God Is Red - Liao Yiwu [33]
Li stood before his audience, hymnbook open, took a deep breath, and began what sounded like a howling song, but as everyone joined in with a distinctive mixture of accents, the cringing dissonance that reached my ears gradually resolved itself into harmony, like blending water with milk.
I had heard some Western hymns in movies, where church choirs of men and women, boys and girls, sang beautifully with trained voices to the accompaniment of organ or piano. Certainly, I could understand why some would call it divine. But what I was humming along to were secular Chinese folk songs, easy to follow and easy to remember. Some tunes reminded me of those songs of the 1980s when the Chinese public had just started to embrace pop music. I presume the hymn was by Xiao Min, a young farm girl from the central province of Henan. Featured in a documentary called The Cross: Jesus in China, which I had seen recently, Xiao Min claimed to be inspired by God and, with no musical training, created and sang hymns while working in the field. She continued to write melodies and lyrics after she was imprisoned. In a matter of a few years, she composed more than 1,200 hymns, which spread all over China. At my friend Wang Yi’s house in Chengdu a few months before, they also sang a hymn by Xiao Min: With tears and laughter, with songs and silence, / We’ve gone through ups and downs, / We’ve walked through the darkest valley, / We’ve climbed upon the highest mountains. / Year after year, the gospel, the salvation, the happiness and the elevation, / Blessings all over China.
During Li’s hymn singing, I noticed two women and a man merge into the crowd, and one of the women slid in next to me. She was young and had beautiful long dark hair, like those models in shampoo commercials. Her fragrance unsettled me. She smiled and asked to share a hymnbook with me, gesturing to her open mouth, urging me to sing louder.
During a break between the hymns and the testimonials, I struck up a conversation with the young woman. She said her Christian name was Ruth and revealed she was a preacher and leader of this particular Christian fellowship. She declined to tell me her Chinese name.
Ruth was dressed like an urban fashionista. She told me she was a member of the Bai ethnic group, that she used to engage in ancestor worship, and bowed to a variety of deities and gods. She had owned a store in the old section of Dali and set up a minialtar for the Taoist god of fortune. She burned incense every day, hoping that her business could prosper. She was married but grew worried when, after several years, she was unable to conceive:
Ruth: I visited a Buddhist temple, seeking blessings from the Guanyin bodhisattva. But life still didn’t work out the way I wanted. My husband left me. Our family was broken. I totally lost myself. I was in no mood to run the business in Dali. So I came back and moved in with my mother in Ganjia Village. She is a Christian. One day she dragged me to the church. I found myself surrounded by old men and women. It felt very strange to be thrown into that group of senior citizens. It was awkward and comical.
Soon after that, I took a bus to Xiaguan. During the trip, a rock bounced up from under the wheel and shot through the window. It struck my foot. I screamed with pain. But the other passengers just sat there, like robots. Not a flinch. The bus was as quiet as a pool of water. I was dumbfounded by what had happened. How could it be possible? Was someone trying to send me a signal?
When I returned from the trip, I was very distracted and couldn’t get over the incident. I went to find my mother, but she wasn’t in her room. On a table, I saw a copy of the Bible, which had never held any interest for me, but I picked it up and flipped it open. The passage I read was Isaiah 54:1: “Sing, O barren woman, you who never bore a child; burst into song, shout for joy, you who were never in labor; because more are the children of the desolate woman than of her who has a husband.”
I was stunned. How