Liao Yiwu writes about what China doesn’t want you to hear

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author Liao Yiwu, who is regarded as the Studs Terkel of China for his pieces on the forgotton people of China's lower working class. Suppressed for years by the Chinese government, he escaped from China in July when authorities told him he would have break ties with his western publishers. I Scott Stewart /Sun-Times

LIAO YIWU

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Updated: November 11, 2011 2:23PM

The first English phrase Liao Yiwu learned was “good luck.” He smiles broadly when recounting this fact.

After all, luck was something the Chinese writer needed plenty of when he quietly sneaked out of his homeland in early July. One of China’s most persecuted authors, he was imprisoned for four years, denied a visa 16 times and threatened with more prison time if he didn’t heed warnings from the government to stop working with Western publishers.

“To me the ultimate goal for a writer is to have the freedom to write and have your work published,” Liao said, through a translator. “If I continued to stay in China, it would no longer be possible. That was the final breaking point.”

Liao, a poet, novelist, musician and documentarian, is best known for chronicling the oral histories of the people on the fringes of Chinese society. Considered the “Studs Terkel of China,” he is in the midst of a North American book tour for the release of God Is Red, the story told through interviews of how Christianity survived in Communist China. He will read from his work and perform on the Chinese flute Wednesday at the University of Chicago’s International House.

A short man with the calm, pensive demeanor of the Dalai Lama, Liao is best known for The Corpse Walker: Real-Life Stories, China from the Bottom Up, which was banned in China shortly after it was published in Taiwan in 2001. A collection based on interviews with China’s downtrodden, it tells the stories of people ranging from a public toilet attendant and professional mourner to a former Red Guard and the men, known as corpse walkers, whose job it is to return the bodies of the dead to their hometown for burial.

Liao says the recent crackdown in China is a reaction to unrest in the Arab world. Liao was well aware of what could happen after his friend Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and writer, was given an 11-year sentence for subversion. Another friend, the outspoken artist Ai Weiwei, was recently released after months in detention.

“The Chinese government is trying to present this picture of a booming economy, this wonderful prosperous China,” Liao said. “But I portray life underneath the surface. I try to give voice to the people who don’t have a voice. It’s a silent world the government does not want witnessed.”

Liao, who is from Chengdu in south central China, cut off communication with friends in Germany and the States as he headed south to cross over to Vietnam.

After several days of travel, Liao reached a small border town and could see Vietnam across a river. With a passport and valid visas for Germany, the United States and Vietnam, he decided to cross through the border post instead of being smuggled across by ferry.

Liao says he felt like he was floating as he waited for the guard to check his papers and stamp his passport. All went smoothly, and he walked out of his homeland.

“I just kept moving forward,” Liao, 52, recalled. “It was hard to believe I was actually crossing the bridge legally.”

From there, his German publisher arranged a flight to Berlin, where Liao will work for the next year on a literary fellowship.

Chicago writer Wenguang Huang, who translated both of the above-mentioned books into English, spent several days and nights in July wondering if Liao would make it out safely.

“We were so worried,” recalled Wenguang, who has worked with Liao via phone since 2002. “When I met him in person for the first time a few weeks ago, it was very surreal.”

Like many of his generation, Liao grew up suffering from hardships during the reign of Mao Zedong. Forced out of school during the Cultural Revolution, he has no formal education. He says his father, a Chinese literature teacher, taught him classic Chinese poetry, out of which grew a desire to become a poet.

“Those poems laid a solid foundation and have stayed with me all my life,” Liao said.

Liao’s reputation as an edgy poet grew and peaked after the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing, when he and other poets contributed to a video that condemned the bloodshed. The piece was called “Massacre” and not long afterward, Liao and others were jailed as “counterrevolutionaries.”

The four years of “prison terror and torture” (he twice tried to kill himself) came during a time when the “poet totally evaporated,” Liao said.

“The death row inmates wanted to tell me their stories before they were executed,” Liao said. “So my mind became a tape recorder, a memory keeper. And when I got out I was determined to tell their stories. That’s how I changed from poet to writer.”

(The English version of Liao’s prison memoir, For a Song and a Hundred Songs, will be published in the United States next summer.)

Being away from the people he writes about is the one great loss for Liao. He says he has plenty of interviews stockpiled for a planned second volume of The Corpse Walker, as well as another book featuring the stories of those involved in the 1989 pro-democracy movement.

Driven by a love of China and its people, Liao is certain one day he will return to a new China.

“Next year there is another change of leadership, and people are full of hope,” Liao said, with a defiant smile. “And so am I.”