The Corpse Walker: Glimpses of Society

Liao Yiwu—poet, novelist, screenwriter, free-lance journalist—published an epic poem “Massacre” that condemned the Tiananmen Square killings. He portrayed the stark reality of the killings of innocent students and residences by reciting “Massacre” using Chinese ritualistic chanting and howling to invoke the spirits of the dead. The audiotape widely circulated via underground channels in China, and eventually caught the attention of the Chinese security police. He spent four years in prison for “speaking out”.

Since his release, Liao has remained on a permanent government blacklist and most of his works are still banned in China, where he lives. Finding a job as a blacklisted person is very hard and he must remain mobile to escape the ever-watchful eye of the government. To do so and because his resident registration, which allows him to get legal work, has been cancelled, he is a street performer. He has been detained numerous times for conducting “illegal interviews” and exposing the dark-side of the communist society, particularly in his documentary-style book Interviews with People from the Bottom Rung of Society. The 27 chapters in his book The Corpse Walker are a collection of voices of people, who, like himself, were flung to the bottom rung of society resulting from the tumultuous changes and political purges of the Maoist era and the radically changing Chinese society.

Originally he compiled over 60 interviews with people who were flung to the diceng, “bottom rung of society”, a word he coined and which is an anathema notion to the supporters of Mao’s communistic movement, which is supposed to create an egalitarian society free of prostitutes, beggars, triad gangsters, drug abusers, homosexuals, street musicians and magicians, dissidents, and more. The displaced people—the marginalized—are mostly those who have been stripped of their residential registration and thus rendered unemployable and subject to expulsion to the countryside. Laio gives voice to the marginalized in his book The Corpse Walker: Real-Life Stories, China from the Bottom Up (2008). The book is a loud condemnation of the deprivation of people’s rights to speak out as well as being an excellent portrayal of a group of unique individuals that heavily populate China. The manuscript had to be smuggled out of China otherwise it would never have reached a reading public.

The 27 chapters in this book are on the voiceless and virtually “unseen” people of China, people that the government doesn’t acknowledge and does not want others to acknowledge as well. Laio as a flute street performer and as a marginalized was able to get their stories:

The professional murderer	The neighborhood committee director
The human trafficker	The former red guard
The public restroom manager	The counterrevolutionary
The corpse walkers	The Tiananmen father
The leper	The falun gong practitioner
The peasant emperor	The illegal border crosser
The feng shui master	The grave robber
The abbot	The safecracker
The composer	The blind erhu player
The rightist	The street singer
The retired official	The sleepwalker
The Yi district chief’s wife	The migrant worker
The village teacher	The survivor
The mortician

Literary expressions:

Many people use the phrase “covering the sky with one palm” to describe the government power over religion as the Communist-spawned Religious Affairs Bureau takes charge of all Buddhist, Taoist, Muslim temples as well as Christian churches. The abbot being interviewed astutely said, “Throughout ancient history, no matter how incompetent the emperors were, or how corrupt and decadent the royal courts became, one never heard about officials blackmailing and harassing monks.” [p87]

Liao described the safecracker with the Chinese cliché, the safecracker “had a tiger’s back and a bear’s waist” as apparently he was a strong man and even though it was a cold winter the man was wearing only a shirt and summer pants. [p267]

Street shoeshine women shoeshine “yellow shoes”, the code name for prostitution. When men stop and show interest, a shoeshine woman will start polishing his shoes first, reach up to fondle his ankle, while haggling over the price. 50 yuan [US$6.40] is a typical full service price. Full-breasted young women find transactions easier, while women almost 30 and with kids and sagging boobs might get lucky to get 20 yuan. “Smart” girls from the countryside get to the city, drop their accents, powder their faces and swing their butts, and even pay money to buy fake college degrees so they can hook the more educated guys by saying that after they earn more money, they can change to a new career to match their college degree. [p313-4]

Outcomes of the Great Leap Forward (1958-1961):

The Great Leap Forward resulted in ordering people in the Dongyang Commune to hasten farm production and discard traditional farming practices. Peasants of fertile fields famous for rice, wheat, corn, beans and sweet potatoes were instructed in the new farming method of “reasonable density” invented by Soviet scientists. That is, make deep furrows and plant seedlings densely. The Party claimed a 10-fold increase of crop production, so crops were duly planted with packed seedlings … which of course failed. The peasants knew better but dared not disobey or voice their more "educated opinion" in the matter. [p123]

Families were starving and couldn’t subsist on the poor communal food kitchens which had thin soups and no fat and no nutrition. Cannibalism became a terrible scandal, and of particular note in the Fifth Production Division which comprised 82 families and a population of 491. Between December 1959 and November 1960, parents there had killed and eaten 48 female children under age seven, which represented 90% of the female children in that age group. About 80% of the families were involved in cannibalism. [p127]

Doctors and nurses were allocated more food than ordinary peasants because there was a social need for them to perform in society. Yet, they too didn’t get meat and the sleepwalker’s wife who worked at the hospital was able to supplement her and her sick husband’s diet by picking up placenta—their only source of protein—from a hospital. Locals didn’t want to touch the stuff for superstitious reasons. [p305-6]

In the Dongyang Commune, a rural area of Sichuan, peasants ate a type of white clay called Guanyin Mud. The mud—mildly sweet and metallic—was considered precious because it helped soothe the sense of extreme hunger. Eating too much, a frequent problem, caused stomach cramps and extremely constipated the intestines. Raw veggies and castor oil would have relieved this but these were not to be found. [p130]

Teachers, as members of the educated class, were condemned as Rightists and if they didn’t lose their lives were sent to the countryside. One teacher of Chinese and math was soon only permitted, as all other teachers were permitted, to teach the chairman’s Little Red Book. Its quotes were treated like words from God. Three times a day people read from the book and all daily behavior was to be a reflection of its teachings. Math could not be taught from the "text" and was struck from the curriculum. Ironically, a well known general, who had written the essay “The Admiring Qualities of a Pine Tree”, also part of the carefully culled curriculum, lost favor with Mao, and teachers who had been ordered to teach his book were labeled as counterrevolutionary and were dealt with "appropriately". [p163]

The street singer came from a family of blind street musicians, a pre-Cultural Revolution trade open to the blind. His illiterate father took his stories from Chinese classical literature, such as “The Warrior Conquered the Tiger”, filling his stories with suspense, colorful description to the beat of his now extinct traditional instrument, the daoqin—a meter-long bamboo cylinder covered on one end with pigskin and much like a drum. With the start of the Cultural Revolution, the government banned him from performing his stories because they were considered feudalistic and anti-revolutionary, so he and his blind wife were assigned to work in a remote sausage factory for 27 yuan [$3.50] a month, barely enough to feed the family of five. After 1966, all street performances were declared illegal and local opera troupes were only allowed to stage the “Eight Revolutionary Model Operas” mandated by Mao’s wife. Apart from that, people spent their evenings attending communist meetings, witnessing public executions of counterrevolutionaries, murderers and rapists, and being bored to tears. [p285]

Social outcomes following the Great Leap Forward:

The neighborhood committee director was interviewed  in his tiny home and on the wall were big pictures of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong—the world’s well-known communist leaders. When asked if the committee director worshiped the leaders, he replied, “Well, I can’t do that. If we want to set up an altar for them, there are specific rules. You cannot treat the pictures of these great men the same way you do pictures of movie stars. You cannot tilt them, or put them in separate places. There are five equally great men, and they have to line up on the same wall. Otherwise it would be a political mistake.” [p191]

Falun Gong practitioners in 1999 stages a silent protest in Beijing against unfair treatment. The communist party leadership saw the group suddenly as a threat to communistic rule, declared it an evil cult, and launched a massive campaign to eliminate Falun Gong in China. [The on-going campaign against Falun Gong practitioners is unclear as the “cult” seems harmless enough: Falun Gong combines Buddhist and Taoist meditation and exercises and was founded by Li Hongzhi, referred to as Teacher Li by practitioners. Teacher Li’s book is said to cultivate the mind and teach a person to be a good person, and teaches the principles of truth, benevolence and tolerance.] [p230]

In recent years, millions of peasants have migrated from the poverty-stricken rural areas to big cities in search of better job opportunities. Many end up working on construction sites or at clothing and toy factories. According to a Chinese government statistic, about 114 million rural laborers—known as min gong, “peasant workers”—swarmed into China’s major cities in 2003. [p308]

The American version of The Corpse Walker:

The United States has a similar book of lesser-known voices, those on the lives of ordinary Americans in the States. The book by Studs Terkel Working: People Talk about What They Do All Day and How They Feel about What They Do (1997) is a book filled with colloquial American English. It is also a book used as a textbook in China with the Chinese translated version being Americans Talk about Lives in America.