God Is Red - Liao Yiwu [30]
Liao: What did you do before you came to Yunnan?
Li: In 1988 I saw a newspaper ad about a school for tailors in the provincial capital, Taiyuan. I left the village and traveled to Taiyuan, using up all my savings to pay for the tuition and living expenses. After graduation, I returned to the village. I was the “famous tailor” who had seen the bigger world. It was right before the Chinese New Year. Many families would show up at my door, bringing new fabrics and asking me to tailor some outfits for them. You can’t imagine how nervous I was, a new graduate without any experience at all. I had to improvise. But I survived. A few years later, my skills had improved somewhat, and my stuff became presentable. In 1994 an uncle on my mother’s side came home for a visit. He lived in Chuxiong, Yunnan province. It was right after my divorce, and I was feeling miserable. This uncle of mine urged me to come to Chuxiong and even paid my train fare. Still, the journey took four days.
Liao: Like the Chinese saying goes: a tree will die if it is replanted, but a person will thrive when he moves.
Li: I can use water that flows freely out of a tub and shower as much as I want. Sometimes, I feel guilty for being too extravagant. One night, I had a dream that I was sitting inside a bathtub. Then my fellow villagers popped up around me, swearing and cursing: You bastard! How could you waste so much water that can feed generations of people here? Then they started to bite me. I woke up in a sweat.
Liao: So, did you continue with your tailor business here?
Li: Yes. Initially, I worked for a tailor on Foreigner Street. Eventually, I started my own shop. There were lots of foreigners and foreigner wannabes in the city. You could spot all sorts of exotic and weird outfits around. It was really quite cosmopolitan. But I was a hick from Shanxi, and there was no way I could compete with the other tailors, so I decided to specialize in mending clothes—hemming, fixing zippers, and patching holes, that sort of thing. It was small money but it all added up. Just like that, I thrived. I arrived here when I was thirty-one. In fifteen years, I saved up quite a bit of money and was able to send some home.
Liao: Who is taking care of your business now?
Li: I don’t have to worry about my business anymore. I closed it down. I’m too weak to handle the sewing machine. I don’t have a lot of days left.
Liao: Do you feel lost?
Li: No, I’m not lost. God will make plans for me.
Liao: When did you start to believe in God?
Li: I had heard about Christianity when I was a child. I don’t know whether it was from textbooks or from newspaper reports, but we were told foreign imperialists enslaved the Chinese people with Christianity, that it was a type of spiritual opium. We were atheists. There were no Christians in my village. Some old folks would light incense and worship Buddhist and Taoist gods at some temples during holidays. I used to look down on them, even condemning them for being superstitious. After I arrived in Yunnan, my mind was opened. I saw people of all colors and countries. I started to hang out with some of them. We have Protestants, Catholics, Muslims, Bahá’í believers, all sorts of faiths here.
I was a victim of the Communist atheist ideology. I had nothing to cling to spiritually. I had no idea where the end would be. Each time things started to trouble me, I planned a way to escape, either through smoking or drinking, or simply burying it down inside. My eldest daughter suffered from a severe fever, which turned out to be meningitis. We didn’t get her treatment right away. She ended up having epilepsy, and later on she became deaf and mute. She died before she turned nine. At that time, my heart was bleeding all the time, but I didn’t know what to do and where to seek help.
When I first found out that I had cancer, I had a very hard time thinking it through. I would count my days with my fingers and say to myself: “I hardly have any happiness in life. What is the meaning in life?”
Liao: