Recorded by Jonathan Landreth is a Brooklyn-based writer and editor who started reporting from China in 1997
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The Sichuan-born writer and street musician who spent four years in prison for “Massacre,” his poem about Tiananmen Square in 1989, talked to fellow author Ian Johnson about exile in Germany and his plan to print dictators’ faces on toilet paper.Jonathan Landreth Published July 16, 2023
Now is not a time when many people anywhere are laughing about China. Especially not in the United States of America. Having read The Corpse Walker, exiled Chinese writer Liào Yìwǔ’s 廖亦武 real-life stories describing China from the bottom up, the last thing I expected from an audience of about 100 China-watchers gathered on Park Avenue was waves of giggles and cackles, snorts and guffaws.
After playing a somber musical opening on a long wooden flute, Liao, 64 — in the loose, faded black cotton shirt he fled persecution in, on foot, in 2011 — delighted his audience with the blunt and mischievous humor of a survivor. Unapologetic the way only humans who’ve experienced real hardship can be, Liao sat on the edge of his seat, eager to engage, even if only about half the room laughed at his Chinese jokes. The other half, this writer included, mostly relied on Vicky Wang’s smooth and nuanced translation.
The following is a condensed and edited transcript of Liao Yiwu’s conversation with Ian Johnson at the Asia Society, New York, on July 12, 2023.
Ian Johnson: Tonight’s topic is exiled literature, writing in exile. And I know that the Chinese flute is very important to you because you brought it with you when you went into exile. You carried it when you walked over the border. Can you tell us a little bit about where you learn to play?
Liao Yiwu: So, during June 4, I wrote a poem that led to me being in prison for four years in four different facilities. In the last facility, I met my flute teacher, a monk. He was the oldest prisoner in the facility: 84 years old at the time. It was a cold winter’s day and I suddenly heard this crying, almost moaning sound. I asked my fellow prisoners, “What is that?” They responded, “He’s been playing every single day. How did you miss this?” So, I found my way to the monk, who was playing outside, and I stood in front of him. He played very long songs, with his eyes closed, very focused as I stood in front of him. I waited until he stopped and opened his eyes. He smiled. I smiled. He said, “Do you want to learn?” Well, that’s how I began learning how to play the flute. In prison. One thing the monk said to me in prison that I still recall very strongly: “The people outside are living in a prison without walls. We are in a prison with walls. Inside? Outside? Life isn’t that different.
Ian Johnson: Your interviews with grassroots China outsiders began when you were in prison. Before prison, you were known as a poet. When you left prison, why did you continue interviewing the kinds of people you met in prison?
Liao Yiwu: In prison, you hear unbelievable stories. At one point while I was imprisoned I was sleeping between two people on death row. One of them had murdered his wife — and he kept talking about how he had murdered his wife. He had killed her and then frozen her corpse and chopped it into pieces and cooked it. The reason that he was eventually captured was because his mother found a piece of human fingernail in her porridge. I didn’t want to listen to him, but this prisoner kept telling the same stories over and over again. One day, I finally got mad and said, “God dammit! I don’t want to hear this anymore.” And the prisoner said, “But you’re my last audience, ever. No one else is going to hear this. I will be executed, maybe tomorrow, so if I don’t tell you, who am I going to tell? After I got out of prison, I dreamed about this guy often. I decided that writing his story would be the way to get it out of my system.
When I was in prison, I shared a cell with gang members and traffickers. They all had these extraordinary stories. So that’s how I got started on the series of interviews.
Ian Johnson: This resulted in a book published in 2000 in China, Interviews with the Lower Strata of Chinese Society (中國底層訪談錄), although it was immediately banned. How did it come about? Were you very dispirited after that? Were you able to make a living?
Liao Yiwu: The banning was very unexpected. I had dreamed of a life where I wrote books like the series of interviews, one a year, making, say, 200,000 yuan [$28,000] each — rich by my region’s standards. I’d buy a house and live large. That was my dream, but then the Chinese Communist Party not only banned my book but also implicated a lot of media outlets and publishers such as Southern Weekly, all to the point where I acquired the nickname “Publisher Killer.” Anyone who published my work ended up getting shut down.
I had not anticipated any of this. In order to make a living to survive, Liú Xiǎobō 刘晓波 and Mò Shǎopíng 莫少平 of Democracy China offered me a series of columns so I could make some U.S. dollars. That was a way for me to make a living, but then the police kept harassing me and asking me about what I’m doing and what I’m writing about abroad. This made me very angry. “You, the government, have been pushing me onto the path of rebellion over and over again,” I thought.
Ian Johnson: A young journalist in Chicago was given a copy of your Chinese language interviews with grassroots China and he reached out to you. Describe how that started and what his translations meant for you.
Liao Yiwu: The young journalist in Chicago, Huáng Wén 黄文, had a Chinese friend staying with him. He asked his house guest, “Have you read any good books coming out of China lately?” The house guest said, “Yes, the series of interviews from Liao Yiwu is great and I happen to have a copy. Here you go.”
The journalist read all night and he thought it was the greatest thing. He wrote me a letter saying, “Hey, I would love to translate this book for you.” The translation went on for many years and I didn’t think much of it. Eventually, he got back in touch and said the book was getting published by Random House. I said, “Oh, okay. Published? Cool. That’s great.” And then Huang Wen asked, “Do you have any idea how much money you made? It’s about $120,000. I will send you your share of the royalties.”
So then I very excitedly purchased property in the suburbs of Chengdu in Sichuan. I thought to myself, “My god, life is so dramatic.” I never would have expected this. When I eventually left China and went into exile, obviously the property couldn’t come with me.
Ian Johnson: So, do you still own the house?
Liao Yiwu: I still have the property, but during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake the ceiling suffered some damage.
Ian Johnson: Why did you leave for Germany?
Liao Yiwu: In 2010, Germany invited me for an event and it was to be my first time traveling abroad. Many people were telling me at the time, “Once you get to Germany, you better stay.” Prior to that trip, I was denied a passport and exit visa from China over fifteen times. But 2010 was the same year that Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Nobel Prize. A Norwegian media outlet found me and asked me, “Since you’re abroad now, why don’t you come to the Nobel award ceremony?” I was the only person on Liu Xiaobo’s invitation list who was abroad and could make it. They were so enticing with their invitation. They even offered me a bottle of maotai liquor because they knew I love to drink. But I thought about it and thought, “This liquor is not worth it.” [Factcheck: Wú’ěr Kāixī 吾尔开希, former Tiananmen student leader, General Secretary, Taiwan Parliamentary Human Rights Commission, wrote to us to comment: “I was one of the dozens of Chinese dissidents who were invited and attended the Nobel Peace Prize committee ceremony, and Liao was not among us.”]
Still, I anticipated that China was moving in the right direction, that things would get better. There was Liu Xiaobo, told while in prison that he had won the Nobel Prize…“Democracy can’t be that far away,” I thought. But I also thought to myself, “Well, if I make work and am published in the U.S. and in Europe, and I earn U.S. dollars and Euros, currency-wise that really works in my favor.” At the time, the exchange rate was $1 to 8.2 yuan so I could make the USD and the Euros and live large in China and enjoy my life, all while people are thinking that I am the guy who is fighting for the cause, fighting the good fight.
So things were looking up, but then, when I returned from Germany, I was detained at the airport and asked, “What did you say in Germany? What did you do?” I ran through everything I said in Germany — nothing scandalous, nothing seditious, so I thought, “That was it. We’re okay.”
But then the next year, when the color revolution broke out in the Middle East, circumstances completely shifted. Again the police told me I was not allowed to leave the country, claiming that there was a new mandate from on high that forbade me from going abroad.
I really wanted to go, but they made it clear that if I tried again things would be very different, much more severe. “You’re gonna go missing for a while,” they said. So I was trapped in China and also wasn’t allowed to publish my prison memoir in Taiwan or in Germany. I was told that act would carry a minimum of 10 years of prison time. So, it became time to leave.
Ian Johnson: Famously, you walked across the border on foot wearing that same shirt — which has been washed since. Why Germany? Why not come to New York City?
Liao Yiwu: It was a real miracle that I got out of China at all. I carried five cell phones with me while I crossed the border on foot, all of them sturdy, original Nokias with a single contact in each. I stayed in Vietnam for three days then lived in Germany for two months. While I was in Germany, I felt like German was just too difficult a language and that Germans are kind of stiff. So, in September that year, I did come to the U.S., on September 11.
I had just published a book called God is Red. They had an African American driver pick me up holding my very red book. When I saw the man, I thought to myself, “Oh, God is black.” I did think about coming to New York, especially, as I have great aspirations for life in Flushing (Queens), because Flushing is China without the CCP. There’s no language barrier and there are plenty of undocumented people living in Flushing, so I could do exactly what I was doing in China before. Instead of interviewing Chinese people in China who were at the bottom of society, I could interview Chinese people in the U.S. I could have the same plan: do one book a year and live large. I even heard about the existence of a so-called “mistress village.”
I was very excited by this prospect, but then Germany gave me another award. This was an anti-fascism award, so that took me back to Germany. I stayed a while and then went to the U.S. again. But then Germany gave me an artist-in-residence program and the conditions were just wonderful. I had a 2,500 Euro [$2,800] monthly stipend. They gave me a huge apartment. At the time, a journalist asked me, “So? What do you think of this program?” I replied, “Even the greatest poets in China, like Lǐ Bái 李白 and Dù Fǔ 杜甫, never lived as well as I’m living now. This is crazy.”
Ian Johnson: One of the problems that exiled writers often have is making a living. In Germany, you were quite lucky with the publisher Fischer, which has quite an anti-fascist history since its founding after World War II. They gave you book contracts and have supported you over the years. Talk a little bit about what it’s generally like for exiled writers.
Liao Yiwu: Fischer is one of the oldest publishing houses in Germany, established in 1886. I feel very lucky to have been published by them all these years. Eleven books so far and two more on the way. Another blessing is the fact that I found a wonderful German translator to collaborate with, Peter Hoffmann. When we first met, Peter was holding a guitar, looking like a poet, and singing “Nothing to my Name,” (一无所有) Cui Jian’s anthem of the protests of 1989.
I stopped myself like, “What? Who is this? What is this?” Then Peter the translator asked me, “So, are we going to have a drink?” That’s when I knew he was my translator. Now he is a very established and well-known professor at a great university in Germany. He is known as my German face.
Still, my biggest marketer, my biggest promoter, is Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 . At one point, a Chinese Ambassador in Germany came to me and said, “Look, if you keep this up, there’s going to be trouble for your family back home. It’s going to be an issue.”
I replied: “I have published so many books abroad that if you keep harassing me, if you keep this up, you might as well go build me a bank. Every time you do something to me now, it’s an international incident with news headlines everywhere.” At this point, I’m a little embarrassed about this. Obviously, the ambassador didn’t take this well.
I was very excited to find out that Xi Jinping had published 128 books himself. Anytime he does anything, it just makes the Western world pay even more attention. For example, consider what happened in Wuhan. The leadership’s approach to disease control and to surveillance makes the world very curious about Xi Jinping, about China. And the first point of reference, their best point of reference is Liao Yiwu. So, anytime something happens with Xi Jinping, mine is the book they buy. One of my most recent books, Wuhan, has been selling really well in Germany. Even I can’t believe this is happening.
Ian Johnson: You’re so well-received in Germany. I lived in Berlin for quite a while and I went over to your house for dinner, and you said, “Oh, Herta Müller is coming by.” She’s the Nobel Literature Prize-winning Romanian-German author. She lives nearby and goes to your house every few months for dinner. You also said, “Wolf Biermann is coming for dinner.” He’s the Bob Dylan of Germany. After Liu Xiaobo died, you were able to use some of these connections, including the former Lutheran pastor Joachim Gauck, who was the head of the Stasi Archives, and later became President of Germany, to work to get [Liu Xiaobo’s widow] Liú Xiá 刘霞 a real shot at being released to Germany. Please talk about that process and an exiled writer’s responsibility to stay politically active.
Liao Yiwu: Before Liu Xiaobo got sick, there was already a plan put in motion. They were trying to convince his wife to leave China. This was largely orchestrated by Wolf Biermann, the famous poet, because he felt like there was really no point in staying in China when the Communist Party was behaving the way it was. He wrote to Liu Xia himself and persuaded her to apply to leave the country and convince Liu Xiaobo to do the same. This was the first time we understood what his wife had been going through, suffering from depression. There were many meetings to make this happen, and through all this, Wolf Biermann is talking with Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany at the time. She was a fan of his in her youth, so they have a special relationship. They’re in very close contact. When they found out Liu Xiaobo had cancer, they held a summit in Hamburg. Wolf Biermann was calling nonstop. It didn’t matter if Merkel was talking to Trump or talking to Xi Jinping, Biermann was calling her about the rescue.
Eventually, Xi Jinping said, “We’ll look into it,” but nothing came of it. Unfortunately, Xiaobo passed away. Now the rescue was for Liu’s widow. He believed that it was part of his self-fulfillment, because of his background, his history in East Germany living under communist surveillance. He felt very passionately about this cause. If Liu Xia could leave China, it would be because of Wolf Biermann who’d written many letters and made many calls on her behalf.
Ian Johnson: And she did, in October 2018. These are some of the things you can do when you’re in exile, but do you feel cut off from China, especially as somebody who has done so many grassroots interviews?
Liao Yiwu: Actually, I have always wanted to be disconnected from China. I identify much more strongly as a Sichuan person, a person who likes his liquor and has a lot of bad habits commonly associated with being from Sichuan. I gave a speech years ago saying that I feel like China, as an Empire, must fracture. That would be the ideal outcome for me. If China fractured into multiple pieces, I’d only have to go as far as Yunnan to be an exile, not as far as Germany. Taiwan is also too far. Anyway, no Sichuan person has ever felt very strongly about unification.
My ideal outcome would be for Sichuan to elect a president who’s either an alcoholic or a chef or both. Instead of a Chinese-style democracy there could be a Sichuan-style democracy and Ian Johnson, if he ever wants to, can come for a visit. He could just come to Liao Yiwu for a visa. This would be the most ideal outcome.
I’ve always wanted to make that distinction. I’ve lived in China for over 50 years of my life, but I have a lifetime of material. There’s a New York Times reporter in the back of the room who’s asked me before. “Are you going to run out of material because you’re disconnected from China?” No, I write all the time. I boasted to him that I have 30 to 50 more books in me. I can write until my arm falls off and I’ll still have plenty of material.
Ian Johnson: Why don’t we move to audience questions?
Audience member 1: Everyone in our high school read your book The Corpse Walker for one of our classes. We had a very strong memory of reading it. In that book you did a lot of interviews with different people from a lot of backgrounds. What was it like talking to them? Where did you find these people? How did you know them and what was the process of interviewing them?
Liao Yiwu: The interviewees came from my prison time. I didn’t have to look for them. After I got out of prison, no one wanted to hire me and so, to make a living, I was playing the flute at bars late at night, at three or four in the morning. By 4 a.m., the only people who are at the bar are either depressed, brokenhearted, or homeless. Initially, I would play for free, playing these very sad melodies. I’d go up to these guys and play in front of them.
“Don’t worry, it’s free,” I’d say.
They’d say, “Okay, fine.”
But eventually they’d say, “Wait. No. Don’t stop. Please keep playing.”
And then I’d tell them, “Well, it used to be 10 yuan [$1.40) , now it’s 50,” and I’d continue playing.
These people I ended up interviewing would be so moved by the music they’d be crying and just spilling their life stories by the end of it. The next morning, I’d get home and be so tired I’d sleep most of the day and not go back to work. That made enough money to get through the day. So, 50 yuan times five, that was enough to get through.
By day three, I’d run out of money and then go back to the bar. The bar owner told me I had a terrible work ethic. That was the cycle of my routine of interviewing people. I have over 300 interviews in my archives, deep in my computer. I’ll be dragging them out as far as long as I’m alive. And after I’m dead, Ian Johnson will inherit them and see what he can do with my interview material.
Audience member 2: Thank you very much. I don’t speak your beautiful language, but I want to know how you feel about living in Berlin today and do you plan to stay?
Liao Yiwu: So, aside from my hometown Chengdu, Berlin is the city I know the best. I’m a person with no sense of direction, so I’m not familiar with a lot of cities. What I really like to do is visit the huge graveyard near my place in Berlin. I like to go there because dead people don’t talk back — and if they’re not talking back, they’re essentially agreeing with you. These graveyards tend to be quite lovely. There are a bunch of birds and so I go and talk to the headstones and have a very refreshing day with very good conversations. You don’t need to learn English or German to converse with the dead. Another thing I like to do is imagine the people buried there are my readers. This enables me to have a conversation, to communicate with my readers. This is very comfortable. In many ways I believe Berlin is even better than my hometown Chengdu.
Audience member 3: Could you comment on how the power of the Communist Party is growing and how technology has enabled it to reach further and more precisely. What might this mean for future dissident voices? Will they be silenced?
Liao Yiwu: In China right now, the surveillance that began in Xinjiang with 12 million Uyghurs has since spread like a virus to the whole. The surveillance has become nationwide. It’s very high tech and, at this point, it’s even being pushed abroad internationally with programs like WeChat. On the other side of this is the idiot leader at the top. Xi Jinping is someone who would carry a bushel of barley on his shoulders for five kilometers and not change shoulders. So it could be any day that he could just fall on his face. You never know. China right now is quite a perverse society in the sense that it has an idiotic ruler but, at the same time, incredibly severe control. So there are two very severe extremes.
In this environment, a writer is incredibly useful. A writer is someone who is observing and keeping records of everything that’s happening because the average person may not even notice. We’re just going to wait for the day when China fractures into multiple countries, and then we will hire Ian Johnson to come and rule the country.
Audience member 3: Thank you very much for making some very heavy things lighter with your humor. We’ve talked a lot about China. I know you haven’t lived in the United States for long periods of time, but I’m interested in your perception of the United States at a time when we are very concerned about the state of democracy in our country. I wonder if you have any advice for us?
Liao Yiwu: This question should be addressed to Ian Johnson, not me.
Ian Johnson: Maybe you don’t have an opinion?
Liao Yiwu: This is too big a question to handle without liquor.
Audience member 4: You predicted twenty years ago some fracturing of China as a nation. Based on the colonization of Xinjiang and the circumstances happening in Sichuan, would you be interested in writing a book specifically about the society and history of Sichuan?
Liao Yiwu: I’m the only one who has actually thought about this for a very long time.
I would like to open a factory that manufactures toilet paper paper rolls. On the toilet paper rolls we would print every dictator’s face, so we can think about them often. Especially those with hemorrhoids. So we could have Xi Jinping, we could have Putin, we could have Máo Zédōng 毛泽东 , we could have Dèng Xiǎopíng 邓小平, and many other dictators. Each would be a big roll. Lots of sheets. We could think about these dictators often, when we wipe our butts, and see how many of them we can recognize. If I patent this idea, I’ll be rich and won’t have to worry about writing books anymore.
Audience member 5: I thank you so much for the conversation today. I was wondering if now you have connections with young people in China and, if so, what is your perception about how they feel politically? What is the energy among young people? How do they feel about their leadership in the country and the direction of the country?
Liao Yiwu: Previously, I actually didn’t really have a lot of contact with young Chinese people, especially the Chinese international students who are in Germany who would prefer not to associate with me for safety reasons, because they still want to go back to China.
But then, last year, there was the A4 Revolution, or the White Paper Revolution, the anti-zero-COVID revolution. When that happened, I was giving a talk in Stuttgart about the revolution and the reaction. There were a lot of students who were there protesting with blank white paper. One of the student leaders approached me and we had a great conversation. Without reservation, I admit that I had previously underestimated the youth, and now I recognize that they have their way and their wisdom in how they approach a revolution. That conversation, with about a dozen Chinese students in Germany, well over an hour long, was one of the most fruitful conversations that I’ve had since leaving China.
Jonathan Landreth is a Brooklyn-based writer and editor who started reporting from China in 1997
