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My Enemies, My Teachers by Liao Yiwu

From the Paris Review


Writer Liao Yiwu traveled to Beijing in December 2007 to receive the Freedom to Write Award given by the Independent Chinese PEN Center (ICPC) for his nonfiction works, which document the lives of some of the forgotten or ignored members of Chinese society. On the day before the award ceremony, members of the Public Security Bureau in Beijing took Liao away from his friend's house and interrogated him for over four hours before handing him over to the police, who escorted him back to his home in Sichuan province. After the event organizer and another award recipient were placed under house arrest, the ICPC was forced to cancel the ceremony. What follows is the acceptance speech Liao had planned to deliver there.


My birthday falls on June 16, which on the Chinese lunar calendar is an auspicious date. It was the date when Guan Yin, the bodhisattva who possessed the power to relieve the masses of their sufferings, became enlightened. Things didn’t quite turn out to be auspicious for me. I entered the world in the middle of a terrible famine, which was to claim the lives of millions nationwide between 1959 and 1962. My father would tell me how, at the age of one, my little body became swollen from lack of nutrition. I didn’t even have enough strength to cry. An herbal doctor in Niushikou, near the city of Chengdu, recommended that my parents hold me over a wok filled with boiling herbal water every morning and every evening. The steam eventually drained yellow liquid, drop by drop, from my body. Thanks to the doctor, I survived.
Hunger was my first teacher in life, following me during my entire childhood. Hunger stunted my growth, hampering my cognitive development. I was a slow kid. At the age of five, I still had problems walking. Many years later, the influence of hunger could still be felt all over in Testimonial, my memoir of life in prison. In this pigsty of a country, one has to have an iron stomach to be a prison eyewitness, who savors the body odor from his fellow inmates and chews on the rotten fermented memories through teeth, blood, and broken bones.
The Cultural Revolution started when I was attending elementary school. My father, a high-school teacher, was branded a counterrevolutionary scholar. Following his criminal conviction, my family fell apart. My mother took custody of me and my sister. We left our hometown, Yanting, and moved from place to place, undergoing countless random searches and interrogations for what the authorities called “migrating to the city without a residential permit.” When I was nine, my mother was accused of being an escaped landowner and living in the city without a permit. Members of the public security bureau took her away one night for detention and interrogation. Since then, this special Chinese terminology, “Hei-ren-hei-hu” or “Person and a family without a residential permit” has been engraved forever on my mind, becoming my second teacher in life. Perhaps in order to cleanse my inward shame at this status, I have allowed myself to sink deeper into this muddy hole of disgrace and have become acquainted with other “persons without permits.” Nowadays, scholars refer to us as “the silent majority.”
I wrote a book called Interviews with People from the Bottom Rung of Society, which scraped the raw nerves of Chinese authorities and some in the press. In the book’s introduction I wrote, “This book is private and scarred. At the same time, it is self-mockery and self-abuse. In a certain sense, Interviews is a book of shame and disgrace. Thanks to shame and disgrace, I’m able to live a healthy busy life like a cockroach. Shame is an appropriate key to understanding this book . . . it will make us feel ashamed and let the future generation feel ashamed for us.”
My third teacher is homelessness. I used to drift intermittently between the cities of Chengdu and Yanting. I would snatch free rides by chasing and climbing running trains, eating at others’ expense, working as a child laborer, fabricating travel documents, trekking for days on circuitous mountain paths, and lodging in the huts of my poor relatives in the rural areas. Fortunately, I never begged or stole, but I never had the opportunity to receive a solid education. Upon recommendation from the local writers’ association, the authorities waived my miserable test scores and admitted me to a writers’ class at Wuhan University. However, bad habits and the unruly nomadic lifestyle to which I had grown accustomed in my earlier years didn’t serve me well, and I ended up getting expelled.
In my youthful days, in the 1980s, I wandered around the country, from north to south. I followed the steps of modern literary figures in the West, composing poems, performing poetry readings, fighting in gangs, running underground literary magazines, and engaging in promiscuous sexual relations with women. My experiences left dense and chaotic marks on my future works and life.
In 1989, when the killing took place in Tiananmen Square, I composed the epic poem “Massacre.” I screamed in protest against my permanent homeless status, and was arrested and tortured by the police.
When I hunched over beside a toilet bowl in my prison cell, trying to catch fleas in my undershirt; when I was handcuffed, with hands behind my back for twenty-three days; when I twice attempted suicide, only to be derided by fellow inmates; when I was locked up with generations of counterrevolutionaries and saw how they were buried alive in the dark cells of prison; when I was convicted for the crime of composing poems without the opportunity to defend myself, my deep love for this land did, in the words of the patriotic poet Ai Qing, “make my soul cry.” I guess I loved this land to the point of dizziness.
Thanks to prison, I have completed the initial two of five volumes of Continue to Live, my autobiographical novel. Thanks to prison, I have learned to play the flute, employing its music to call on the spirits of the ancient masters and console myself with philosophy. Thanks to prison, I had the opportunity to live in close quarters with murderers, counterrevolutionaries, human traffickers, peasant emperors, robbers, and swindlers.
Prison is my final teacher. Despite the fact that I was let out many years ago, I’m still stuck in an invisible prison. Escaping from prison is a constant theme in my dreams. When I wake up, my legs spasm terribly. In my dream I scream, “I don’t want to be Chinese.” I have no alternative but to sleep on this bed called China. I’m good at offering advice and helping others design ways to defect. As for myself, since I harbor strange ideas, engage in wild behavior, and move in and out of police detentions, I have been denied passport applications nine times. If this country loves me so much, does she have to worry that wild dogs like me would never return if I were to be let off my leash? The police officer that arrested me years ago has now become chief of the customs and immigration office in my Sichuan province. Maybe his refusal to grant me a passport shows that he still has feelings for me. My only option is to write and continue to write. Life without writing is a life of emptiness, boredom, floating, amnesia, and chronic suicide; at the same time, writing requires me to endure endless disasters and sufferings.
Another several years have gone by. I have churned out volume after volume of stories of injustice in China. I keep telling myself: Your efforts are in vain. Don’t do it anymore. Why don’t you want to live a healthy, normal life? Don’t you want a home of your own? Even a wild dog has its own cave. But writing is my destiny. Some invisible force from above pushes me forward. I cannot quit it.
At this moment, when I’m about to receive this special honor, I can feel the warmth, like sunshine on a cold winter day, come over my shoulder. The warmth comes from my enemies and friends who have accompanied me throughout my life. I’m grateful to hunger, my first teacher. Today, I no longer face the threat of starvation. But my sense of starving for freedom is stronger than my physical craving for food.
I want to thank my second teacher, “a person without a residential permit,” because I have been such a person for more than twenty years. My temporary residential card has been checked and my apartment has been searched countless times. I have turned the sense of helplessness and humiliation into fodder for my writing. I have learned to identify with those living in the bottom of society.
My third teacher is homelessness. Thanks to you, I have not been able to live under a permanent roof for many years. I wear the same clothes for months; my socks and shoes stink. I still hang out with younger street people and the situation is hopeless. But this is my life, much better than the lives of those landlords whom I trekked hundreds of miles of mountainous paths to visit and interview. Those landlords had never left their villages, but they still couldn’t escape the fate of being tortured and then slaughtered like pigs.
I want to thank my fourth teacher, prison. After spending half of my life reforming myself, I have met the authority’s requirements. I have become what the Party calls “a new person with high morals, well-developed mental capability, and healthy physique.” To repay this kindness to our government, I have interviewed more than three hundred victims of persecution under this system. I have written millions of words in the past decade in order to record their stories. Because of my works, I have been given the 2007 Freedom to Write Award.
I can’t help crying because I feel very satisfied.

On writing by Orhan Pamuk - Part I

Excerpted selection from a Paris Review interview of Pamuk on writing:


Why do you write?
I have always thought that the place where you sleep or the place you share with your partner should be separate from theplace where you write. The domestic rituals and details somehow kill the imagination. They kill the demon in me. The domestic, tame daily routine makes the longing for the other world, which the imagination needs to operate, fade away. So for years I always had an office or a little place outside the house to work in. I always had different flats.


Orhan, your namesake and the narrator of Snow, describes himself as a clerk who sits down at the same time every day. Do you have the same discipline for writing?
I was underlining the clerical nature of the novelist as opposed to that of the poet, who has an immensely prestigious tradition in Turkey. To be a poet is a popular and respected thing. Most of the Ottoman sultans and statesmen were poets. But not in the way we understand poets now. For hundreds of years it was a way of establishing yourself as an intellectual. Most of these people used to collect their poems in manuscripts called divans. In fact, Ottoman court poetry is called divan poetry. Half of the Ottoman statesmen produced divans. It was a sophisticated and educated way of writing things, with many rules and rituals. Very conventional and very repetitive. After Western ideas came to Turkey, this legacy was combined with the romantic and modern idea of the poet as a person who burns for truth. It added extra weight to the prestige of the poet. On the other hand, a novelist is essentially a person who covers distance through his patience, slowly, like an ant. A novelist impresses us not by his demonic and romantic vision, but by his patience.


Have you ever written poetry?
I am often asked that. I did when I was eighteen and I published some poems in Turkey., but then I quit. My explanation is that I realized that a poet is someone through whom God is speaking. You have to be possessed by poetry. I tried my hand at poetry, but I realized after some time that God was not speaking to me. I was sorry about this adn then I tried to imagine - if God were speaking through me, what would he be saying? I begain to write very meticulously, slowly, trying to figure this out. That is prose writing, fiction writing. So I worked like a clerk. Some other writers consider this expression to be a bit of an insult. But I accept it; I work like a clerk.

The Calf-Path - A poem

One day through the primeval wood
A calf walked home as good calves should;
But made a trail all bent askew,
A crooked trail as all calves do.

Since then three hundred years have fled,
And I infer the calf is dead..
But still he left behind his trail,
And thereby hangs my moral tale..

The trail was taken up next day
By a lone dog that passed that way;
And then a wise bell–wether sheep
Pursued the trail o'er vale and steep,
And drew the flock behind him, too,
As good bell–wethers always do.

And from that day, o'er hill and glade,
Through those old woods a path was made.

And many men wound in and out,
And dodged and turned and bent about,
And uttered words of righteous wrath
Because 'twas such a crooked path;
But still they followed – do not laugh -
The first migrations of that calf,
And though this winding wood-way stalked
Because he wobbled when he walked.

This forest path became a lane
That bent and turned and turned again;
This crooked lane became a road,
Where many a poor horse with his load
Toiled on beneath the burning sun,
And thus a century and a half
They trod the footsteps of that calf.

The years passed on in swiftness fleet,
The road became a village street;
And this, before men were aware,
A city's crowded thoroughfare.

And soon the central street was this
Of a renowned metropolis;
And men two centuries and a half
Trod in the footsteps of that calf.

Each day a hundred thousand rout
Followed this zigzag calf about
And o'er his crooked journey went
The traffic of a continent.

A hundred thousand men were led
By one calf near three centuries dead.
They followed still his crooked way.
And lost one hundred years a day,
For thus such reverence is lent
To well-established precedent.

A moral lesson this might teach
Were I ordained and called to preach;
For men are prone to go it blind
Along the calf-paths of the mind,
And work away from sun to sun
To do what other men have done.

They follow in the beaten track,
And out and in,
and forth and back,
And still their devious course pursue,
To keep the path that others do.
They keep the path a sacred groove,
Along which all their lives they move;
But how the wise old wood-gods laugh,
Who saw the first primeval calf.

Ah, many things this tale might teach —
But I am not ordained to preach

(Cant recall the author yet)

'Writing undoes me' by Pico Iyer - Part I

"To give oneself over to the objective business of writing," says Pico Iyer, "is to see how subjective the whole business of the self and writing is."

To write is to step away from the clamor of the world, to take a deep breath and then, slowly and often with a shaking heart, to try to make sense of the bombardment of feelings, impressions, and experiences that every day and lifetime brings. The very act of putting them down - getting them out of the beehive of the head and onto the objective reality of paper - is a form of clarification. And as the words begin to take shape and make pairings across the page, gradually you can see what you thought, or discern a pattern in the random responses, so that finally, if all goes well, you're convinced you've got something out of your system and into a domain where it creates a kind of order. Random experience becomes teaching, cautionary tale, or even blessing.

To write is to make a clearing in the wilderness in which, almost literally, you can see the wood from the trees. In the thick of anything, you hardly know who you are or where you'r going (which is the redeeming power of experience); at your desk, recollecting emotion in tranquility, helped by memory's editing devices and imagination's hunger for possibility, you take something that might only have been heartache and turn it into something more provocative, enriching and even instructive.

That's the theory. And it works. I know what I think of many things because I have wrestled them into clarity through long, long hours at my desk. I've told myself that I've made a shape, an argument, out of a barrage of sensations, and now I can tell you where I stand on Thailand, on the late romances of Shakespearre, or Susan, and her infuriating habit of talking about herself.

But there is a fatal catch in the process that any Buddhist might mournfully savor. The very process of sitting at the desk, day after day after day, alone, somewhat removed from the world, one's eyes literally or metaphorically shut, makes one able to see through (in every sense) the whole process of thinking and concluding, the very construction denoted by "I". The very fact of trying to explore the mind and its responses, intensely and inwardly, without stepping back, moves one after a while to see that the mind, and the self that talks to the mind, feels no more real than that cloud formation over the mountains, where the sun is beginning to set. To give oneself over to the objective business of writing," says Pico Iyer, "is to see how subjective the whole business of the self and writing is.