God Is Red - Liao Yiwu [11]
Liao Yiwu: I’ve been looking forward to talking with you for quite some time.
Zhang Yinxian: I’m here in the church every day, praying, cooking, exercising, gardening, loosening up the dirt for ants and worms. If I’m not around, it means I’m out buying vegetables at the market.
Liao: When were you born?
Zhang: I was born on August 3, 1908 in Qujingcheng, Yunnan province. I don’t even remember what my parents looked like. They died when I was only three. I was an orphan. I had a brother. He was taken away by a local warlord. I think he died on a battlefield. I was sent by an uncle to Kunming to serve the Lord.
Liao: Your uncle?
Zhang: He was a priest. In the Qing dynasty, under Emperor Tongzhi [1856–75], Catholic missionaries came to Yunnan from Vietnam. When I was growing up, there were many foreign missionaries, from France in particular. I was taught to read and write. I learned the Bible, attended Mass, and said prayers. Sometimes, I would do odd jobs. Around that time, people suffered terribly. The small monastery sheltered me from the chaos outside.
When I turned thirteen, I followed my aunt to Dali. Back then, the city’s old section had several churches. Then more Catholic missionaries arrived. They represented many different religious orders—Jesuits, Paulists, Franciscans, and so on. Our diocese expanded fast, into the Lijiang, Baoshan, Diqing, Lincang, Dehong, and Xishuangbanna regions. At its peak, we had more than eighty thousand parishioners from all ethnic groups—Han, Bai, Tibetan, Yi, Dai, Jingpo. Did I leave anybody out? Anyway, to accommodate the growth, the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart bought a large swath of land in the 1920s. They put a French bishop in charge. His Chinese name was Ye Meizhang. Under his leadership, the organization built a monastery, an orphanage, and this church here.
At that time, we had about four hundred people living inside the church, and on Sundays, local residents flooded in for Mass from all over. The church couldn’t hold that many people. Some ended up standing or kneeling outside in the yard. Children came with their parents. When they became bored, they would climb up the trees.
Since I joined the church at an early age, I knew all the hymns, and when the priest quoted a Bible passage, I could immediately tell you chapter and verse, and I knew all the stories associated with that reference. People always complimented me, saying how smart I was, but my aunt would give me a stern look and say, “Hey, don’t be such a show-off.”
Liao: I grew up in the 1960s. My generation was told that religion was the tool employed by the imperialists to enslave people and that the nuns conducted medical experiments on children in foreign orphanages.
Zhang: Lies, lies. At public denunciation meetings during the Cultural Revolution, we were accused of murdering orphans. They said the priests were vampires.
In times of famine or war, poor people would abandon their children on the roadside. Some would pick a nice moonlit night, cover the baby with layers of clothes, and leave it at the church entrance. When the nuns found the baby, they would take the child in, no matter whether the baby was healthy or ill. Some parents were quite shrewd. They would leave their child with us and come back after the hard time was over. But the majority of the children here were never reclaimed. Back then, people were poor, and it was common for one family to have many children. Parents treated their babies like little animals. If they were strong and survived, they would keep them. If the babies were sick, parents would abandon them to strangers or just leave them to die.
I have seen many