I have always been fascinated with books that for one reason or another end up banned in any given country. The mere act of officially banning a book makes it tantalizing for me as I wonder what subversive messages it may contain. As someone who comes from a liberal democratic country, I consider myself extremely lucky for the sheer fact that I have at my disposal, all of the books that have been deemed unfit for public consumption in other less tolerant parts of the world. This is a privilege that I treasure greatly for in reading banned books, I am better able to get a sense of the world as it really is and not just how world leaders want to portray it.
I recently read a book that I found absolutely heartbreaking and astonishing at the same time. The book is called The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories: China from the Bottom Up. It is written by poet, musician and, a well-known critic of the Chinese government, Liao Yiwu.
Born during Mao's Great Leap Forward campaign, Liao saw the ravages of the Communist regime first hand. His father, a school-teacher, was labeled a counter-revolutionary, a fact that caused his parents to divorce in an effort to safeguard his future. As a youth, his views were shaped not only by his lived experience but by his extensive travels around China as much as his familiarity with Western writers and poets. Over time he started to produce poetry that gained literary recognition during the 80s when there was a sort of thaw concerning censorship in China. Not surprisingly, he was eventually imprisoned and tortured for his work. Despite this, following his release from prison, he put together this book which contains 27 interviews with people that found themselves, either by birth or circumstance on the bottom rungs of Chinese society.
In the West, we get such a skewed view of China, its people, its trajectory as a global power, its economic prowess. We alternate between fearing its dominance to ridiculing it as a mere paper tiger. For me, the best indicator of what a nation is and where it is going is the fate of the people that find themselves on the fringes of the mainstream culture of that nation. For this reason, I think this book is a must-read for anyone who is interested in cultivating a more nuanced perspective on this often misunderstood and heavily guarded country.