Foreword
To hear a new voice is one of the great excitements that a book can offer-and
through Liao Yiwu we hear more than two dozen original voices that have a great
deal to say. Liao is at once an unflinching observer and recorder, a
shoe-leather reporter and an artful storyteller, an oral historian and deft
mimic, a folklorist and satirist. Above all, he is a medium for whole muzzled
swathes of Chinese society that the Party would like to pretend do not exist:
hustlers and drifters, outlaws and street performers, the officially renegade
and the physically handicapped, those who deal with human waste and with the
wasting of humans, artists and shamans, crooks, even cannibals-and every one of
them speaks more honestly than the official chronicles of Chinese life that are
put out by the state in the name of “the people.”
Liao was shaped as a writer by the harshest of experiences: he nearly starved to
death as a child and his father was branded an enemy of the people; he was
thrown in jail for writing poems that spoke truthfully about China’s Communist
Party and he was beaten in jail for refusing to shut up; and he discovered in
jail the enormous value of listening to others like him whom the authorities
wanted to keep forever unheard. So Liao writes with the courage of a man who
knows loss and doesn’t fear it. There is nothing to make him take notice like an
official injunction against noticing, nothing to make him listen like official
deafness, nothing that drives him to make us see than the blindness that
Communist officialdom seeks to impose. But it is not merely defiance, and it is
hardly political polemic, that drives the vitality of the stories in this
collection. What makes Liao’s encounters with his characters so powerful is the
fact that he clearly delights in their humanity, however twisted its expression,
and he shows his respect for his subjects in the most fundamental way: he lets
them speak for themselves.
There is no question that Liao Yiwu is one of the most original and remarkable
Chinese writers of our time. It is, however, truer to say that he is one of the
most original and remarkable writers of our time, and that he is from China.
Yes, his language is Chinese, his country and its people are his subject, and
his stories originate from intensely local encounters. But even to someone who
has never been to China, and who can know Liao’s work only through Wen Huang’s
translations, these stories have an immediacy and an intimacy that crosses all
boundaries and classifications. They belong to the great common inheritance of
world literature.
Liao Yiwu is an original, but it seems a very good bet that writers as diverse
as Mark Twain and Jack London, Nikolai Gogol and George Orwell, François
Rabelais and Primo Levi would have recognized him at once as a brother in spirit
and in letters. He is a ringmaster of the human circus, and his work serves as a
powerful reminder-as vital and necessary in open societies lulled by their
freedoms as it is in closed societies where telling truthful stories can be a
crime-that it is not only in the visible and noisy wielders of power but
equally in the marginalized, overlooked, and unheard that the history of our
kind is most tellingly inscribed.
Philip Gourevitch
November 2007
(Continues…)
Excerpted from The Corpse Walker
by Liao Yiwu
Copyright © 2002 by Liao Yiwu.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Pantheon
Copyright © 2002
Liao Yiwu
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-375-42542-4
