God Is Red - Liao Yiwu [57]
Acutely embarrassed after taking a flash photograph of the minister onstage, I slunk out of the courtyard and bumped into the driver. As he tried to explain what was being said from the stage, he stopped midsentence, took my arm, and led me to a gray-haired man who had just emerged from the common toilet. “This is Reverend Zhang Mao-en . . .” the driver said, “the person you want to interview.” Zhang was the most senior clergy in the Sayingpan region; it was he who was presiding over the service.
We quickly exchanged greetings, and I pressed my case for an interview, which was not immediately confirmed. He seemed intrigued that I was working on a book about Christians in China and said, “I will see what I can do. It will probably be late. Is that okay?”
I nodded: “It’s not a problem. I can wait.”
“You don’t have to stick around here,” he said. “You’ve had a long day. Go stay at my house tonight. We can talk in the morning. At six? Your driver knows where I live.”
I accepted Zhang’s offer. It was almost two in the morning when we reached his house. Zhang’s wife poured hot water into two wooden basins, and we soaked our feet. Then she led us by oil lamp to a bedroom on the second floor, where, exhausted, I dropped fully clothed onto the hard bed.
As the sound of barking dogs reached me, I opened my eyes and saw that it was morning. Zhang was not there, so we retraced our path and found him at a farmer’s house, standing at a stove in a dark cavelike kitchen with his assistant. He had barely slept. They were preparing boxes of coin-shaped wafer-thin cakes and bottles of red wine for the pastors to take with them to use for celebrating the Eucharist.
We sat near the stove. His assistant, the new face of the church, retreated to a corner of the sooty room, and Zhang closed his eyes for a few minutes before indicating he was ready for my questions. It was in the early morning of August 6, 2006.
Liao Yiwu: When did you become a Christian?
Zhang Mao-en: When I was still inside my mother’s womb.
Liao: What do you mean?
Zhang: My family has been Christian for ninety-two years. If my oldest brother, Zhang Run-en, were still alive, he would also be ninety-two. My father converted when Run-en was born and had him baptized. We are one of the earliest Christian families in Yunnan province. A Yi family on the other side of the Pudu River became believers even earlier. At the beginning of the last century, there was a lot of trade across the Pudu River, and preachers followed the merchants on horseback and brought the gospel to Dega, and from Dega it was taken into the mountain regions—Shengfa, Zehei, Malutang, and Salaowu.
In the early 1920s, those areas were very poor. There were no schools before the church arrived. After Japan invaded China in 1937, an Australian missionary escaped to the region and founded a seminary here. I don’t know his English name, but his Chinese name was Zhang Erchang. By the time I was born, in 1939, there were a lot of Christians—my parents and siblings, my parents’ parents, immediate and distant relatives, my fellow villagers rich and poor. Soon after I learned to speak, I could memorize simple hymns. The first book my parents gave me was the Bible. In remote Yi villages many people were illiterate, but you only needed to mention a certain passage from the Bible and they could recite it from memory.
Before the Communist