God Is Red - Liao Yiwu [78]
Epilogue
Reverend Yuan Xiangchen passed away in 2005 at the age of ninety-two. He had six children, all of whom are pious Christians. His son, Yuan Fusheng, whom I interviewed for this story, continues to be active in the Christian community in Beijing.
Chapter 15
The Poet and the Priest
I am desperate,” she whispered. “I cannot stay in China anymore. I want to escape.” When I last saw Liu Shengshi, she was young and beautiful; now, her skin was weathered and rough, her forehead scored with deep creases. The leader of the avant-garde poetry movement in Sichuan in the 1980s, Liu had dropped out of sight, disappeared—no one had heard from her in years. Seeing her dressed in black and coming toward me as I sat with friends outside the Three-One Bookstore in Chengdu in 2002 startled me, as did her words. We moved to a separate table. She began to cry. She had become a Catholic activist and had been jailed for seven months for proselytizing in rural areas.
Liu had me worried, so I made some inquiries on her behalf, but when I tried to set up a meeting, she didn’t return my calls and I had no other contact information for her. I saw her again three months later. It was the third day after the Chinese New Year. She was giving a talk at an outdoor teahouse. She looked calm and relaxed. “My daily prayers have given me much internal peace,” she said. Liu said she was gathering information on Father Zhang Gangyi, a key figure in the Chinese Catholic community.
Liu came from a family of Communist officials. Her father had fought with Mao Zedong during the Chinese civil war. He was there when the Nationalists fled to Taiwan and he helped establish the new government in Chengdu. For years, her father took charge of the Communist Youth League in Chengdu. He met Liu’s mother during the campaign to nationalize China’s private enterprises. She was a worker in a textile factory and devoted to the Communist cause. They married. Liu was born in the spring of 1961, a time of famine in China when very few babies survived.
Liu Shengshi: I was a rebel, a black sheep. I didn’t have anything in common with my parents. As a child, only eighteen months old, I was sent by my parents to a kindergarten specifically for the children of senior government officials. I went to a special high school and then college. I was duck-fed Communist ideology. My parents were more dedicated to their work than to their family. When they visited me and my siblings, it was like a prison visit—short and formal. After they retired, the Party no longer needed them, and they discovered they had no life outside the Party. They didn’t even know how to live together as a family. My parents are both in their seventies, but they fight all day long. They become very irrational and verbally attack each other as if they were sworn enemies.
Liao Yiwu: They had put their faith in Communism . . .
Liu: . . . and their faith amounted to nothing. They devoted their lives to the Communist Party, and the Party wrote them a big check, but they can never cash it because the Party is bankrupt. Several generations of Chinese have been deceived by the Party. They all became fanatics. Many former officials were attracted to the practice of Falun Gong, and no matter how hard the Party tried, they couldn’t keep them from joining what the government declared was a cult. The reason was simple. Those practitioners were disillusioned with the Party. They had devoted their lives to that promised check, only to discover it was not worth the paper on which it was written. When my father mentions the top Communist leaders now, it is always with a volley of curses. He and other war veterans planned to gather in Tiananmen Square for a sit-in demonstration. They planned to don their uniforms, put on all their medals, and protest