by Liao Yiwu
When news of this reached the outside world, the Western media took notice, but the authorities claimed that none of it ever happened. When an official characterized the event as a “disturbance” in the local newspaper, I was livid and immediately wrote an appeal to the International Labour Organization at the United Nations, asking their help rehabilitating the people who had been arrested because of this “disturbance.” I faxed my manuscript to the New York office of Human Rights in China. Soon a group at the United Nations was investigating it. All of the 200-plus people were released. The police, beside themselves with rage, came after me.
You were on the run for more than half a year?
I hid in an old fellow prisoner’s home in Chongqing for a few days. Then Yang Wei came and took me to Guangzhou to prepare to cross the border into Hong Kong. However, T at Human Rights in China called to change the plan, saying that Hong Kong was too tense and that he couldn’t go meet me there. I had no choice but to turn around and once again go back to the China-Burma border in Yunnan for a while. T again passed word that I should try to get across the border on my own. Someone would receive me at Chiang Mai in Thailand. It just went on and on like that, until eventually I went home.
People saw me as soon as I went in the front gate, but I was still determined to hurry up to the third floor and get through the door of our apartment. My wife was startled. “Why did you come home?” I hemmed and hawed and was about to head out the door, when my son suddenly hugged my legs and started crying, “I want Daddy!”
It was heartbreaking, because those were his first words. But there was nothing I could do: I had to harden myself and pry his hands off me, leaving with my eyes red with tears. I spent less than ten minutes at home before hurrying out into the street and hailing a rickshaw. When we reached the highway, I switched to a cab. I didn’t ask how much, I just told the driver to drive toward Chengdu. Two police cars sandwiched us at a tollbooth, and the police dragged me out of the cab. The handcuffs clicked on my wrists.
I’ve now been captured more than ten times, caught red-handed each time. The last time I was caught, the case was about me alone, so I made a full confession. This time the authorities gathered many witnesses they had tampered with. I was sentenced to seven years in prison for “economic fraud crimes” and sent back to our old spot, Sichuan Provincial Prison No. 3. After a few months I was transferred to the Ya’an Prison in western Sichuan some 600 miles away. I was worn down, I had blood in my urine, my fingers bled, and I was as pale as a corpse. One day, when I had just woken up and eaten, I fainted. I spent several months in the hospital and feared that I wouldn’t live to get out of jail. It was about that time that my wife asked for a divorce. I agreed for the sake of our son. Things dragged on there until 2003, when I met someone I knew in prison. We chatted for about ten minutes, but someone informed on us. Early the next morning I was transferred to the Mingshan Prison, about six miles away. There we made machine parts. The work was hard, awful. I was sick most of the time. My health improved slightly through better nutrition and exercise before my release. I wrote several million words’ worth of poems and songs, novels and plays. Most of it was confiscated. I want to rewrite some of them from memory.
Running and jail; jail and running. Always back and forth between the two. Such is my life. I keep writing about life. But what is life? Now my son is nine years old and needs money and a steady father’s love. But I have nothing.
After I got out, the public security bureau arranged for me to work at an insurance company. They said, “Don’t you have a special talent for propaganda and agitation? Use it in that calling. Go from person to person and house to house and sell life insurance!” After two or three months I hadn’t sold any insurance. I’m over forty years old and still asking my family for handouts. I have no shame. My way of earning a living now is writing. I want to publish books and articles abroad.
I’ve seen your poems, songs, and novels. It wouldn’t be easy to make a living from them. In one of your poems you curse God, “that old landlord in the sky” who only wants to “use the gold coins of the sun to purchase humanity.” Who could understand what that means?
You understand.
But I can’t afford to pay authors’ royalties.
The Prisoners
In the winter of 1992, two years into my sentence, I was transferred from a prison in Chongqing to Sichuan Provincial Prison No. 3, which was packed with June Fourth “counterrevolutionaries”; I met more than twenty of them there. The crime was always the same: “counterrevolutionary propaganda and incitement,” but our sentences ranged from two years to twelve.
The shortest among us was Xu Wanping from Dadukou, in Chongqing, who, with his curving eyes and thin mouth, strongly resembles a laughing fox. The man is headstrong, and his thinking is totally naïve.
Xu was once an honest worker in a state-owned printing plant. His family had an excellent class background going back three generations—what they called a “brilliant red seedling background.” In other words, he was a genuine proletarian. Who could have known the tricks fate would play? During the student movement of 1989, he followed the people into the streets and got mixed up in politics, chanting slogans and singing the Chinese version of the Internationale: “Overflowing with passion, we will fight for Truth!” With a black placard on his chest with the words “I am that son of a bitch Li Peng,” he would stand on the street so the crowds could gawk at him and criticize him. All worked up, he was like a cross between performance artist and a red-cheeked fox.
He took advantage of the chaos to found the China Action Party. He was arrested a dozen or so days later and quickly sentenced to eight years in prison for incitement and for founding a counterrevolutionary organization.
Xu was frugal to the point of it becoming a vice. He often carried a big mug of sweetened water around with him, doling it out to himself one spoonful at a time, deliberately savoring every bit. He was interested in studying poetry, so we became friends and he invited me to enjoy some of his sugar water. Although I am a literary man, I am solidly built and have strong appetites. After a few polite words, I took the mug and drank it all in a few gulps and then in a grand gesture I wiped away the little pearls of sugar water from my mouth. Xu smiled and waited for me respectfully before saying, “Big Brother Liao, slow down a bit or you’ll choke!” Remembering that scene many years later, I finally understood it a little bit better. Xu came from a very poor family. His father died young and his mother was retired, so they had just enough to survive on. The family would send small amounts of money, 20 or 30 yuan, to ease the hunger of their imprisoned, unfilial son.
Xu had a strong revolutionary will. He was punished a few times for his participation in prison strikes, hunger strikes, and other violations and locked up in that cramped little doghouse of a solitary confinement cell. As the chief negotiator for our group of political prisoners, he would go up to the prison office on the second floor. Before he could get a word out, they would force him to the floor and tie him up.
In 1997, Xu completed his sentence and was released. Without a way to support himself, he came with his poetry and other writings to visit me when I was down in the dumps. He spent over a month working in my mother’s teahouse, attentive and ready to work hard, earning the appreciation of the middle-aged and elderly clientele. There was very little money to be made in the teahouse, though, so Xu had no choice but to eat less and less. Xu read a great variety of books and made many friends while he was there. He wrote a lot and his thoughts bubbled up like the water in a fountain. His ability and fame were growing, even as he grew more emaciated.
Then, in the fall of 1998, Xu became an activist in the China Democracy Party. During that very jittery period, he entered “the palace” for a second time, for the crime of subversion. This time, because the Chongqing police complained that the legal system was too obsessed with small details, they sent him directly to the Xishanping Forced Labor Camp for three years of reform through labor.
Three years later, it was a fall afternoon when I got a phone call from Xu. His breathing was weak and punctuated by coughing. He said that Xishanping was the worst place in the world and that he had barely managed to get out of there alive. I didn’t know what to say. “I was caught between common criminals and Falun Gong practitioners,” he went on. “I didn’t have a single June Fourth comrade in prison with me.”
“You should write down your experiences,” I said when I was finally able to interrupt him.
“They destroyed me in there,” Xu panted. “Whenever I pick up my pen to write, my head buzzes.”
Survival cuts like a knife, and human rights don’t put food on the table. Xu, with his battered, bleeding, and buzzing head, had to start keeping a lower profile and join the hundreds of millions of other Chinese working to earn a living. He went around doing sales and ran a street stand. He even had the title “Business Manager” on his business card. On the eve of the SARS outbreak, he used a $500 donation from Liu Qing of the NGO Human Rights in China to open a noodle shop with another fellow sufferer, Jiang Shihua. Business was just starting to pick up, and Xu’s morale was improving, when the SARS epidemic hit hard. In the blink of an eye, the government ordered Xu’s noodle shop and others on the same street to close down.
Xu had invested all of his family’s savings, and now it was completely gone. In desperation, he went to the police station, alone, protesting that he had a right to live, too. It didn’t do any good. He made an overseas collect call and made unfounded accusations against various people for living off the sweat and blood of the democracy movement people. All that did was cut him off from the support he needed. One evening, Xu called me to say that he had just arrived at Chengdu’s North Gate train station. After I gave him detailed directions to my house, I put down the telephone receiver and waited for him until late that night, but he never came.
Had the police arrested that crazy fucker? I lay on my bed wondering until I eventually fell asleep.
Just like that, Xu kept bumping along, eking out a living and finally even getting married, which was truly a wonder of wonders. I vaguely recall that his wife was a laid-off worker, too. The home the two of them made for themselves had all the distinguishing characteristics that Marx ascribed to the proletarian home.
On the Internet, I sometimes saw Xu’s commentaries on current political issues, which must have earned him some royalties. Commemorations of June Fourth had started popping up in cities across China, and with the fifteenth anniversary approaching, Xu announced that he would organize one in Chongqing. I had seen plenty of them and didn’t pay much attention to it. When Xu was arrested on June 3, I wasn’t very surprised. During those years, democracy activists were always being detained and released.
But Xu had narcotics planted on him, and he was charged with drug trafficking. According to one report, someone walking by had slipped a bag of heroin in his pocket, and in short order Xu was videotaped and intercepted by police who were waiting right there in the shadows.
Just like some fucking Hong Kong movie, I thought angrily. Once the date of the anniversary was past, Xu was released yet again, but this time the narcotics division at the public security bureau had tortured him and tied him to a chair for forty-eight hours straight. How could he stand it? He didn’t say. What was he going to do in the future? No one asked. Too much goes on in the world. In just a moment, it all becomes old news. Xu is still alive, I thought, and in that sense he is doing pretty well.
Not long after that, Xu was sentenced to twelve years in prison for the crime of trying to “overthrow state power.”
* * *
Tall and thin, Pu Yong came from an influential family of practitioners of Chinese medicine in Nanjiang County, in the Daba mountain range of northeast Sichuan. He was a deputy town head in his early twenties and once had the prospect of a brilliant political career. Enraged after the Tiananmen slaughter, he took advantage of the nighttime stillness to distribute and post hundreds of leaflets condemning the Chinese Communist dictatorship. Swiftly sentenced to ten years in prison, he was just as quickly sent under armed guard to the Peng’an Prison in the Nanchong region. There he became fast friends with Lei Fengyun, who had gotten his own heavy sentence for attempting to dig up the graves of Deng Xiaoping’s ancestors. They secretly tried but failed to build a political system inside the prison. Betrayed by informers, the two became the focus of a “struggle meeting” held in front of all the other prisoners. Then they were locked away in solitary confinement, in tiny rooms the size of dogholes, for three months. After getting out of the hole, Pu Yong was immediately transferred to another prison, where he became one of my fellow inmates.
To blunt his passionate spirit of resistance, the prison’s cunning political commissar personally put Pu Yong into the lowest level of the prison, the automobile parts foundry and grinding workshop. Every day, for his reform-through-labor work, he did extremely punishing physical labor amid the constant dust of the foundry workshop. As a result, Pu contracted serious stomach and lung disorders for which he was never treated. He became as emaciated as a shadow, as bony as a ghost.
Despite all this, Pu studied hard every night. He read the classics intensively, especially Sun Tzu’s Art of War and Liu Bowen’s Ming-era commentary on the Tui bei tu, the famous book of prophecies. As he gradually came to understand these works better, he would often ask me for insights into them. Incapable of doing more than writing a few verses of clumsy poetry, I didn’t understand them, either, so I introduced him to Li Bifeng, who was reputed to be an extraordinary fortune-teller.
As the sun was setting one day, Li Bifeng and I were strolling the prison yard as usual, when Pu suddenly appeared and asked, “Where are you going?”
“I go wherever I want to,” I said.
“Let’s imitate Old Mao,” said Pu, “and play a game of mountain guerrilla warfare. Crazy Li, how about you and I discuss strategy?”
“Why in hell does a scholar want to fight like a guerrilla?” replied Li Bifeng.
“It’ll be fun just to experience what it’s like to carry out an armed uprising,” replied Pu.
The three of us had a conversation ranging across 5,000 years of Chinese history, astronomy, and geography as we paced back and forth like caged lions. Our faces turned red as we engaged in a battle of words. One moment we were shouting angry insults, the next we were laughing. It went on until a jailer on the second floor whistled to alert us that the outdoor recreation period had ended.
During the last late autumn of the twentieth century, Pu was released after completing his sentence. His ambition was as high as the heavens, but his fate was as thin as paper. He huffed and puffed and ran all over the country, both north and south of the Yangtze, getting in touch and arguing with all the democracy movement figures he could find, and he returned home disappointed. Once Pu Yong visited me at home to ask about the whereabouts of my friend Yang Wei, who had fled abroad because of the China Democracy Party case.
Watching Pu’s expression and choosing my words carefully, I told him about how Yang Wei had asked for political asylum at the U.S. embassy in Bangkok but was turned away. His face turning ghastly pale, Pu was quiet for a while before finally saying, “Then what can the unknowns like us do?”
I had no answer for him. During that long silence, Pu finally realized there was nobody to rely on besides himself as he struggled to live his difficult life. When we met again, Pu was enrolled as a student at the Chengdu University of Traditional Chinese Medicine. “I’m a bit older than the other students,” he laughed, “but after studying for a few years, I’ll be able to open my own clinic and rely on my own skills to live a normal life.”
Later, we didn’t have as much contact as before. I remember once when Pu was at my place, sitting and not saying much before suddenly sighing. “She Wanbao, Li Bifeng, and Xu Wanping are all back in prison again. Of all the others, you’re the only one with a fixed address. They’re all just drifting.”
I tri
ed to console him: “You’ll soon lead a normal life.”
Pu shook his head. “On the outside everything looks normal, but my heart just can’t get past it, not until the victims of the June Fourth tragedy are acknowledged. I don’t want anything. I just want them to be acknowledged.”
After that, we didn’t see one another again. My home wasn’t far from where Pu was going to school. I would often walk over and ask after him, but I always returned home disappointed. Pu hadn’t left a telephone number. All the political prisoners were like frightened birds when they left prison. Once they flew past, they were gone, leaving little trace in reality or in history.
Autumn passed and winter came. My father went into the hospital with a terminal illness. After fighting for over a year, he finally died in the cancer ward where Pu had studied. Once the funeral arrangements were complete, I returned home feeling like my skin had been peeled off. After beating up on myself for a while, I curled up like an insect and tried to get a good night’s sleep. Just then, the phone rang. It was Pu’s younger brother Pu Xiongwei: “My elder brother has late-stage stomach cancer and is in critical condition.” My hands and feet started quivering so badly, like springs, that the call got cut off. I had to look up the number displayed and call back. At the other end of the line was Pu in his hospital bed. His life hung by a wavering thread, but his spirit was still fresh. Overcome by grief, I felt something blocking my throat, and for a while I didn’t know what to say.