God Is Red - Liao Yiwu [61]
Liao: What did the Bible look like?
Zhang: It was bound together with leather and string. Some of the pages had stuck together, some of the words had blurred, and there were bloodstains. We kept it for many years. But one political campaign followed another; it was hard enough preserving our lives, and the Bible was “counterrevolutionary evidence.” During the Cultural Revolution, my mother burned it. She had no other choice.
We were lucky that we didn’t get arrested like my oldest brother, but we were kicked out of our house. My mother, my second elder brother, and I were classified as landlords.
My sister had been married to a man in Jiaoxi region, and they were also of the landlord class. My uncle, a church elder, was labeled a counterrevolutionary landlord. All my family was in trouble. We became homeless and lived in “cowsheds.” Several times when I ran into the children of peasants on the street, they would accuse me of wearing nice clothes and make me take them off. We didn’t have enough to eat and were constantly the target of condemnation meetings.
If village officials were in a bad mood, they would taunt us if we encountered them on the street, or beat us up. If they were in a good mood, they would order us to do their work in the fields, even though we were weak from hunger. Each time there was a new campaign, we would be targets of persecution. My uncle underwent three hundred public condemnation meetings. His health deteriorated fast. He died in 1958 of tuberculosis.
In 1953 they reclassified my mother—we were downgraded from landlords to rich peasants and were able to get back our house, which had been seized by the village, and a small plot of land.
My second elder brother—he was twelve years older than I—was hard of hearing. He was a pious Christian. He continued his prayers all through the 1950s, when my family was suffering at the hands of the work teams. One day, he was seen on his knees praying and was reported to the work team. They ordered him to say that belief in God was superstition and counterrevolutionary. He refused to renounce his faith. Instead, he closed his eyes and kept praying. They tied his hands and feet and hung him on a tree for several days. When they cut him down, he would be on his knees again, praying for the Lord to forgive his torturers. His health declined. He contracted TB. But he persisted. Before his death in 1999, he traveled all over the region, helping and praying for the poor and the sick.
In the later years of the Cultural Revolution, I was jailed three times for secretly preaching the gospel. I suffered but survived. In 1979 the government relaxed its control over religion. From 1979 to 2003, I served as a church elder. Then I became an ordained minister in the Sayingpan region. I’m the first ordained minister in my family. Like my second oldest brother, I also suffer from TB and take all sorts of medicine. None of it has helped much. My second brother died at the age of seventy-two. I’m sixty-eight. I don’t know what God has planned for me, but while I am still able, I want to try to do more. As you could see last night, more and more local people are following Jesus. It encourages me.
Chapter 12
The Feast
Yi ballads can be boisterous and jubilant, or serene, or reminiscent of lone traveling spirits, full of sadness and melancholy. My first encounter with the Yi ballad was in a bar in 2007 when I was traveling in Dali. I met a French musician who had just returned from a trip to several Yi villages in the Daliangshan area. With his expensive recording equipment, he had collected several dozen ancient ballads and burned them onto three CDs. We drank together as he played me a selection.
Those songs entered my dream one night. A simple repetitive melody echoed inside the dark, bare mountains, every note dripping tears, as slithery as earthworms. When I woke up, my feet were ice cold, which I like to attribute to my subconscious interpretation of the Yi culture—a people coming from the dark, damp mountains,