang suburbs to get in touch with them and support them, but the school security patrol wouldn’t let us in, saying we were “social chaff” plotting something sinister.
The next day we made banners in support of the students and persuaded some locals to participate in the demonstrations. Despite the blazing hot sun on May 21, 200 or 300 students held a sit-down strike in front of the city government offices. There were many people standing around, watching, but not one of them would give those patriots soaked in sweat so much as a cup of water. That infuriated me. I stood up on a rickshaw and started asking everyone to bring water and donations for the students. That day I was very eloquent. I talked for hours until I was losing my voice. Finally people started making contributions. Now that the students had the support of the people, their morale greatly improved. But as for me, because I had openly incited people to act, I had gotten myself in trouble. The public security bureau took note: “We’ll have to detain that guy with the glasses from the taxation administration!”
Later, tracing the origins of my crime, the indictment quoted from a little poem I had published in the popular periodical Seeking the Dream:
The sky is too dark
I cannot see the volcanoes on the moon tonight
The prosecutor must have been illiterate, because he questioned just what it was I meant to say when I wrote that the sky was too dark.
“The sky is dark because the sky is dark,” I answered. “That’s all it means.”
He pounded the desk, enraged. “You’re being contentious. You’re obviously slandering the socialist system by painting it pitch-black.”
“My eyes are very nearsighted,” I said, �
�so when I see that it’s dark, I write that it’s dark . . .”
Later, with the expert testimony of the editor Xie Zongnian, “The Sky Is Too Dark” became a truly reactionary poem and a solid piece of evidence against me.
After that day with the students in Mianyang, I caught wind from several sources that I was in trouble, so I fled. I headed directly to Chengdu to join the revolution. In the square by South Renmin Road, several hundred of us gathered and announced the founding of the Chengdu Young People’s Autonomous Association. I was elected chairman of the association by majority vote.
What kind of activities did you organize?
I was in contact with a group from Peking University that was trying to spread the revolution. I went to the Sichuan Industrial College in the western suburbs and mobilized students there to participate in the May 30 Worldwide Chinese People’s Demonstration. I was also planning to organize a “death-defying squad” to support the protests in Beijing. With a poet’s intuition, I published “A Speech for the End of the World,” predicting that the June of democracy would become a June of darkness. That angered some university students, who went to the police to inform on me and slander me as a “Taiwanese spy.”
How did you know the end was near?
On the night of May 28, I was sleeping beneath the statue of Mao Zedong in the square, when I dreamed that six public security officers wielding police clubs came screaming at me like fiends: “What are you doing?”