Liao Yiwu, the writer, has left China, his homeland. He arrived this morning in Berlin, via Warsaw and Hanoi. This is good news and bad news at once. It is good, because Liao is now safe and feels liberated: “My goal was personal freedom and freedom to write,” he told me over the phone from Berlin, with his German translator, Yeemei Guo, as our interpreter. And it is bad news that he felt pushed by the constant threat of prison at home to choose between silence and exile.
Liao, who is best known in America for his book, “The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories: China from the Bottom Up,” is not only a true artist, but also a true patriot: while his work gets under the Communist Party’s skin—and has repeatedly landed him in prison—it is driven by a defiant love and celebration of China and its people. And for a while, in recent years, it looked like Beijing might have decided he could simply be ignored. Last fall, he was permitted for the first time to travel abroad, and he appeared at a literary festival in Germany, where “The Corpse Walker” was a bestseller. But in the wake of the popular uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East early this year, there has been a steady crackdown on independent voices in China, and when we last heard from Liao, in late March, he had just been visited by the police and prevented from making a long-planned trip to attend the PEN World Voices Festival in New York.
At the opening ceremony of the PEN Festival, Salman Rushdie placed an empty chair on the stage to pay tribute to Liao’s involuntary absence. Liao then wrote Rushdie a letter, saying, “This prison-like state has confined me. I’m not alone… At a certain venue in Norway in 2010 [the ceremony for the Nobel Prize in Literature], an empty chair was set on the stage for my old friend Liu Xiaobo. I can only hope that my writings, which serve as testimony on China’s present and its history, deserve that empty chair at your opening ceremony.” In his response, Rushdie wrote to Liao, “Quite simply, we miss you.”
It is bad enough to have to miss a writer, and it makes it even worse to have to miss his writing as well. When the Chinese authorities grounded Liao in March, they also made him sign a declaration that he would not publish any “illegal” books abroad. Liao knew what the problem was: his magnum opus, a memoir of his ordeal as a Chinese political prisoner, was scheduled to be published this spring in Taiwan, and in translation in Germany.
Liao was first imprisoned after witnessing the crushing of the Democracy movement at Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, and writing a powerful poem about it, called “Massacre.” On the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown, he wrote a piece, which I published at the time in The Paris Review, called “Nineteen Days,” recalling how he’d spent every June 4th since. Today Liao told me that when his police minders visited him in March, they threatened him with his harshest sentence yet: “The police told me that if I publish more of my work abroad, it won’t be easy—if you do it again, you will be disappeared for quite a while, you’ll get put away for as long as Liu Xiaobo.”
The German edition of Liao’s memoir—“The Witness of the 4th of June”—runs to five hundred pages, and was supposed to appear in April. But after the Chinese police threatened him, it was postponed until June, and then postponed again, and the Taiwanese edition (the first Chinese edition), was also postponed. In this way, the publication of the book recalled Liao’s ordeal in writing it, for he wrote it three times: the first manuscript was confiscated in the nineteen-nineties during a police search of his home, so he rewrote it, and that manuscript was taken from him by the police in 2001. When he finished the manuscript for the third time last year, he got it out of the country to safety, and today when he followed it, his German publisher, Peter Sillem of Fischer Verlag, told me that it will be published in August. Liao also has a new book of oral history coming out in America in September, “God Is Red: The Secret Story of How Christianity Survived and Flourished in Communist China”—and he didn’t want to go to jail for that, either. (Now, better late than never, Liao plans to visit New York this fall.)
Liao said he didn’t know if the Chinese authorities had realized yet that he’d left. “It has been a very difficult trip for me to get out of the country, but I would like to keep the details to myself until next year,” he said. “In 2012, the leadership will change in Beijing, and I’m looking forward to a new government with the hope that I may then go back to China.” He added, somewhat cryptically, “It was like magic that I was able to get out, and such wonderful magic that I even got an exit stamp in my passport.”
So he is not a refugee. “Never,” he said. In fact, he told me, “I’m excited about political developments in China, and looking forward to a Jasmine Revolution. I am quite sure that Hu Jintao may be a refugee some day, but not Liao Yiwu.”
In the meantime, he was celebrating his arrival in Berlin with Sillem, his publisher, and Guo, his translator and good friend, at the Ming Dynasty restaurant—“The best Chinese restaurant in Berlin,” Sillem said, “and fittingly right across the street from the Chinese embassy.” I asked Liao if he was happy. “I will say that I left a country with bad people, and I am now in a country with good people,” he told me, “and I am very happy.” At that moment, Sillem snapped the above photograph of Liao, and e-mailed it to me, by way of evidence, with the subject line: In Good Spirits.
(Photograph: Peter Sillem)
