From the Publisher
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.
The New York Times -
Michael Meyer
…an industrious, well-crafted recording of oral histories, almost all from the southwestern province of Sichuan…Most books about China published in the West plant their standards at the best-selling poles of enchantment or awful mystery, but The Corpse Walker is more subtle. Its collective tone is not mournful but, rather, full of forbearance and forgiveness.
The Washington Post -
Da Chen
Liao Yiwu got in trouble, to put it mildly, for speaking in his own voice. He spent four years in a Chinese prison for circulating a tape of himself reading "Massacre," his underground poem about the killings in Tiananmen Square in 1989. In The Corpse Walker, the 49-year-old poet and author, who still lives in China and struggles against censorship, speaks through others: He gives us the oral histories of 27 people from Sichuan province, his birthplace in southwestern China. But the resulting collective portrait is as full of indignation as his own poetry.
Publishers Weekly
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.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Melissa Aho
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Library Journal
A popular and much-censored author in China, Laio here illuminates the lives of those at the very bottom of Chinese society-people who don't officially exist in today's modern China and who were often the most affected by the Cultural Revolution. Based on conversations Laio had between 1990 and 2001 and presented in interview format, this book offers the oral histories of 27 intriguing men and women, who range from grave robber to former Red Guard, migrant worker, political prisoner, and Buddhist abbot. One even recalls the lowly work of the title's traditional corpse walker, who returns to their homeland the bodies of those who died elsewhere. While their lives are often tragically sad, these individuals are often humorous in their reflections, and each has such a distinct voice that you are not likely to forget any of them soon. Highly recommended for larger libraries and for all libraries with Chinese collections.-Melissa Aho, Univ. of Minnesota Lib., Minneapolis
Kirkus Reviews
English-language publication of dissident writer Liao's "interviews with people from the bottom rung of society," a 2001 bestseller in China until the government banned it. Working with the author, translator Wen selected 27 pieces representative of the unabridged Chinese work that would interest Western readers, adding background information to clarify the political and historical references. The interviews cover a broad cross-section of Chinese society-the kind of people who never turn up in tourist literature, official press releases or the accounts of Western journalists focusing on a small number of dissidents. Officially unemployable after a four-year prison stint for protesting the suppression of the pro-democracy movement, poet, novelist and screenwriter Liao began talking to others at the bottom of the labor force. Some of the most illuminating chapters are devoted to people with jobs that are either peculiar (a performer of mournful music at funerals) or illegal (the former leader of a sex-trafficking ring). Liao never actually met a "corpse walker," but a nonagenarian family friend told him stories about people who risked punishment for engaging in "business connected with tradition and superstition" by carrying dead bodies back to their hometowns to be buried in their native soil, as custom demanded. Many interviews reveal the horrors and/or stupidities of communism. A retired Party official saw the Great Leap Forward lead to famine and even cannibalism in a rural section of Sichuan province. Grandpa Zhou, who worked in a public restroom in the city of Chengdu, found waste disposal a perfectly respectable job, but the intellectuals and professors who were labeledcounter-revolutionaries and forced to clean toilets during the Cultural Revolution did not. Many of them couldn't take the loss of status, Zhou recalled, "and hanged themselves with their belts inside the toilet stalls." Other chapters show political decrees provoking radical personal changes. Mingles a scholar's detachment with bemused sadness at the cruelties of a troubled and furious history.
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