The Corpse Walker

"It’s a bit like the first one: the writer Liao Yiwu is not much appreciated by the present government – he was put in jail in 1989 because he’d written a poem called ‘The Massacre’, about the 4 June incident in Peking. He spent ten years in jail, where he was put with the ordinary criminals, so he mixed with all kinds of people and interviewed them and recorded their life stories, and it’s an extraordinary testimony about how people live at the bottom of society. Through the story of their lives you have a record of recent Chinese history (some are 60, 70 years old), and so you have an awful lot about the human component of society: a kind of mirror of the life that has been lived by individuals. For instance, he interviewed a schoolteacher, a public toilet manager – the man who does the dirtiest work – and also a professional mourner: a profession that has recently been revived under the Communist regime. They accept – they try to find a way. They know they cannot do much about what is above, and that even if they do speak out it does not have an effect. But they try to manage, and to understand how it works in order to keep some kind of independence and meaning in their lives, much as the rickshaw man and the people in The Water Margin do, although the people interviewed here are not heroes or rebels, and they are in jail. But they try to justify themselves. There is a man, for instance, who is a human trafficker, who started marrying his daughters in a province where there are not enough wives. He discovered that people there would pay a lot of money to get wives, so he started finding other young women in Szechzuan, his own province, and lured them, saying they would get wonderful salaries in big factories and so on, and in fact they were married off. He was arrested and jailed, but he says: ‘After all, I did something right, because if the men there can’t find women they get furious and become potentially criminal. And the girls in Szechzuan don’t want to stay there, they want a better life, and they do have a better life where I put them.’ So he gives his crimes a justification, and is quite philosophical about the fact that he’s been jailed for 20 years or so. The book gives a light on the way that society is working. Liao Yiwu is a very good writer, and he perceives something which is very deep in Chinese society. It’s not just a question of rebellion against the Communist government – of course he’s against Communist rule. It’s more a sense of universal values, and the dignity of the human. That’s a kind of blood that flows all along in Chinese history and literature, which is expressed by various writers, but especially by these writers who can really go to the truth, to the inner, the deep things."