The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories: China from the Bottom Up [Hardcover]

Liao Yiwu (Author)

Book Description

Release date: April 15, 2008

The Corpse Walker is a compilation of twenty-seven extraordinary oral histories that opens a window, unlike any other, onto the lives of ordinary, often outcast, Chinese men and women. Liao Yiwu (one of the best-known writers in China because he is also one of the most censored) chose his subjects from the bottom of Chinese society: people for whom the “new” China--the China of economic growth and globalization-—is no more beneficial than the old. By asking challenging questions with respect and empathy, he manages to get his subjects to talk openly about their lives.

Here are a professional mourner, a trafficker in humans, a leper, an abbot, a retired government official, a former landowner, a mortician, a feng shui master, a former Red Guard, a political prisoner, a village teacher, a blind street musician, a Falun Gong practitioner, and many others–people who have been battered by life but who have managed to retain their dignity, their humor, and their essential, complex humanity.

Liao crafted the interviews (conducted between 1990 and 2003) with sensitivity and patience, working both from notes and from his own memory of these remarkable conversations. The result is an idiosyncratic, powerful, and richly revealing portrait of a people, a time, and a place we might otherwise have never known.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. In this rich, often harrowing oral history, Chinese writer (and notorious target of censors) Liao travels to the margins of Chinese society, interviewing 27 outsiders from China's forgotten classes. The book contains an incredible cast of characters: a grave robber, a composer, a leper, a professional mourner paid to wail at funerals, a human trafficker and a delusional peasant who has anointed himself emperor. These conversations, largely recorded from memory, showcase Liao's empathy for his subjects and a particular talent for getting into tight situations; on one occasion, the author is forced to leap out of a three-story building when he fears the Communist government is targeting him for talking to a Falun Gong supporter. Liao's research took 11 years, and his final product is a stunning series of portraits of a generation and class of individuals ignored in history books and unacknowledged in the accounts of the new China. (Apr.)
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From Booklist

Poet and novelist Liao, imprisoned for four years by the Chinese government for his poem condemning the massacre at Tiananmen Square, offers intimate portraits of ordinary people in China. Using interviews with hundreds of villagers whose lives have not benefited from the astounding economic growth of the new China, he offers oral histories of their lives lived day to day. Among his interview subjects are professional mourners, a former Red Guard, a trafficker in women, a grave robber, and a former political prisoner. Liao talked to people in villages where traditions have changed little as well as those where the old ways have clashed with the Revolution. A man recounts how fear of leprosy and evil dragons prompted villagers to burn his wife alive. The shocked husband was then obligated to feed them at a festival afterward. A retired government official recounts the hardships during the Cultural Revolution, the passion of the villagers and the hypocrisy of leaders, and the need for an honest assessment and apology. Liao offers rich detail about people who live well outside the spotlight trained on China. --Vanessa Bush

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon; First Edition (states) edition (April 15, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 037542542X
• ISBN-13: 978-0375425424
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.1 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #459,071 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

37 of 39 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars An enlightening easy read. April 17, 2008

By Shirley Evans

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

This collection of short stories is easy to read and never boring. It gives the reader a picture of life in China that is very different from the propaganda we get from the governments in China and in the United States. If anyone wants to know about a culture or a country, observing the bottom of society is much more enlightening and accurate than looking at the society from the top. I suspect that most of us, in China and the rest of the world, are much closer to the bottom of our societies than we are to the leaders of those societies. I thank the author for braving the wrath of his government to show us a glimpse of real life in the real China. It makes me think that the more different we appear to be, the more we are all the same.

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Oral histories tell dark fascinating tales August 12, 2008

By Lynn Harnett TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

As Studs Terkel did for American workers in "Working" and other books of oral history, so Liao does for the Chinese in this wide-ranging collection of interviews. From landowners to restroom attendants, from former Red Guards to Tiananmen parents, from professional mourners, feng shui practitioners, and fortune tellers to safecrackers and human traffickers, Liao encourages the ordinary people of China to tell their extraordinary stories.

A dissident poet and journalist who has himself been imprisoned, Liao has talked to everyone. Twin themes of incredible cruelty and quiet endurance run through the interviews. Some of the exchanges are hilarious, many of the accounts are deeply disturbing and tragic, and all of them portray the rapid changes China has undergone since the 1949 communist victory.

A Red Guard tells of torturing a school principal who had dedicated his life to the revolutionary cause, only to be accused at the start of the Cultural Revolution of forcing Western science on his students. The principal committed suicide. When asked if he ever felt he had gone too far the former Guard says:

"I was born into a family of blue-collar workers. The Cultural Revolution offered me the opportunity to finally trample on these elite. It was glorious. I couldn't get enough of it."

The human trafficker, Qian, interviewed in prison, describes how China's shortage of girls led to his success in the kidnapping and forced marriage business. He discovered the money to be made by selling his own daughters. "What do they know about happiness?" Qian responds when Liao expresses distaste. "My daughters are the children of a poor peasant."

Liao does not bother with Western journalism's objectivity. After Qian brags about his lying skills, Liao concludes the interview: "If I were the judge, I would first cut off your tongue as punishment. It deserves to be cut off."

No one has escaped China's political upheaval. The title interview, "The Corpse Walker," describes an old custom in which, back in unpaved China, people who died far from home would be taken on foot back to their families. But what starts out as a rather colorful, curious tale of an outmoded profession turns tragic as mob bloodlust and class hatred intervene.

The Cultural Revolution transformed a generation. Education was devalued, lives were blighted, torture and execution were common. The stories are heart-rending, but most of the tellers are more philosophical and fatalistic than bitter.

There is overall agreement that life in China is better these days, though many find the preoccupation with money ironic and a few lament the passing of their professions. The professional mourner describes how funeral rituals have changed, incorporating pop songs and limos. "People are not what they used to be. They don't even pretend to be sorrowful."

These very particular, individual stories breathe life into swathes of history. A Buddhist abbot describes an old woman's generosity during the widespread starvation of the 1960-61 famine, an old man tells of forsaking his bright revolutionary future for the love of a politically incompatible woman during the Cultural Revolution, a peasant matter-of-factly demonstrates the still destructive power of superstition (and the gulf between city and country) in "The Leper."

Liao's sympathetic and insightful interviews paint a complex, often breathtaking portrait of a convulsive period in a vast land.

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars compelling stories about ordinary people in China April 15, 2008

By D. Conroy

Format:Hardcover

I picked up this book after reading a review in the Financial Times. And I couldn't put it down. There is so much being written about China but nothing out there presents such a fascinating glimpse into the lives of ordinary people who are out of view in all the talk about the economic power.