by Liao Yiwu
I scoffed then, but after my release I realized that I had indeed lost it. That part of the longed-for reunion with my wife was underwhelming; in fact, it was over before it had even really started. She picked herself up, ice-cold, and said, “I didn’t really want to, but since you’d just come home, I thought there was no way to avoid it.”
The blank look on my face hid my inner turmoil. I quickly got dressed. Life after prison turned out to be a living hell. What was the way out for someone with my combination of insatiable sex drive, sexual dysfunction, and politically suspect past? My former friends would answer the phone the first time I called, but they never answered a second time. Even those who came by especially to invite me to dinner would later vanish.
At the time, my wife was editing a weekly entertainment magazine published by a Chengdu nightclub. She was afraid that my shaved head was too conspicuous, the sign of an inmate, so she bought me a wig and forced me to wear it. I once went to the club to pick her up because it was late and I was worried about her getting home safely. As soon as I entered the club, I ran into the two managers, one fat and the other skinny, both of them drunk, both old friends of mine who used to be poets. Together we had run an underground poetry zine that poked fun at the Party. Of course they were both more idealistic and patriotic than I was during the 1989 student protests, publicly reciting their anticorruption poems on campus. The night of June Fourth found them in Tianfu Square in Chengdu, bringing food and water to the students who were skirmishing with the military police, and ferrying the injured to hospitals.
At the club they recognized me right away. The fat one seized my wig and cried out, “What’s this counterrevolutionary doing in disguise?” The thin one yelled, “A girl for the counterrevolutionary!” I broke out in a cold sweat. They both roared with laughter and pulled me into a private room for a drink.
Three hostesses came in and started up the karaoke machine. The fat man produced his wallet and gave them all 100-yuan tips as if he were handing out candy. “Do you still write poems?” asked the skinny man.
“I haven’t been able to. I guess I just don’t feel like it,” I said.
“Well, if you do ever feel like it, try changing your tune and writing poems that sing the praises of nightclubs, Chengdu nightlife, sexy women, and spicy hot pot,” he advised. “We can print your poems under a pseudonym in our magazine, the one your wife edits.”
I was dumbfounded. “You guys used to be dirt-poor poets who couldn’t even afford a decent bottle of booze. Where did you find the money for this place? The rent alone must cost you hundreds of thousands of yuan per year.”
“Just take out a loan and you can spend all you want,” said the fat man. “There’s someone I know at the bank who will take the building and facilities as collateral. Unfortunately, the girls don’t count as collateral.”
“Being poor hasn’t been socialist since Deng Xiaoping touted economic reform on his famous tour of southern China back in 1992,” the thin man chimed in. “Protesting for democracy won’t get us anywhere. Money will.”
* * *
Life before June Fourth became a distant memory. The months wasted away. I drifted aimlessly, playing the flute in bars and on the street to scrape by while working on an account of my life in prison whenever I could find time. I figured I was the unluckiest man alive. Even my secret-police minder felt sorry for me. One day he paid a visit, announcing he had found a vacant storefront and arranged for me to open a clothing store there. I said I wouldn’t know where to buy clothes, let alone how to sell them.
“What do you mean, you don’t even know how to do something so simple?” he asked. “I’ll take you to the Lotus Pond Market for fake goods, at the North Gate train station. You can stock up there on shirts, pants, and name-brand clothing tags in bulk. Buy a bundle, spray it with water, brush down the clothes, shake out the creases, iron them carefully, and they’ll look like the real thing. If you’re good at talking up your wares, you can sell a 10-yuan shirt for 50 or 100. You’ll be rich in no time!”
“Customers aren’t idiots,” I shot back.
“No, but you’ve got to tell yourself they are. Selling is a psychological battle.”
“What if someone realizes they’re knockoffs?”
“Stick to your guns and insist you’d never sell them a fake. If they really make a fuss and refuse, then give me a call.”
“I’m not sure I want to run a business that wouldn’t survive without police protection,” I said, laughing bitterly.
“If you can pull it off, there’s real money to be made,” he assured me. “I can get you a rent exemption for the first few years, and once the store really takes off, then you seize the opportunity and open a chain. Aim for ten stores within five years, and fifty stores within ten years. You’ll have the leading clothing chain in town. If you take it one step further, hire a few more people and open up your own factory churning out knockoffs of foreign brands and exporting them cheaply; you’ll be the boss of a huge multinational company. Before you know it, even the Westerners will be shirtless and pantless without you.”
I laughed out loud, but as soon as I shut my mouth, I felt pathetic.
We drank late into the night, getting properly drunk. One moment we were slapping each other on the back, the next moment we’d be eyeing each other warily again. It was nearly dawn when the drinking session ended. “Think about it, Liao,” he said in parting.
“It’s not for me,” I told him. “You can keep your primrose paths. I’ll stick to my single-log bridge.” That single-log bridge was the prison testimony I was writing in secret.
One year later that same drinking buddy from the secret police came charging into my apartment with a gang of men. “This is a legal operation,” he announced. He showed me his police ID and read out the search warrant. They searched the place inch by inch: the bed, the table, the roof, the floor, and all the nooks and crannies that I didn’t bother to dust. They opened every drawer and turned all my pockets inside out. Although my old watchdog, Yuzui, protested loudly, they tipped out the contents of his dog bed and inspected that, too. Every written word in the house was confiscated: letters, notes, a missing-dog flyer, and the manuscript of my nearly completed memoir. I signed the list of criminal evidence they had collected. Then I was hustled into a police van and interrogated at a nearby police station until nearly midnight. At that point, the same man who had urged me to take up a career in the clothing industry came to see me before I went home. He shook my hand, patted me on the shoulder, and warned me, “You shouldn’t leave your house for a month.”
I lost hundreds of thousands of words in the space of one night. I fell asleep cursing myself with every Sichuanese curse word I knew. And then I started rewriting my testimony from scratch. I didn’t deserve anyone’s sympathy—when we were all barely making a living, no one had time to spare for my ridiculous troubles—but the heavens felt sorry for me and made up for my misfortunes by sending me an angelic girlfriend, Song Yu. She encouraged me and stuck by me during the most wretched time of my life. My problem with premature ejaculation gradually got better, but my mental dysfunction persisted. I was restless and plagued by extreme mood swings. At night, when I performed my music in bars, I was often talkative and subdued by turns. I once smashed a bottle on a drunkard’s head in a bar fight that the police had to write up.
In 1995 the secret police were back. Maybe they were bugging my house; they always seemed to know where I’d been and who I’d spoken to. They seemed to have mysteriously penetrated my dreams: I had a recurring dream of escaping, of flapping my arms and suddenly soaring away. Exhausted by flying, I slept in the fetal position, wanting nothing more than to return to my mother’s womb, where I would be free from surveillance. When I had nightmares, Song Yu would wake me by shaking me gently and holding me like a mother until another nightmare of a day began.
What had brought the police to my door this time was the “Truth About June Fourth” petition that Liu Xiaobo h
ad sent me by fax. I signed the blurry document without thinking and faxed it back. Two days later I was taken away by the secret police without even realizing why and held in custody for twenty days. Song Yu spent days outside the walls of the jail, trying to find out what was happening to me. When I got home, the first thing she said to me was: “If things go on like this, do we still have a future together?”
There was nothing I could say. The only words that came into my head were from a line of a poem by Dylan Thomas: “On whom a world of ills came down like snow.”
I was young and hot-tempered then. Although I made noise about wanting to go abroad, I didn’t really want to emigrate, not even for political asylum. I was a natural-born wild dog. I excelled at rolling around in the trash in the alleys, sunning myself, then turning over a few trash cans and looking for stories. I was like a gambling addict in a frenzy. If the Communist Party didn’t want me to write something, I just had to go write it. Maybe it started when I was in prison, bunking between two men sentenced to death. They vied at pouring their hearts out to me day and night. One told how he had hacked his wife to death and then had sex with her corpse for a whole hour. The other told me how he reeked after escaping from prison by climbing out of a cesspool. I didn’t want to listen—my senses were overloaded—but they wouldn’t shut up. “You have to listen,” they said. “You’re our last audience. How can you not listen to us?” So I listened to their stories again and again. The only way I could get those two condemned bastards out of my mind was to write down their stories. Over the years, I ended up recording and writing the stories of over three hundred people living at the bottom of Chinese society.
By then I was part of it, too. I had fallen into the abyss of the urban underclass, which put me on a level with the city’s homeless population. I had no direction in life and no freedom. “If your heart imprisons you, you’ll never be free.” That was something my bamboo flute master used to say—and where was he now? I started drinking heavily. When I was drunk, I would curse China, the police, the Communist leaders Deng Xiaoping and Li Peng, the intellectual elite, the democracy activists in exile, and all the millions who had taken to the streets in 1989. Why on earth had I decided to recite my poem “Massacre” early on the morning of June Fourth? Was it worth it? It was all very well to be killed for what you believed in, but I had been condemned to eke out a miserable existence indefinitely.
* * *
In the fall of 2004, I got divorced for the second time.
Soon after, the secret police came and put me under house arrest after I interviewed two Falun Gong practitioners. My luck was lousy. Since my release from prison a decade earlier, the police tasked with following me had changed seven times. This time what happened was that two shabbily dressed, very worried-looking women knocked on my door. I thought they were beggars and I let them in. Out of habit I got out my notebook and recorded the horrible treatment they had suffered at a mental institution.
A week later I heard heavy pounding on my door. Fortunately, the door was solid and couldn’t be opened by punching and kicking. In my desperation, I grabbed my bank card and ID card from the drawer, squeezed myself out the kitchen window, and started climbing up the chimney by grabbing onto two rusty wires. Just as I was reaching for the edge of the concrete, pulling and contracting my body and attempting to hook my right foot on the edge of the roof, my left hand slipped a little. I broke out in a cold sweat. The seventh floor! If I fell, my brains would splatter everywhere like a meat pie.
I took advantage of the heavy fog that night to sneak out of Chengdu and then out of Sichuan altogether. I made my way down to Yunnan to hide out until the situation calmed down. The following year, my work among the June Fourth “thugs” began in earnest.
“You’re one of the lucky ones,” said Wu Wenjian, the first thug I interviewed, when I started telling him my story.
“Yes,” I said. “Compared to those who died.”
“And to those who lived,” he said.
Wu Wenjian was only nineteen in 1989. Against his parents’ wishes, he joined the street protests on the morning of June Fourth, and he was lucky that a bullet only grazed his scalp rather than piercing his heart. He published a speech expressing his outrage; it was called “We Demand the Repayment of This Debt of Blood.” It earned him a comparatively short seven-year sentence in prison.
Wu explained how thugs like him were treated after the massacre. For instance, seven of the first eight people convicted of arson—they had been charged with setting army tanks on fire—were promptly executed. The only one spared was Wang Lianxi, a sanitation worker who was found to be severely mentally disabled. As a result, his sentence was commuted on appeal to life in prison. After eighteen years, he was released, shortly before the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Then he was evicted from his apartment, like many other Beijingers, when the city forcibly removed thousands in preparation for the games. Wang Lianxi ended up homeless and was eventually sent to a mental hospital. Those who knew him said Wang had been sleeping on the streets and scavenging in dumpsters for food.
Another man called Lu Zhongqu, who had also committed property damage by setting vehicles on fire, was nearly beaten to death by troops on a rampage. “We saw the soldiers drag him into a tank and take him directly to a detention center,” Wu told me. “By then he’d already lost his mind. He was covered from head to toe with bruises. He also had no bowel or bladder control left. He walked around in his own world and spoke to no one. He eventually disappeared, just like Tank Man.”
Almost no one I interviewed was willing to speak publicly about sex, but the damage there was deep, too. All over China, many of those arrested after the 1989 protests were teenage boys, virgins, like Wu Wenjian. On their release, they were middle-aged men dealing with erectile dysfunction and premature ejaculation, and their recovery often took months or years.
Wu Wenjian told me his erectile dysfunction lasted at least two years. “I had been studying art, so not long after being released from prison I found a job at an ad agency. I traveled a lot for work, so I was staying in hotels and found myself in places full of sexy women. But I was scared that the police were following me and would catch me in the act if I tried anything.
“My first kiss was a disaster. I managed to crack the skin on her lips. As soon as I put my arms around her, I came, and it was visible. I was nervous and extremely horny, but the hornier I got, the less I could get it up. It went on like that all night. The girl was patient, and she kept stroking me and comforting me, but I was on the verge of tears. I just wanted to slap myself in the face. She left and never came back.”
That’s what happens when you’ve been sexually starved for a long time.
Many people were afraid to talk to me at all, like a friend of Wu’s named Kun, who had sexual problems that were just a symptom of the wider malaise in his life. Wu tried to talk him into giving me an interview, but he declined: “If my boss finds out, I’ll be fired right away.”
Kun was a real patriot and had been honorably discharged from the army. The night of June 3, he was at Muxidi Bridge, one of the people directing the crowds of protesters from above to collectively resist the tanks. Someone later betrayed him to the military police, and he was convicted on charges of subversion and given a death sentence that was later commuted to life in prison. His wife left him not long after, taking their child with her. By the time he was released, years later, he was single and living with his eighty-year-old parents.
Kun told me a little of his employment history after getting out: “My first job involved standing outside big department stores, watching their customers’ bicycles. It paid next to nothing. Out on the street on snowy days, I stomped my feet so they wouldn’t freeze. Then my friends pulled some strings to get me the job I have now, working in a public bathhouse as a janitor. I clean toilets day and night, but at least it’s a stable income. Forget nightclubs. Now bathhouses are the new thing. Drinking, karaoke, mah-jongg, bathing, full-body massages, foot m
assages, back massages, hand jobs . . . We’ll satisfy the full range of the customer’s desires.
“In that den of vice, I’m just the janitor who cleans the toilets. When the fat cats and magnates come in with girls hanging off their arms, I stand respectfully to one side and hand them napkins. In the 1989 student movement, we ordinary people supported the students because we were sick of corruption. We wanted the top Communist officials to disclose their ‘gray income’ and private assets. We wanted a fresh start for our country. Government officials are still in league with big business, while ordinary people can barely make ends meet. Society is suffering from a crisis of trust. Those of us who paid the price for supporting Chinese democracy are left waiting on the fat cats.”
One time Kun was cleaning the toilets at work, when two shirtless businessmen came in. One was a former neighbor of his who had battled the tanks side by side with Kun during the movement. “I got lucky and slipped away into the crowd,” the neighbor told Kun after recognizing him. “They had no proof that I’d taken part in the protests, and I denied my involvement strenuously. Eventually I got away with nothing more than making a self-criticism at work.”
Responding to the Party’s call to go into business, the neighbor went into food processing, making a fortune “selling dead pigs as live ones,” as the saying goes. As long as you never breathe a word of 1989 and never reopen those old wounds, he advised Kun, you can keep making money. “You were literally on the top of the world back then!” exclaimed the neighbor, still expounding and shirtless as Kun waited to clean the bathroom. “There’s no predicting what will happen to anyone,” he added.
