God Is Red - Liao Yiwu [3]
In God Is Red, Liao’s essays also chronicle his own transformation. He started this project as an outsider—an urban, non-Christian, Han Chinese writer—thrust into a crowd of rural ethnic Miao, Yi, and Bai Christians, whose language, cultural traditions, and faiths were foreign to him. At times, Liao felt alienated and confused. At the end of the journey, the villagers’ hospitality, honesty, and sincerity, their single-minded pursuit of their faith, as well as their optimism for the future, melted away any sense of alienation and helped him gain a better understanding of China. He was deeply touched by what he heard and witnessed. In his story “The Fellowship,” he observes:
Village women, many of whom were semiliterate, had long been deprived of the right to speak and did not so much “tell” their stories as perform them, articulating their ideas with eloquence, as if each had been a professional trained actress. Their stories were told with vivid anecdotes. The variation of tone and occasional outbursts of tears enhanced the effect, carrying their performances to a high emotional level. They were true storytellers. I was a meager scribbler compared with their gift.
Even though Liao remains a “nonbeliever,” the journeys brought him kinship with millions of Chinese Christians who are finding meaning in a tumultuous society, where unbridled consumerism is upending traditional and inculcated value systems. Liao saw parallels in the perseverance by Chinese Christians with his own fight for the freedom to write and travel. In September 2010, when the Chinese government finally granted Liao a permit to present his literary works and perform music in Germany after he had attempted to do so fourteen times in the previous ten years, he e-mailed his friends: “To gain and preserve your freedom and dignity, there is no other way except to fight. I will continue to write and document the sufferings of people living at the bottom rung of society, even though the Communist Party is not pleased with my writing. I have the responsibility to help the world understand the true spirit of China, which will outlast the current totalitarian government.”
Wenguang Huang,
Chicago,
November 2010
Preface
The Mountain Path Is Red
“Every inch of soil beneath my feet was red, shining under the frail winter sun, as if it had been soaked with blood.”
I jotted down this observation in my journal in the winter of 2005 while trekking on a narrow mountain path in China’s southwestern province of Yunnan.
I had arrived in Yunnan a year before, running away from public security agents who came to interrogate me for interviewing members of Falun Gong. Fear of arrest prompted me to jump from my second-floor apartment. I fled to the sun-drenched city of Dali, where I took temporary shelter at a friend’s place. Like a rat sneaking out from a tight-lidded container, in this case, the Sichuan basin, I brushed off the dust, stretched my limbs on the beach of Erhai Lake, and resumed my life as a writer and musician—performing my Chinese flute on the street and in bars, and interviewing people and writing about them.
Broke and depressed in a new city, I cut myself off from my friends in Beijing and Chengdu. During the day, I roamed the streets, hanging out with beggars, street vendors, musicians, and prostitutes, listening to their life stories. In the evenings, I doused my loneliness with liquor, through which I even made an unexpected acquaintance with plainclothes police officers who had been sent to monitor my activities. Unlike those in Sichuan, policemen in Yunnan never refused a free drink and felt no qualms about being my drinking buddies. Even in their highly intoxicated state, they didn’t forget to toe the Party line by saying how hard they tried to protect the Communist system, and that it was good for China.