The Corpse Walker: Real-Life Stories, China from the Bottom Up

THE CORPSE WALKER: REAL LIFE STORIES, CHINA FROM THE BOTTOM UP;
Liao Yiwu; New York: Pantheon, 2008; Nonfiction; 318p. Translated from the Chinese by Wen Huang.

Among the many sights, sounds, and people we expect to see in next week’s Beijing Olympics, we may also anticipate not seeing in any official version, the lives of China’s underclass. That omission can be addressed, however, by reading Liao Yiwu’s “The Corpse Walker: Real-Life Stories, China from the Bottom Up.” Brief oral histories from citizens who have somehow missed out on China’s current economic boom describe, among others, the lives of a public restroom manager, a leper who may not really be a leper (and who attributes his misfortune to his killing of a Ma snake), a Buddhist abbot, a grave robber, a professional mourner, and a feng shui master who chooses propitious tomb sites. Many of these accounts are not for the tenderhearted, as in tales of the “Great Leap Forward” when starving peasants ate their own children in order to survive. Mindless and endless denunciations demanded by the Red Guard set a gifted composer of symphonies to menial tasks in assorted labor camps. The abbot’s stories of the Red Guard destroying the monastery, and of government officials extorting money from the monks to upgrade their luxury vehicles are heartbreaking, but his explanation of how the monks saved a Buddhist encyclopedia printed in 1372, by airing it out, a page at a time, and then inserting thousands of tobacco leaves between the pages to absorb the moisture is fascinating. Liao Yiwu, himself a great dissident writer on the government’s bad list, is a unique interviewer, who doesn’t mind calling a jerk a jerk, and who asks the most penetrating questions. “The Corpse Walker” is a particular treasure of a culture foreign in almost unimaginable ways.

LW