It helps to know the ending before reading Liao Yiwu’s searing memoir, For a Song and a Hundred Songs: A Poet’s Journey Through a Chinese Prison. The “happy” ending, if any such adjective could be used to describe a life that the state has systematically destroyed, is Liao’s escape from China. After being denied an exit visa 17 times, the author finally fled his homeland and now resides in Germany.

By the standard of 1980’s China, Liao lived a comfortable, even enviable, life. A poet-in-residence at a municipal institute, he engaged in boozy nights of discussion with other intellectuals, and went on road trips to meet fellow writers. He was “a well-dressed hypocrite, a poet who portrayed himself as a positive role model but all the while breathed in women like I was breathing air, seeking shelter and warmth in random sex.” Meantime, his wife diligently transcribed his messy, illegible manuscripts, “a lonely widow using her artful penmanship to fill the void created by my neglect.”

China’s burgeoning democracy movement came to a murderous end on June 4, 1989. “The bloody crackdown in Beijing was a turning point in history and also in my own life. For once in my life, I decided to head down a heroic path.” He recorded a poem, “Massacre,” and made a movie with fellow intellectuals, an artsy rendering of the abrupt death of the protests called Requiem. These two works were Liao Yiwu’s ticket to a four-year odyssey through the Chinese justice system.

Detained in Chongqing, he was taken to the city’s notorious Song Mountain Investigation Center. From the moment he has to scream for permission to enter the facility, he is subjected to a brutality that is intent on reducing him to something less than a human. His head is shaved, and he is strip-searched, poked in the anus with chopsticks, assigned a number to be used in place of his name and introduced as “new inventory” into an overcrowded cell. Just as on the outside, where party leaders wield almost unlimited power in their fiefdoms, there is a “rigid hierarchical system” in the cells. “A path in the middle of the room divided the upper- and underclasses  … the chief was the king. Beneath him were his cabinet members. …  They possessed considerable clout and unscrupulously exploited and abused the underclass.”

It is at the investigation center that confessions and self-incriminating evidence are brutally extracted. In China, if you are detained in the first place, you are almost surely destined for trial. If you are put on trial, you are almost certainly found guilty. China’s conviction rates hover at about 99 percent.

Liao finds that many of the guards are secretly in sympathy with the counterrevolutionaries, and a number of them have read his poem. But they still have a job to do, and Liao is not spared the beatings and the electric baton. Almost worse, however, are conditions in the cell. To keep order, the chief chooses from a “menu” called “Song Mountain’s One Hundred and Eight Rare Herbs,” which lists punishments that are masterpieces of sadism. “Sichuan-style Smoked Duck: The enforcer burns the inmate’s pubic hair, pulls back his foreskin and blackens the head of the penis with fire.” “Noodles in a clear broth: Strings of toilet papers are soaked in a bowl of urine, and the inmate is forced to eat the toilet paper and drink the urine.”

After Liao is officially arrested, he is sent to the Chongqing Municipal Detention Center to await trial. Here, he encounters death-row convicts who, permanently shackled, must rely on the kindness of their fellow inmates for everything. Though the government does not release statistics, it is widely recognized that China has the highest execution rates in the world. Liao writes that “between ten thousand and fifteen thousand people were executed in China in the 1990s ... With rampant corruption in the court system, it is hard not to question how many of those on death row were wrongly convicted.” Up until their execution, the “living dead” never know when their time will come.

Finally, Liao pleads guilty to his crimes and is sentenced to four years in prison, including the two that he has already spent in incarceration. He appeals his conviction, even after a veteran prisoner advises him not to: “There is really no point. Be patient and get ready for the labor camp. Life is much better there.”

And indeed, although the penitentiaries are human-rights nightmares, life is not as tumultuous. The days of slave labor leave inmates too exhausted for violence and rapes. Food is distributed more equitably, each inmate gets his own bed, there is even a lamp with which Liao can read at night. After his transfer to the No. 3 Prison, which boasts the nation’s “highest concentration of political prisoners,” he starts his memoir and learns from a monk how to play the flute. He’s with kindred spirits, fellow ’89ers, as the counterrevolutionaries are known, who band together and protect each other.

Throughout the narrative, Liao tells the stories of his cellmates, although he admits that, “as more stories came my way through other inmates I became numb and started to find them exhausting and repetitive.” However, he feels compelled to bear witness, writing his memoir three times, as his manuscripts keep getting confiscated (“I have become an author who writes for the pleasure of the police”). He writes about the noble prisoners and the debased ones; their acts of profound kindness, and their most heinous cruelties. He does it to record the details that the Communist Party tries to erase from the world’s collective memory. He writes for those who are not poster children of Chinese government suppression, like Ai Wei Wei and Chen Guangcheng. He hopes that “the international community [will] look beyond the situation of China’s elite dissidents and pay attention to the deplorable conditions of ordinary political prisoners.”

After his 1994 release, his wife leaves him, his young daughter reviles him as a “bald criminal,” his cohorts in the making of Requiem sneer at him for not embarking on the new, government-approved mania of getting rich, “a corrosive acid that dissolved political dissent.” His relatives berate him for not adjusting to life in amnesiac, post-Tiananmen China. 

Liao’s powerful memoir makes clear that while China is eager to thrust upon its head the heavy crown of a world superpower, its flesh is riddled through with corruption and cannot bear the weight. If the government does not implement profound reforms soon, it may find itself just another name in the long list of China’s fallen dynasties.

Alice Stephens is a regular contributor to The Independent.

 

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