by Liao Yiwu
Years ago, I had lost all interest in collecting envelopes, so I felt that I had let down the People’s Government. To express my sincere apologies, I praised them, talking about how times had changed and how our comrades from the police force had changed their traditional style of acting like devils and monsters into something much more approachable, meticulous, and patient.
“I can see this by the way that you’re searching my home,” I went on. And then I took the initiative and stuffed a big pile of illegal materials right into the tiger’s mouth, hoping that a few bits would fall out again from between the tiger’s teeth. When they offered to help me put things back in place again, I thanked them several times, but actually I was afraid they would turn up more things. I praised them shamelessly: “The police are more fit to get married than vermin like me, who go around harming people. Assuming the comrades are just as sensitive and solicitous in their personal lives, surely any woman in the world would fall for them.”
The police must have been moved by my praise, because before they left they reminded me to lock the door securely to keep burglars from getting in. Together we descended seven floors in force and piled into three police cars. Every pair of eyes in the neighborhood saw us. Fortunately, there were many criminal cases going on that year, so people didn’t think much of it. When we got to the police station, the police divided into two groups, one interrogating my human brain and the other interrogating my electronic brain, my computer. Apparently there were more problems with the electronic brain than with the human brain, so a group of specialists went about examining it to determine my guilt. At the time, I was suspected of having signed on to a group that had published China’s Wrongful Cases and a political series that was coming out online in installments. But as to the question of how many websites were carrying my articles and signature, a computer-illiterate person like me just had no idea.
Just now you said times have changed. Has the traditional way of searching homes changed, too?
Forget the innumerable cases of home searches and confiscations mentioned in premodern Chinese writings or the early twentieth century. Even just over the course of the several decades of our “new society,” including hundreds of political movements large and small, I’m afraid that up to 80 percent of all Chinese homes have been searched at one time or another. Ba Jin once openly proposed building a Cultural Revolution Museum, but I think that would be too narrow. I believe one day a Political Movement Museum will be built in this country, with the Cultural Revolution Museum as just one of its sub-museums. Some people have suggested erecting a Monument to the Ideological Criminals to take the place of the Monument to the People’s Heroes now on Tiananmen Square.
On that future monument they should engrave the names of tens of millions of ideological criminals, with every name enclosed in a teardrop-shaped crystal. Seen from a distance, it won’t look like a monument but like a mountain gleaming with the cold light of eternal tears, one piled on top of another. I hope Liao Yiwu’s name will be among them.
In the future Political Movement Museum, I firmly believe that home searches, custody, and struggle sessions should be categorized as separate subjects. At least there should be specialized fields of study, like home search studies. More than 1,000 professors and staff will be needed for the vast project of collecting, sorting, classifying, identifying, and researching all this material.
If we go down this road, then China in the future will have to conjure an array of museums and monuments out of thin air—a Land Reform Memorial, a Monument to the Three Oppositions and the Five Oppositions, a Monument to the Hu Feng Case, and monuments to the Anti-Rightist Movement, the Four Cleanups Movement, the Great Leap Forward, and the Great Famine. We couldn’t do without monuments to the Cultural Revolution, to April Fifth, to Bourgeois Liberalization, and to June Fourth. You write about unjust and mishandled cases involving ordinary people. Shouldn’t there also be a monument to the marginalized people in Chinese society and to the people who were unjustly wronged? Naturally, we can’t leave out monuments and museums for Falun Gong, the China Democracy Party, Tibetan independence, and Xinjiang independence. In short, one monument for each debt the government owes. Our Party already has lots of rotten accounts. How many monuments will have to be built? Will our children and grandchildren find a place to live in a country crowded with so many monuments?
It’s human nature to forget our wounds as soon as they heal. Two days after they searched my house, I can stand before you, smiling and grinning. People don’t like to talk about troubles. Once people hear the same old sad story several times, they curse you in their hearts as if you were Xianglin’s wife in the famous Lu Xun story, who was always telling the tale about her son A Mao being eaten by wolves. Three generations of my family have had their homes searched and their possessions confiscated.
My grandfather was an old landlord. Nothing about him left a stronger impression on me than his stinginess. Rats and king rat snakes had been nibbling forever at the aged, cured meat he hung in the rafters of his house, but he never took it down to feed anybody. Walnuts and peanuts sat in his pantry for seven or eight years getting eaten by worms and moths, but even when nothing was left but empty shells, he still couldn’t stand to bring them out to eat. He wore the same clothing winter and summer and rarely changed to wash it. When I was little, I once spent two days in the old broken-down courtyard of my grandfather’s house. I was itching and wanted to change my clothes and wash them, but there wasn’t any soap. Finally, my older cousin knocked some pieces off a Chinese “soap pod” locust tree.
My grandfather never rode in a car. Even when he was nearly eighty years old, he still walked miles and miles on mountain roads to my father’s middle school in the county seat. On sunny days he would open up his pants as he walked so he could pick out the lice. If he wasn’t careful, his pants would fall down to his ankles. I never understood how there could be such a hardworking and plain-living landlord. My father said that when land reform began in 1950, my grandfather was really out of luck, because he had just worked himself nearly to death to buy 40 mou, or 6.6 acres, of land. Forty mou put him just over the line to qualify as a “landlord,” so everyone went after him. My third granduncle from the same branch of the family had lost all his family property smoking opium, so he was honored as a poor peasant. He even led the masses to his elder brother’s home to search it and confiscate what he owned.
Two plow oxen, five fat pigs, and several dozen ducks and chickens were confiscated and divided among the poor. Everything was taken—all the cabinets full of grain were opened, all the white rice and white flour he was normally too frugal to eat on a daily basis. Then people filled their sacks with old millet, wheat seeds, corn, and garden peas, and carried them away. The cellar, filled with over 2,000 pounds of sweet potatoes, was emptied. That day the poor people of Lijiaping lived like they were having a festival. They swarmed all over my grandfather’s home, taking whatever they wanted. At first the head of the working group kept accounts of what had been confiscated. Later there were just too many people and there was just too much chaos, so he stopped keeping track.
That evening, something like a hundred people had come with only one or two lanterns between them. In the dim light, all my grandparents’ woks, cups, and ladles vanished. Naturally, “policy work” had to be carried out. Everyone dug all around, more than three feet deep into the soil. When they dug up a box full of gold and silver jewelry and two bolts of indanthrene blue cloth, the working group leader announced to the crowd that it was all being confiscated. My grandmother was paraded around the village and criticized and “struggled against” for hiding it all. Some young men the same age as her nephews even tied her up with a rope.
In the late 1980s, I went back to the family home with my father and took pictures in front of the ancestral graves. Grandfather had just died. Grandmother had died in the famine thirty years earlier. People say that during the famine people tottering from hunger still didn’t forge
t the class struggle. They broke into the old landlord’s home to search for food. They took corncobs kept as fuel next to the kitchen stove, broke them down to bits, and ate them. They even emptied my grandfather’s pickling jugs. Finding no vegetables left, they scooped out the pickling juice one spoonful at a time and passed it around.
Before she died, my grandmother rolled out of bed and crawled to the main hall, sat on the threshold, and cried for a long time. The fields had been divided up. Five households had moved into the courtyard left to my grandparents by their ancestors. The newcomers took up a dozen of the rooms on all four sides of the courtyard, leaving only the side room on the southeast corner to my grandfather and grandmother. Father said that when land reform began, he was teaching over in the county seat. Someone from home came with a letter bearing the bad news. He didn’t dare go home to see what was happening, fearing someone would report him for not drawing a clear line between himself and his exploiter-class family. It was only once the storm blew over that he quietly returned to Lijiaping to give my grandfather some money to help him get through. Not a single chair was left intact in the entire house.
I was seven or eight when the Cultural Revolution broke out, old enough to remember it. During that “spiritual” revolution dead set against property, books—old and new, Chinese and foreign—were the main target of searches and confiscations. My father’s home was searched because he was too good a teacher. He was particularly good at teaching that famous article “The Style of the Pine Tree” by Tao Zhu, who was considered the number three supporter of the political line espoused by Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. For that, he was labeled a reactionary academic and a member of a sinister gang. Frequently beaten, he had to write self-criticisms every day. At the time, he had a salary of just over 50 yuan a month. With four children to raise, there wasn’t any chance of saving any money.
When the Red Guards came to search our house, they were indeed more honest than those poor people and police who came to my grandparents’ place after Liberation in 1949. The Red Guards turned our house upside down, but all they carried away was basket after basket of my father’s books, including his teaching materials. At the school exercise grounds, they burned all the feudal, capitalist, and revisionist works they had collected, including my father’s lesson plans, and the fire burned for nearly an hour. While the embers were still warm, they held a criticism and struggle session, pulling my father up to the platform together with the school principal, the department heads, and other forces of evil. Black placards were placed over their necks, and they were made to bend over 90 degrees. I was just a skinny kid standing stiffly at the door of our house, sucking on my fingers and looking on while several Red Guards painted their big-character denunciation on the wall.
But let’s talk about your own experience with home searches.
Even before 1989, the homes of many Sichuan underground poets were searched. At the time, there were many channels for publishing underground poetry, and some were very influential. As a result, the Sichuan public security bureau kept a special dossier on underground poets, Zhou Lunyou, Shi Guanghua, Wan Xia, and Song Wei among them.
In 1987, I was working at the Fuling District Art Museum, where I tried a little sleight of hand, turning the museum publication Sichuan Literary Style into the Sichuan Contemporary Poets’ Group. I spent two months running back and forth to the printing press every day, checking the lead type myself. On the day the publication was supposed to come out, several dozen police raided the press. I was on the second floor, happily inspecting proofs and supervising the binding, when I heard the police sirens down below. I grabbed a copy that hadn’t yet been bound, opened a window, and jumped out. Fortunately, the road below was just a country-style dirt alley, so I was completely covered in mud but I wasn’t hurt, and I ran for my life. Only after I reached the docks did I turn around to see if anyone was chasing me.
I took a boat and then a bus, bumping around until I finally reached Zhou Zhongling’s home in Chongqing. He was the boss of a local printing shop, so it was a simple matter for him to duplicate and bind several dozen copies from that one original I had taken with me. We sent it off to poetry hubs all over China with a handwritten note that the matter was urgent.
All the poetry fans who got a copy treasured it, solemnly footing the bill to make more copies, so that even more third-generation copies were distributed. In fact, the number of copies in circulation increased geometrically, with ever more copies being made and distributed, even as later generations of the collection became harder and harder to read.
I spent a few months wandering around, getting free meals and free drinks like some kind of hero out of a legend. By the time I returned to my work unit, the political winds had already shifted. I learned that on the day of the raid, the head of the printing press had been fired and 2,000 copies of the book had been sent to the provincial cultural bureau to be locked up forever. My home got a symbolic search as well. According to my ex-wife, the police officer who led the search loved reading and writing and was secretly a fan of my work, so he kept the search pretty cursory.
Despite that brave act of jumping out of the building, it was only a scare and nothing really happened. That doesn’t really count as a home search.
But the episode I just mentioned is directly related to something that happened later. Michael Day, the Canadian who became my accomplice, managed to get hold of a third-generation copy of that book of poems at the home of Liu Xiaobo. That prompted him to write me a letter and travel a long way to see me. Over the two following years, he was a frequent guest at my home. On the morning of June 4, 1989, I used his tape recorder to add in background music and, through tears, I committed my crime of reading my poem “The Slaughter.”
Originally there were two copies of “The Slaughter,” one for me and one for Michael, and both copies passed through many different hands. The next year a few colleagues and I filmed Requiem, a kind of companion piece of which I was the main performer and author. The very day we finalized it and distributed the master copies, the Ministry of State Security raided us and the entire Requiem group was taken into custody.
It was then that I witnessed the true power of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The dreams I had cherished for over a decade of making poems and songs ended in an instant. A little after ten in the morning, with “The Slaughter,” Requiem, and other criminal evidence on my person, I boarded a bus from Shapingba to Niujiaotuo. I was just about to cross the street to catch another bus, en route to the train station, when I heard someone call my name. As soon as I turned to look, a group of military-issue raincoats pounced on me from all sides.
They took my backpack, cuffed my hands behind my back, and stuffed me into the back seat of a police car. The plainclothesman beside me gritted his teeth and wiped his bloody nose. I had instinctively thrown a punch at him. “You dare resist!” he roared at me, and tightened the handcuffs behind my back until the steel barbs bit into my flesh. “No. 1 in custody,” said the fat policeman, sitting shotgun, into his walkie-talkie. “We are escorting him to Songshan.”
As I later found out, several dozen police, methodical as sappers, had sifted through the workplace and the room of our photographer Zeng Lei’s dormitory. Before they got into the car, Zeng Lei and Wang Xia were made to hold tapes and books in their handcuffed hands so they could be photographed with the criminal evidence. The two men’s eyes were dull with sleepiness, and bits of toothpaste were still sticking to the corners of their mouths. The evidence filled a whole van, including all of Zeng Lei’s photographs, tapes, books, and letters, as well as makeup, costumes, and props.
More than twenty homes were searched across the province, including the homes of Liu Taiheng, Wan Xia, Gou Mingjun, Li Yawei, and Shi Guanghua. At Zhou Zhongling’s place, they emptied a giant bookcase and tramped back and forth over a pile of his books several feet deep. At Ba Tie’s they confiscated all the avant-garde poetry, materials, notes, books, publications, and letters
exchanged with literary figures that he had spent years collecting. Two years later, released after detention, he was so discouraged that he decided to leave the world of literature that he had loved for half his life.
The police also patronized my home and my in-laws’ home. Within the space of three days, my living quarters were searched three times. Cassette tapes, photo albums, my then wife A Xia’s diary, pen-and-ink drawings, books, a tape recorder, and manuscripts were all taken away. My wardrobe, bookcase, sofa, bed, and tables were all turned upside down and soon had big holes in them, thanks to iron clubs.
A Xia, then three months pregnant, was taken away and locked up in the public security detention center for over forty days. She was interrogated every day to make her inform on her husband. By the time she was released on bail, she had a bad case of pulmonary disease. She couldn’t stay home anymore, because, according to our neighbor, thieves had entered and ransacked our home several times, taking anything the police had left behind: jewelry, clothing, furnishings, electronics. Our dressing room mirror and bed were smashed. There was also some shit left behind in the living room—probably the thieves’ revenge, because the pickings in our home were so slim.
I have no clue how much I lost between everything that happened. Everything I had with me—all my manuscripts from 1980 onward, many audio and video recordings, a mini–tape recorder, photo albums, collections of underground poetry, along with more than 1,400 yuan—was confiscated. I was taken to the Songshan Detention and Interrogation Center in the Geleshan Mountains, an old-fashioned prison near Baigongguan. As soon as I entered, five ferocious reform-through-labor prisoners pounced on me and stripped me naked. On that overcast, rainy day in March, I stood for a long time in the corridor, naked with my hands over my crotch, while the prisoners thoroughly and skillfully squeezed and shook and took away everything in my pockets and the seams of my clothes. Then they took away my belt and used pliers to remove any metal buttons from my clothes and zippers from my pants.
