by Liao Yiwu
When Lei was released at the century’s end, I arranged a gathering in Chengdu. He came with his wife and daughter, who had been waiting for him all along. During the meal Lei recalled the incident of the prison graduation photo and all the misery it had caused. I was feeling uneasy, but Lei said, “Thank you, Big Brother Liao, for letting the outside world know about us. The punishment was worth it.” Feeling ashamed, I handed him the $600 in support that Liu Qing of Human Rights in China had sent. Lei was grateful but firm: “There’s no need for this. Tens of thousands of June Fourth people went to jail. Those in need must number in the hundreds or thousands. I’m fluent in English: I can just live in obscurity and support my family by teaching English. I won’t have any problem getting along.” When the banquet was over and it was time to go, he added, “Before, everybody was patriotic. Today, since all people care about is money, it looks like it will be a long time before the Communist Party falls. You and I will just have to endure all that. Brother Liao, goodbye.”
Goodbye, Lei. The seasons change and the constellations move to different positions in the sky. Since we said our farewells, we haven’t had a chance to see each other again. I heard a rumor among my brother prisoners that Lei teaches in another part of the country and pays no attention to the outside world. But recently, some seventeen or eighteen years later, from my exile in a foreign land, I searched online and found that Lei had been interviewed by the former June Fourth leader Zhou Fengsuo. I could tell that the passions still run deep inside him. In the interview he refers to “butchers,” “bandits,” “digging up graves,” and “avenging humiliation.”
Still overly trusting and underestimating the enemy, I thought, counting his age on my fingers. Lei must already be well over sixty.
I felt a wave of emotion come over me.
* * *
Short and stout, Hou Duoshu, from Dazhou in northeastern Sichuan, was a well-liked teacher in his hometown when the Beijing student strike broke out. Electrified, he banged the table in his classroom and led a pack of young students to push down the school gate, which the president of the college himself had locked, so they could go demonstrate in the streets and shout slogans.
People in neighboring schools heard them and they, too, went out into the streets, which were like a bowl of boiling gruel. Amid the excitement, Hou was elected leader of the academics’ outreach group. Above the turbulent crowd of thousands of people, he raised his megaphone and harangued the city’s mayor for hours about the bloodbath taking place in Beijing and around the country. He called on the mayor to send telegrams calling for the overthrow of Li Peng and in support of the hunger-striking students in Tiananmen Square.
One evening in the middle of winter in 1992, with our heads pressed low into our necks like turtles in the biting wind, Hou Duoshu and I met at Sichuan Provincial Prison No. 3. We discussed our cases. He’d fled and wasn’t captured by police until more than half a year later, in a small southern town. Tried back home, he was sentenced to eight years in prison for the crime of counterrevolutionary propaganda and incitement.
Soon, with the blowing of a whistle, all the prisoners assembled. As each prisoner’s name was called, he would stand up straight and answer “Here!” and the warden would stare at him for a moment before moving on to the next. But when he called “Hou Duoshu,” the warden’s voice suddenly quivered, and Hou, with his arms crossed, grinned. Red-faced and dejected, the warden handed the roll call book to the prison group head and walked away.
“It’s sad for a teacher and his student to meet in prison!” exclaimed Hou, and the entire group heard his words and started whispering among themselves.
“He was one of my favorite students, a hard worker from a poor family. In public, I treated him strictly, as I did all the others, since I was supposed to treat everyone the same. In private, I treated him differently, and tried to help him financially as much as I could.” Later, Hou told me, “Our relationship was like that of Confucius and his favorite pupil Yan Hui.”
One day, in an unobtrusive corner of the prison, a short, stocky prisoner—going against all regulations—shouted over to a tall, skinny man in a police uniform. The warden stopped, responding timidly, “Teacher Hou.”
“Why are you here?”
“I was sent here after graduation.”
“Why didn’t you take the examination to go on to graduate school?”
“First I had to find a way to make a living.”
“It’s better to die than to become a ‘running dog,’ a lackey.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean your occupation. What makes it any different from being a running dog? What you should do is find time to review your studies and then take the entrance examination for graduate school.”
“Thank you, Teacher Hou.”
“No need to thank me.”
Hou grew still more arrogant. One morning at three a.m., the shrieking sound of an electric buzzer woke us up. We formed into groups and made our way by the light of the moon and the stars to the reform-through-labor workshops almost a mile away. We started up the furnace while it was still dark outside and began to melt iron and mold automobile parts. Hou was with the group, but as soon as we arrived, he snuck off to the fitting workshop and went back to sleep. He didn’t wake up until after the sun had risen, stamping his feet to get warm and taking out a copy of Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy. The prisoners all around him were working hard; the machine tools were whirring. Sparks flew all around, but he ignored it all.
Envious people started to inform on him, but his former student the warden thought to himself, How could a teacher be a teacher if he didn’t read? He sent someone to take Hou back to his prison cell and tell him there was no need for him to go out to work again in the future.
Instead, he was assigned to clean the exercise field, an area about the size of a basketball court. That was an extremely enviable job, since it left you with lots of free time, but Hou was the sort of person to take a mile if you gave him an inch. Every day he would do a cursory sweep for half an hour, swinging his broom like a Daoist priest scribbling an inscription, and then take a break to work on his English. That provoked even more envious informer reports. The young warden, in an awkward position, was eventually transferred.
Things quickly turned sour for Hou. Not only did he lose his sweeping job, but because he feigned illness, the prison leadership declared that he would be put in the doghole. That was a big disgrace for an educated man like him, so Hou grabbed onto the iron bars of the doghole, determined not to be put in there. A prisoner came by to push him in, but Hou grabbed onto him as he approached and they got into a fierce fight. Then Hou tried to cover up what he was doing by screaming “He’s killing me!” so loudly that his voice echoed through the prison, but all that won him was a series of beatings with a police baton, plus a set of leg irons.
Just before I got out of prison, the warden-student, through self-study, did manage to pass the entrance examination of a graduate program at a university in another province. In violation of prison regulations, he went to the prison cell to say goodbye to his teacher. There was much to say, but his sobs prevented him from saying any of it. Hou laughed and said, “Confucius said, ‘Everything is vulgar. Only study is noble.’ I’m sorry that I cannot see you out. Later, when I am out of prison, we will meet again.”
From then on, Hou’s status in the prison deteriorated even faster. In the fall of 1995, together with Lei Fengyun, Pu Yong, Xu Wanping, and others—and with the help of an ex-prisoner who by then was working at the prison—Hou secretly sent a political prisoners’ declaration to the United Nations, Amnesty International, and Human Rights in China. When they were discovered, each was put into solitary confinement for more than a hundred days. While down there, Hou screamed and howled and banged his head hard against the wall. He ended up tied face up to the four posts of a torture bed used for condemned prisoners, where he couldn’t do anything on his own, not even e
at, drink, or shit. Despite all this, when the prison authorities asked him if he regretted what he had done, Hou answered just as before, his entire body swollen up from his beatings: “Please allow me to read the Bible for a few days first before I tell you if I regret anything.” The seeds of Christian faith had quietly taken root. Several years later, Hou was baptized as a follower of Jesus Christ.
In the spring of 1997, Deng Xiaoping died. The flag was lowered to half-mast throughout the land. Wardens dressed in mourning led a group of armed police into each cell to force the prisoners to participate in a memorial ceremony. Hou resisted. He lay on the ground like a scoundrel, cursing and spitting, saying, “That butcher deserved to die!”
That was going too far. The prison authorities strongly believed in the wisdom of the old saying “Kill one monkey to intimidate a hundred other monkeys,” so Hou was ferociously beaten in front of the other prisoners. A special 175-pound leg iron was put on him and he was carried into the hole. The heart-wrenching pain made Hou howl bitterly like a pig about to be killed, a cry that blended perfectly with the solemn mourning music for the national martyr Deng Xiaoping.
That evening the prison’s political commissar personally visited the cell and ordered him to write a self-criticism. Hou took the pen and paper handed to him through the prison bars and with a flourish of the pen he was done. “Honorable Political Commissar: I did not participate in the memorial for Deng Xiaoping today. I was wrong and I will behave better in the future. If there is a similar memorial meeting tomorrow, I promise to participate. Signed, self-criticizing person Hou Duoshu.”
The political commissar laughed angrily at him. “You couldn’t even write a self-criticism. What kind of education did you get?”
Hou sneered, “I didn’t go to school to learn how to write a self-criticism.” The political commissar turned around abruptly and left. Looking at his back, Hou resumed his murdered-pig howls. “God-awful sound!” said the political commissar, blocking his ears and ordering that Hou be let out of the hole.
The past is like a cloud of smoke. When I saw Hou again, the new century had already begun. “These last few years have been pretty rough. I felt ashamed to come to visit you,” he said, laughing. “I heard from everybody that you had remarried. That’s a fine thing, so I had to come.” Then he took a pair of Nike running shoes, worth a few hundred yuan, out of his bag.
Living on the margins of society, it was the first time that I had ever had such a nice pair of shoes. I couldn’t help but exclaim, “That’s too much money to spend! What kind of business are you in?”
“I sell sexual health products.”
“Is that a moneymaker?”
“This evening, let’s keep things classy and not talk about things like that.”
Then our conversation returned to what had gone on inside the prison walls. At the time, I didn’t know that Hou had also married and had a child. In the predawn hours we talked about the sixth-century philosopher Boethius, sentenced to death by the Roman emperor. During some fifty days in prison awaiting execution, he finished his book The Consolation of Philosophy, and by coincidence it was just when he had laid down his pen that the executioner entered his cell. “Soon after Boethius’s execution, the emperor died as well,” Hou continued. “The Consolation of Philosophy was widely read and has lasted through the centuries, all the way up to us this evening.”
Hou stood up to say goodbye. Seventeen years have passed since then.
The Author
This is a self-interview, from before exile. (Lao Wei is Liao Yiwu’s pen name in China.) The third generation of my family to be honored with home searches and confiscations, I laugh it all off, play my flute, sell my art, and stand around screaming at the top of my lungs.
Lao Wei: So your home was searched again?
Liao Yiwu: The phone rang a little past six a.m. It was still pitch-black outside, and I’d had only two hours of sleep. It rang for four or five minutes without letting up. Then came the pounding on the door. Song Yu jumped out of bed, startled. I walked out of the bedroom, quickly pulling up my pants. It was like a scene from a horror movie, the duet of the ringing phone and the pounding on the door, while the lead actors blundered about blindly like headless houseflies.
Was your wife frightened?
She was relatively calm. Hanging around with someone like me, she’s gotten used to dealing with the police. Remember the descriptions of arrests in the first chapter of The Gulag Archipelago? Song Yu can relate. For example, the day we made our first visit to her family home as a married couple, the groom suddenly disappeared before the feast, leaving her to put on a happy face while greeting the whole room of guests alone. And there was the time her husband made plans to go out for hot pot with friends but never made it back the whole night. There were many other similar disappearances. The only thing she could do in such situations was call the relevant friends to ask what had happened to her husband and wait.
So she kept her cool this time, looking in the mirror, brushing her hair, putting on her makeup, and getting ready for work. As the room filled up with plainclothes police, she turned to the top cop there and asked him for the court summons and search order. She read it over carefully, then smiled and asked, “Shouldn’t there be a duplicate copy of the search order?” The section chief answered that there was only one copy.
“How could that be?” she asked. “When we go shopping, we always get a copy of the receipt. That makes things easier if there’s a problem later and we need to look for you.”
The section chief answered harshly, “Doing a search is not like going shopping. We will provide you with a detailed list of everything we confiscate, in accordance with the law.” Song Yu wanted to talk back to him, but I quickly stopped her and told her to hurry off to work. Before she left, she put two tablets of cold medicine on the desk and reminded me several times not to forget to take it. “She’s a young one,” said the police admiringly, “but she is really tough!”
That afternoon at five p.m., because the police hadn’t found the evidence they needed, I was released. A few days later Song Yu and I had a chance to really talk, in a way we usually didn’t have time for. Questions like “What can we do in this life?” and “How is it we can have friends with ideals, ambition, and so much knowledge—like Kang Zhengguo, Liu Xiaobo, and Wang Lixiong—while I, Liao Yiwu, mostly just love eating and drinking?”
I argued strenuously with her, but my wife, who had been a student leader at school, stood in front of our bed and announced her conclusion after thinking long and hard about me: “You are not the kind of person who should get married.”
How could you just laugh all this off?
When life is this tough, if you don’t laugh a lot, you’re doomed to be a bitter melon. Even if the laughter is just a mask, you need to keep the mask on. When we were little, we watched many times while condemned prisoners, all tied up, were paraded around in front of the people. We soon forgot all about them, but the image of one poor devil about to be killed, smiling happily at the crowd, will stay with us forever. People in the streets talked about him for a long time afterward. So if they are going to search, well, let them do it. What could I do when eight plainclothes police in two squads charged in? I still had to smile.
They took away my computer, including manuscripts of mine running to millions of Chinese characters. Fuck, I thought, whether I like it or not, I’m the only writer in China who writes exclusively for the police. During repeated searches of my home, they have accumulated everything I have written from 1980 to the present, not to mention love letters, random notes, award certificates, old photos, and even smelly discarded manuscripts they fished out of the bathroom garbage can. This time they had the honor of being the first readers of the third draft of my multivolume novel Survive. They figured out how to assemble my manuscripts for Interviews with People on the Margins of Chinese Society and Unjust Cases. They revisited my works “City of Death,” “Requiem,” “The Slaughter,” and “L
ove Song of the Gulag Archipelago,” and they systematically studied the news and reviews about each one.
They spent three hours methodically searching the balcony, the living room, my study, the bedroom, and all the hardest-to-reach corners of the apartment. After two of them had been in my study for a long time, I went in, with ulterior motives, to serve as their guide to my bookshelves.
“That’s my elder sister. She died in a car accident in 1988,” I said, taking back a picture they were holding.
“We wouldn’t take that,” one of the young guys said kindly. “Your elder sister was very pretty.”
I took the opportunity to guide them through significant pictures, calligraphy and paintings, my vertical bamboo flute, and various other things. Intentionally or not, I was partially blocking their line of sight, but their eyes, used to taking in the smallest details, alighted on my complete collection of Tendency, an elegant illegal magazine printed in Hong Kong and bound in nine volumes; a copy of Today; and some things by Xu Wenli, Wei Jingsheng, and Liu Binyan, as well as printed materials from the China Democracy Party. One of them picked up a book by Huang Xiang, flicked through it, and then put it down. There was also a copy of the “Appeal to Compatriots Throughout the Country,” which they had fished out of some drawer. “Was it mailed to you?” they asked, excited. “Where’s the envelope?”
