God Is Red - Liao Yiwu [62]
In early August 2006 I was invited by Reverend Zhang Mao-en to attend a service held not in a church but in the yard of a parishioner’s house. As he led me along a narrow, muddy path that wound through the village, giving way to strolling cattle adorned with bells and clip-clopping horses with rounded bellies, I trod carefully, avoiding deep hoofprints filled with steaming dung. Zhang seemed oblivious to the petty disruptions of rural life.
The sight and smell of so much manure reminded me of an allegorical article I was made to read in high school during the Cultural Revolution. A group of urban youths sent down to the rural areas to receive “reeducation” stumble upon a pile of fresh cow dung on a similar muddy path. As they search for a shovel to scoop it up, a peasant girl appears, cups the dung in both hands, and carries it to the communal manure pond. The young peasant girl sets a powerful example for the young city people who are unable to see past their petty bourgeois habits. Our teacher left us with a series of questions: Which was worse—the horse dung or petty bourgeois thinking? Who had the purer mind—the peasant girl or the urban youths? Some forty years later, school teachers no longer imbue cow shit with Communist ideology. Chinese people know shit stinks and that anyone in his right mind would use a shovel to collect it, whether proletariat or bourgeoisie.
What should have been a five-minute walk took half an hour, and by the time we arrived, my pants and shoes were a muddy mess. I stomped my feet on dry ground, trying to shake myself clean, when the driver touched me on the shoulder and said, “Don’t waste your energy. The mud will dry in no time and come off easily.” As we approached the parishioner’s courtyard home, I could hear hymns blasting from two Mao-era loudspeakers, very like those used by Party cadres during denunciation meetings, mixing in a painful static that drilled at my eardrums and cast me back for a moment to darker times.
The sun was well up now, and the air was humid and full of cicada song. I licked my parched lips, looked around to get my bearings, and realized it was here, the night before, that I had met Zhang. The house and the yard looked very different in daylight, the surreal and magical rendered shabby and crude, the crowd indistinguishable from any other gathering of ordinary, simple peasants, except that they were all smiling with what I can only ascribe to faith-induced happiness.
Zhang’s head of silver-gray hair disappeared fast inside the house. He was the only ordained minister in the Sayingpan region, so this was his show. I watched his parishioners, and what at first glance appeared to be chaos resolved itself into order as greeters arranged seats and passed around tea and candies while the cooks chopped and clattered in the kitchen.
Christians in China’s major cities are greatly divided over the government-sanctioned churches, but villagers here are not so political. They attend Sunday service at government-sponsored churches run by Zhang but also participate in services held by family pastors.
Around me in the courtyard, the talking stopped and ears strained to hear Zhang’s voice as it rose and fell on the warm morning air. I listened but couldn’t understand a word. He was speaking Yi. It was like listening to a tape of poet T. S. Eliot reading his poems when I was young. I could only decode the meaning from the tones and rhythms and with my eyes, my nose, and my mind. I let my imagination fill in the blanks and felt I could see the blood of Jesus, smell the fetid air before his death, and share the exultation of others around me of his resurrection. It was not a long service, and soon the crowd uttered “Amen” and life snapped back to its noisy secular state.
Language made it impossible for me to interview participants. Since many had seen me arrive with Zhang, I could move freely with my camera, trying to capture interesting faces and unusual scenes. Mounds of garbage and dirt piled up along the walls near