Liao Yiwu on two poems and four years of detention

Source: The Guardian (5/9/24)
Two poems, four years in detention: the Chinese dissident who smuggled his writing out of prison
My poems were written in anger after Tiananmen Square. But what motivates most prison writing is a fear of forgetting. Today I am free, but the regime has never stopped its war on words
By Liao Yiwu (Translated by Michael Martin Day)

Most of my manuscripts are locked up in the filing cabinets of the ministry of security, and the agents there study and ponder them repeatedly, more carefully than the creator himself. The guys working this racket have superb memories; a certain chief of the Chengdu public security bureau can still recite the poems I published in an underground magazine in the 1980s. While the literati write nostalgically, hoping to go down in literary history, the real history may be locked in the vaults of the security department.

The above is excerpted from my book June 4: My Testimony, published in Taiwan in 2011. I wrote that book three times, the later drafts on paper much better than the paper I used for writing in prison, which was so soft and brittle I had to write very lightly. Paper outside prison is solid and flexible enough that you don’t have to worry about puncturing it with the tip of a pen. Thus, I restrained myself and filled in a page of paper, and then how many thousand – ten thousand? More? How many ant-sized words can be packed on to a page? Who knows.

I spent four years in prison for two poems, Massacre and Requiem, both of which railed against the Tiananmen massacre that began in the early hours of 4 June 1989. Fuelled by extreme anger, I recited Massacre and made it into an audiotape, which was distributed to more than 20 cities across China. I worked with the Canadian sinologist Michael Martin Day, who was living in my home at the time. After mustering a mob of sorts, we made Requiem into a performance art film. On 16 March 1990, I was arrested and imprisoned. About two dozen underground poets and writers were detained and interrogated, but only eight would be named as defendants in the first indictment in the case against this “counter-revolutionary clique”.

I passed through an interrogation centre, a detention centre, No 2 prison and No 3 prison in Sichuan province. During the two years and two months I spent in the detention centre, I wrote and preserved 28 short poems and eight letters, which I hid in the spine of a hardcover edition of the medieval novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms. I used paste to “repair” and restore it, before it was eventually taken out of the prison after passing through many hands. In the last prison, No 3 prison in north-east Sichuan, I secretly wrote more than 200 pages of manuscripts. These were published after my release in a four-volume book with the title Go on Living.

The process of smuggling the first three volumes out of the prison was extremely complicated. In the winter of 1992, I was transferred to No 3 prison, where many political prisoners with a connection to the Tiananmen massacre were detained. I slept on a top bunk in a group cell. In the beginning, I wrote down some irrelevant random thoughts, which I let everyone pass around, but I had ulterior motives.

Originally, it was impossible for me to keep these secret manuscripts myself, as the cells were subject to random searches. But I knew a paramedic downstairs who had been locked up there since the start of “liberation” in the 1950s. He had been a reporter from the Nationalist party’s Saodangbao (“Mop-Up Daily”). As he had been detained for so long, the prison guards ignored him. He was well read, and everyone called him Old Man Yang. Every time I finished writing a fragment, I handed over the manuscript to him to hide.

Old Man Yang knew many prisoners who had served their sentences and then stayed on, working in the prison. They’d been friends for decades, so he gave them my manuscript to take out of the prison and put in the post. This went on for a while, but I never expected all the manuscripts would be collected in one place – a very labyrinthine miracle.

Our group of June 4 political prisoners was closely monitored from the moment we entered the prison. Of course, someone considered organising, but it was simply impossible. From my point of view, this prison was a living history museum, as several generations of political prisoners were imprisoned there. Our group was actually very lucky. Not only did we receive international attention because of the Tiananmen massacre, but we also had the sympathy of the whole of society at that point. At the same time, I noticed that there were still many “counter-revolutionaries” there from the 1950s, 60s, 70s and 80s.

These people struggled desperately in the bottomless black hole that the Communist party had created, but they were forgotten, including Old Man Yang, who on the surface supported the government and flattered the prison guards, but in his heart was at odds with the party. In order to survive, he had no choice but to remain calm, as if his vocal cords had been severed. At the time I knew him, he was more than 70 years old and felt there was nothing to live for, until he unexpectedly discovered that I was secretly writing.

Maybe he pinned on me his slim hopes of seeing history recorded, as passing on manuscripts was a very risky thing to do. Old Man Yang had contact with many June 4 political prisoners, and several of them were writing. Why didn’t he help others? He disingenuously stated he never had anything to do with such things.

I remember one time when we were chatting casually, he asked: “What do you think about history?”

I replied: “History is like a great tree, and our group of June 4 political prisoners, who have received so much international attention, is like the part that can be seen from the ground. Absorbing the sun and rain, the branches are flourishing, and the spotlights of the whole world are trained on us. But beneath the ground, there are many invisible roots in history. Without roots, there can be no great tree, so if I write history, I will not write the conspicuous part above; I will dig out the roots that spread everywhere in the ground, and write of the tears of the roots that will never see the light of day.”

On hearing this, Old Man Yang was stunned for a few moments, and then silently walked away. After that, he often came to the cell; I gave him the manuscripts, and there were never any problems. As the prison authorities trusted him, he knew in advance when there would be searches.

Not long after I was released from prison, Old Man Yang and a monk called Sima, who had taught me how to play the flute, were also released. If they were alive now, they would both be more than 100 years old. They couldn’t possibly have lived to such an old age. Nevertheless, their spirits deserve comfort in heaven.

My co-conspirator, Michael Martin Day, was deported as an imperialist spy. This aroused such sustained attention from the international community that I was released from prison 43 days early in January 1994, and was sent directly by police car to Fuling, on the Yangtze, upriver from Chongqing, where I was registered as a resident. Unknown to me, the times had changed, and the world was very cold and calculating. I was divorced by my wife in the blink of an eye, and was perceived as carrying a political pestilence that everyone tried to avoid. As I couldn’t make a living for a while, I temporarily relied on my elderly parents for support.

What surprised me most was the fact that writing outside prison was even more treacherous than writing inside prison. My manuscripts were confiscated three times. So the square Chinese characters that I wrote became even smaller and denser than in the first draft, and in the end, almost no one could read them but me.

According to my records, as written in the traditional Chinese version of June 4: My Testimony:

On 10 October 1995, at two in the afternoon, three police cars carrying about a dozen special agents burst in on me. Everything was carried out in accordance with “legal procedures”, the officers’ IDs and search warrant were presented, the entire search process was meticulously videotaped, and all written matter in the house (including manuscripts, letters, and notes) was confiscated. And this included the very nearly completed draft of this testimony – more than 300,000 characters representing my painstaking efforts of the past year and a half.

I was breathing normally, signed with a smile, and asked: “Should I bring clothes?” The answer: “No.” I was uneasy leaving my money and valuables at home as I prepared to be the guest of the state for a long time. The agents laughed.

At 10 o’clock in the evening, I exited the Baiguolin police station in the Xicheng district of Chengdu and was politely told: “Don’t leave the city for the next month.” Thank God, my head was still on my shoulders and I could still write.

I cursed my carelessness with the foulest language imaginable and set about rewriting with all my might. Without inspiration or passion, the pen slashed the paper to ribbons, and often I could only produce a few hundred words a day. Staring at the paper was useless, and cold sweat couldn’t solve my writer’s block. But I’d made a bet; I couldn’t admit defeat. I wanted to use this to validate my own stupid way of living as an insignificant individual – a bet with the world’s largest dictatorship – with writing materials, so that in future my kids won’t think their dad was just talking big.

Some details I left out: three days before this search, Yang Wei, my former June 4 cellmate, visited and brought with him a document, entitled June 4 Political Prisoners’ Appeal to the United Nations and the US Government, which he had smuggled out at great risk. The four signatories were Lei Fengyun, Pu Yong, Xu Wanping and Hou Duoshu, who were serving sentences of eight to 12 years. I flipped through it quickly and stuffed it into a drawer. Yang Wei said: “Let’s go to Beijing. You go find a buddy who can pass this letter on to the American embassy.” I was hesitant, but Yang Wei said he had already bought train tickets. He grew agitated, tears streaming down his face, and I had no choice but to agree.

Among the 20 or so June 4 inmates, Yang Wei was the youngest. When he was arrested late in 1989, he was not yet 18. The reason for his arrest was that he had drafted and printed a manifesto “calling on the people to overthrow the murderous regime”, posted hundreds of copies everywhere, and signed it as the “China Democratic League”, headquartered at No 1 Times Square, New York. This led to an extraordinarily serious criminal case that rocked the municipal, provincial and central levels of government. The police were shocked to learn that the chairman, vice-chairman, secretary general, office director and liaison officer of this wave of “hostile overseas forces” were all one and the same high-school student.

Yang Wei and the police have one thing in common: they are in the habit of making silent phone calls. The landline would ring, and I’d pick up the receiver and say, “Hello”, only to hear the line go dead. Then, a few minutes later, someone would knock on the door. It was the same this time, too, and I thought it was Yang Wei again, but it was the police who came in. We were all caught. After an overnight interrogation, I was placed under “residential surveillance” for 20 days. Of course, the four imprisoned signatories to the UN petition had a miserable time of it, placed in handcuffs and fetters, and confined to cells the size of coffins, denied the sight of daylight for three months.

On the morning of 6 June the following year, the police raided the same cramped apartment again. My parents were at home, hiding in their bedrooms. I was “subpoenaed according to the law” to a nearby police station for 24 hours of interrogation. The second draft of June 4: My Testimony was only a bit over 60,000 words, so the loss was not big, but it was still so disappointing! How could I proceed with such writing? After I was released from prison, China’s leader, Deng Xiaoping, was promoting the idea that “poverty is not socialism”, so everyone was keen to find opportunities to earn money. No one was interested in the Tiananmen massacre any more.

For a provincial political prisoner like me, far away from the political centre, the driving force for writing is just the fear of forgetting. To be forgotten by relatives and friends, forgotten by everyone, and finally forgotten by myself. “Live and remember” is the enduring motto of witnesses from different countries. I wrote poems and went to jail, attempted suicide twice, was humiliated, beaten, electrocuted and handcuffed countless times, and shared cells with more than 20 condemned prisoners day and night. I suffered so much, and overcame so many hurdles, but in the end, I was like a piece of shit on a pavement, and the value of my existence was in reminding everyone not to step on me.

The good news is that after the searches, my memory and vigilance had been fully tempered. The third draft was written intermittently over a year and a half, and there were also more than 60 pieces of writing outside the prison. The handwriting and density were more compressed than the manuscripts written inside the prison. At that time, computer shops appeared in major cities in China. I spent a king’s ransom of 500 yuan to hire a professional typist to input the official manuscripts, which were sorted out and transcribed into a humming desktop computer. I made several copies of the floppy disk and stored them in multiple places.

Afterwards, Hu Jian, an artist friend who worked in a private printing factory, took the initiative to make a scanned copy of the original manuscript, and copied that on to five CDs. However, fortune and disaster can visit at any time. A French editor had published a translation of one of my books, Interviews With the Lower Strata of Chinese Society, in September 2003, and the French photographer Gao Lei was sent to pay a special visit to me in Chengdu. I couldn’t control my vanity, so I made an exception and retrieved the “authentic manuscript” from its hiding place and allowed it to be photographed in my home. This led to word of my book leaking out, and the next day the special agents of the public security bureau came and confiscated it.

What I’m facing up to is the longest-lived communist dictatorship in the world. I fled to the free world so I could continue this game of chance. I’ve been in exile since 2011, and have had nine books published in German by Fischer, as well as a collection of poems, a speech, an audio book and three other collections by other publishing houses. The latest book is called Wuhan. When I was writing the first draft two years ago, I was sent to hospital for heart treatment as I’d exhausted myself after working through the night dozens of times. Now that I’m healthy again and sitting here reminiscing, I feel I still have the strength to make that bet with the dictatorship, that I will continue to publish.

After having the apartment searched and being summoned by the police many times, unable to put up with the harassment any longer, Song Yu, my second wife, filed for divorce. On the eve of my little family’s demise, I wrote:

My soul is full of poison due to long-term persecution. Writing is a slow process for me, a process of detoxification. In a bottomless pitch-black abyss, what is a writer to do? I wanted to escape, I wanted to go crazy. I might lose my freedom at any time, but I wanted to gamble again.

I wanted to be in the sunshine, in words, to try to smile calmly, to talk about it. I wanted to live in poverty, but healthily, like a migrant worker who runs around from dawn to dusk. The purpose of tyranny is to turn us into a group of angry lunatics, a group of invalids dominated by our emotions; lunatics and invalids cannot say anything of value about a system or a period of history.

Even if you take my life, I want to strive to be healthy. Even if the police take me away again tomorrow, today I still want to write these words as incriminating evidence, and then go back to my parents’ home to accompany my dying father at dinner …

Not long after, my father passed away, and our family, following traditional customs, sent his ashes from Chengdu to Lijiaping, a mountainous area in Yanting, Sichuan province, hundreds of kilometers away, where he and I had both been born. We invited my grandfather’s contemporary, the feng shui master Luo Tianwang, who was 95 years old at the time, to choose the burial place and time for my father, who, at 80 years old, belonged to the “younger generation”.

I took the opportunity to interview Luo Tianwang several times, and persuaded him to recount the tragedy of the “practitioners of superstition”, who, more than 50 years earlier, when the regime changed, travelled thousands of miles so that they could accompany the corpses of those who died abroad, to allow them to “walk back” to their home towns – only to be arrested for doing so. A few years later, Huang Wenguang, an American translator I’d never met, selected and translated 27 of the 300 interviews I had conducted with people at the lowest rungs of society over several years – these had been compiled in the book that got me into trouble after the French photographer visited me in 2003 – and had them published by Random House in New York.

At the time, May 2008, I was interviewing people among the ruins of the Sichuan earthquake as the stench of decaying corpses hung in the air. It was then that the name Liao Yiwu appeared for the first time in the US, beside the title of my book, The Corpse Walker, and attracted a lot of attention.

I applied for a passport to go abroad at least 15 times; all of the attempts were rejected. As a last resort, I took advantage of household registration loopholes caused by the Sichuan earthquake to take the risk of acquiring a passport through deception. I then obtained visas from Australia, Vietnam, the US and Germany, but I was intercepted as I tried to go through customs and very nearly had my passport confiscated. Fortunately, I have quick eyesight and quick hands, and snatched it back in front of everybody, bellowing: “Murder! Murder!” All the tourists around me were stunned, thinking they’d encountered a mad man. I made it on to my plane to Germany, but seven armed policemen seized me just as it was about to take off.

Again, those around me were dumbstruck, this time thinking they were in the presence of a hijacking suspect. But a few minutes later, the international media was in an uproar. The German foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, had summoned reporters into his office and issued a public statement: “The German government has tried many times to arrange for Liao Yiwu to make this trip, but, regrettably, we have not succeeded. Germany will continue its dialogue with China, emphasising freedom of speech and civil rights, and hopes to welcome Liao Yiwu to Germany soon.”

I finally made it to Berlin in September 2010, with the help of Bernhard Bartsch, a Beijing-based reporter for the Frankfurter Rundschau. Thanks to him, my prison manuscripts and the scanned copies of original manuscripts recording my time in prison were also able to arrive in Berlin.

I kept my promise to the authorities to return home as scheduled. The result of this was that I could no longer leave the country. The Chengdu police conveyed the “latest instruction from Beijing”, not only strictly prohibiting me from going abroad, but also strictly forbidding me from publishing abroad my poetry collection, For a Song and a Hundred Songs. If I insisted on going my own way, I could be sentenced to at least 10 years’ imprisonment.

My home was searched, and I was placed under surveillance again. Fortunately, I hadn’t brought the publishing contract back with me; furthermore, for the sake of my personal safety, Fischer postponed the publication date twice, and finally declared that the book was “indefinitely delayed”. I sent a letter expressly stating that I’d rather go to jail again than not have it published, but Fischer remained silent.

It’s time to end all this, I thought. This convict’s war against an empire was too difficult and long. Would I keep at it indefinitely until it consumed me? I was 53 years old, and Confucius said, “You know your destiny at 50”, so I felt I had to leave.

I bought four mobile phones at a secondhand shop, each of them the size of a goose egg. I used them to communicate with a crime syndicate on the border between Yunnan and Vietnam, and with friends in the US and Germany.

Before I crossed the border and moved on to Hanoi in order to catch a flight to Berlin, Vietnamese customs officers extorted my remaining €1,000 and more than 2,000 yuan, on the pretext that I had to buy a return ticket. They said that they would return me to the border if I didn’t pay. When I landed at Berlin Tegel airport the next day, I was greeted from afar by the tall figure of Peter Sillem from Fischer, arms open, calling out not my name but: “My God!”

I rebuilt my life in Berlin with a lovely wife and a daughter born into a German-speaking environment. For a Song and a Hundred Songs spread like wildfire, with editions published in English, French, Italian and many other languages. However, this war between a book and an empire is still being waged, and the empire will never stop practising evil unless it is overthrown or dismembered.

Throughout the ages, no book has been able to change the darkest parts of history. It’s frustrating. I’ve said many times: both Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four are depressing – but when you think about it, a person did actually write Records of the Grand Historian and Nineteen Eighty-Four, so that’s not so depressing after all.

I once proclaimed that I “fight for the freedom of others”, but I can’t seriously recall any prisoner of the empire whose slaughter I’ve prevented because I wrote of him or her. This truth is suffocating, and I have to stand up, get away from my desk, and go out into the bright sunshine to gulp the fresh air.

Translated by Michael Martin Day. This is an edited extract from Invisible Warfare: How Does a Book Defeat an Empire? by Liao Yiwu, published by Polity