Liao Yiwu

Photo Courtesy of the Independent Chinese Pen Center

Celebrities like Madonna and Bono take on aliases because they’re “cool”; Liao Yiwu has an alias because he’s in trouble.

Liao, a.k.a. Lao Wei, has the distinction of being the most censored contemporary writer and poet in China. The onetime truck driver and drifter, now one of China’s most influential writers, has been pursued relentlessly by the Communist government, which shuts down magazines and publishing houses just for being involved with him. Liao’s book Interviews with People from the Bottom Rung of Society became an instant bestseller in China and was banned nearly as quickly for its honest, unflinching look at the lives of Chinese social outcasts—ranging from murderers and human-traffickers to Falun Gong practitioners and the merely homosexual—in their own words.

The Chinese literary critic Ren Momei remarked that “All the characters depicted in the book have one thing in common: they have all been deprived of their right to speak out. This book is a loud condemnation of [that deprivation] and an excellent portrayal of this group of unique individuals.”

Like much good art, the book came from pain. Liao, blacklisted in China since 1987 for various involvements in the Chinese underground literary movement, found himself imprisoned in the early ’90s. For the sin of speaking his mind, he shared a bunk with a convicted murderer. Ostracized and tortured mercilessly, Liao suffered mental collapses and attempted suicide twice.

After being released from prison, Liao found his wife and child long gone. His city residential registration was cancelled and all his previous writer friends avoided him at all cost. He had nowhere to go. With an empty bag and a flute, which he had learned to play in jail, Liao started his life as a street musician.

Portrait Courtesy of the Independent Chinese Pen Center

Police harassment made it difficult to find gainful employment, and Liao was reduced to taking odd jobs in restaurants, teahouses and bookstores. But his life at the bottom only broadened the scope of a book he intended to write about social outcasts in China. The conversations he had with prison inmates and socially marginalized street people formed the basis for Interviews with People from the Bottom Rung of Society.

It was not the first time Liao turned a negative into a positive. After 1989’s Tiananmen Square crackdown, an incensed Liao composed his epic “Massacre” in protest. With virtually no chance of having it published, Liao engaged in the late-’80s version of podcasting—he recorded himself reading his poem onto an audiotape, and let the power of piracy send copies of his message all across China. This act of defiance later led indirectly to his imprisonment, but his mission had been accomplished; he had gotten the word out.

In 2002, one of Liao’s friends managed to smuggle the complete manuscript of Interviews out of China. With his help, the Taiwan-based Maitian Publishing House released the book (in traditional Chinese characters) in three volumes. The following year, portions of it were translated by Marie Holzman into French, published as L’Empire Des Bas-Fonds Des Liao Yiwu by Bleu de Chine in Paris in 2003. Portions of that were subsequently translated into English and printed in The Paris Review.

Theme was lucky enough to see English-language excerpts from the hard-to-get book, and the well-constructed, thorough, and brutally honest interviews have made for some of the more fascinating reading we’ve had in recent memory. We were also lucky enough to score an excerpt for this very issue. (The excerpt has been edited for length.)

Liao, exiled to an undisclosed location within China, continues to write and publish, despite continued police harassment and censorship. “I am trying to overcome, little by little, the fear that’s been inflicted on me,” says Liao. “By doing so, I won’t lose my sanity and inner freedom.

“Throughout my whole life, I’ve been pursuing the right to free expression. In a healthy society, citizens should be allowed to express themselves. The current system of dictatorship will stifle creativity and end up destroying our national culture heritage. It will be a long way before we can establish a healthy society here in China.”

Ultimately his instincts as a writer kept his sanity intact, giving him the will to live. He bonded with the criminals and death row inmates he was surrounded by, people who had no future because they could be executed at any time. He faithfully recorded their life stories, their voices, their wisdom, their passion for life, their tears, their blood, and their raw human emotions.