The straight translation of the title of the book from which most of these interviews are drawn is "Interviews with People from the Bottom Rung of Society," and a reader soon gathers that there are many ways to end up on the bottom rung in China. We hear from a few actual criminals, such as "The Human Trafficker" and "The Safecracker." A larger number are outcasts thanks to their ties to traditional beliefs and practices that the state wishes to discourage, such as ""The Abbot," "The Falun Gong Practitioner," and the corpse walkers of the title, who carry on a tradition of accompanying a dead body to its birthplace for burial (the state prefers that the dead simply be cremated where they happen to have died).
The largest group on the bottom rung are people who have managed to offend the state in some way, intentionally or inadvertently. We have the brilliant composer Wang Xilin, who mainly wants just to write music but offends by his occasional candor; a man who found some old gold coins buried on his property and was accused of robbing graves; the father of one of the students killed at Tiananmen square; and of course people who got targeted and suffered during the Anti-Rightist Campaign, or the Great Leap Forward, or the Cultural Revolution, etc.
Liao Yiwu, like Terkel, is an astute interviewer, skillful at inspiring trust and then getting out of the way to let people tell their stories. As far as I can tell, he and his interview subjects have been well served by their translator, for the book is a brisk and engaging read. We get an extraordinary chorus of very individualized voices, a ground-level history of one of the world's oldest and largest societies during a half-century of astonishing and often tragic transformation.
No comments:
Post a Comment