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Prowadzący Umarłych. Opowieści Prawdziwe. Chiny Z Perspektywy Nizin Społecznych (2008)

by Liao Yiwu(Favorite Author)

4.11 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

8375362360 (ISBN13: 9788375362367)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Wydawnictwo Czarne

review 1: The author Liao Yiwu introduced the word "diceng" meaning "bottom rung of society" in 1949. His book "interviews with people from the bottom rung of society" was published in China in the 1990s. It was banned. In 2002 the complete manuscript was smuggled out of China. The translator Wen Huang met with Yiwu in 2004 and was given permission to translate some of the interviews and publish them as "The Corpse Walker and other true stories of life in China". While Yiwu still lives in china and struggles to have a voice or acceptance by the present day government (he's been jailed, fined and ostracised) he states he will never give up trying to get the real stories of china out.Yiwu spent decades listening to diceng stories, he then transcribed them secretly and had them smuggle... mored out of China to be published. The Party would prefer to pretend the diceng do not exist, and they certainly should not be mentioned. I thank Yiwu for letting these individuals speak, Huang for his translations, and The Text Publishing Company for sharing it.This was one of the most interesting and compelling books about China's history I have read. It's not about the usual, geographical, political or cultural history. This is a charming, confronting, bleak look at some of the more obscure careers that the poor and disenfranchised undertook.For example a corpse walker was hired to take travellers back to their home cemetery for burial or be destined to be a lonely soul or homeless ghost. The cemeteries could be hundreds of kilometres away and in rural districts their was no mechanised transport.There is also an interview with Professor Ding Zilin who founded the Tiananmen Mothers, a group of more than 150 families who lost someone in the massacre, and she has been a consummate mouthpiece and fundraiser for the victims.While it could be easy to get caught up in the freedom of speech issues surrounding this book and some of its interviewees - it is still a fascinating window into everyday life.
review 2: The Corpse Walker dives into stories of the lives of ordinary citizens of the People's Republic of China. The Communist Party and the Cultural Revolution are the dominant topics in this collection, as elderly and adult Chinese reminisce about their lives. Some men illegally walk a corpse an untold number of miles to be buried in its hometown. An unapologetic human trafficker relives his "glory days" in prison. A man who runs a public toilet talks about the Cultural Revolution and life in a turbulent modern China. Mr. Yiwu is adept at adapting his interviews with the "bottom" of Chinese society, telling their stories and risking his own life in the process. So many were hurt under Mao, and many still hurt from the memories and lingering physical pain. The emotional toll on those interviewed stuck with me after each story. I felt as if I could understand their harsh, unforgiving lives thousands of miles away. Oral histories of the lives of average people are rare, but provide a background and personality to history that a narrative can't. Not everyone in this collection is a good person; they are thieves, Red Guards, and revenge-seeking landlords. But they are all people. less

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