For a Song and a Hundred Songs: A Poet's Journey Through a Chinese Prison Hardcover - 2013
by Liao Yiwu; Wenguang Huang (Translator)
From the renowned Chinese poet in exile comes a gorgeous and shocking account of his years in prison following the Tiananmen Square protests.
Summary
WINNER OF THE 2012 GERMAN BOOK TRADE PEACE PRIZE
In June 1989, news of the Tiananmen Square protests and its bloody resolution reverberated throughout the world. A young poet named Liao Yiwu, who had until then led an apolitical bohemian existence, found his voice in that moment. Like the solitary man who stood firmly in front of a line of tanks, Liao proclaimed his outrage—and his words would be his weapon.
For a Song and a Hundred Songs captures the four brutal years Liao spent in jail for writing the incendiary poem “Massacre.” Through the power and beauty of his prose, he reveals the bleak reality of crowded Chinese prisons—the harassment from guards and fellow prisoners, the torture, the conflicts among human beings in close confinement, and the boredom of everyday life. But even in his darkest hours, Liao manages to unearth the fundamental humanity in his cell mates: he writes of how they listen with rapt attention to each other’s stories of criminal endeavors gone wrong and of how one night, ravenous with hunger, they dream up an “imaginary feast,” with each inmate trying to one-up the next by describing a more elaborate dish.
In this important book, Liao presents a stark and devastating portrait of a nation in flux, exposing a side of China that outsiders rarely get to see. In the wake of 2011’s Arab Spring, the world has witnessed for a second time China’s crackdown on those citizens who would speak their mind, like artist Ai Weiwei and legal activist Chen Guangcheng. Liao stands squarely among them and gives voice to not only his own story, but to the stories of those individuals who can no longer speak for themselves. For a Song and a Hundred Songs bears witness to history and will forever change the way you view the rising superpower of China.
Details
- Title For a Song and a Hundred Songs: A Poet's Journey Through a Chinese Prison
- Author Liao Yiwu; Wenguang Huang (Translator)
- Binding Hardcover
- Edition First Edition
- Pages 432
- Volumes 1
- Language ENG
- Publisher New Harvest, Boston, New York
- Date 2013-01-15
- ISBN 9780547892634 / 0547892632
- Weight 1.41 lbs (0.64 kg)
- Dimensions 9.11 x 6.31 x 1.36 in (23.14 x 16.03 x 3.45 cm)
- Library of Congress subjects Prisoners - China, Liao, Yiwu
- Library of Congress Catalog Number 2012019558
- Dewey Decimal Code B
Excerpt
Preface
I have written this book three times, thanks to the relentless obstructions of the Chinese security police.
I first started writing it on the backs of envelopes and on scraps of paper that my family smuggled into the prison where I was serving a four-year sentence from 1990 to 1994 for writing and distributing a poem that condemned the infamous, bloody government crackdown on the 1989 student prodemocracy movement in Tiananmen Square.
Even after my release in 1994, the police continued to monitor and harass me. On October 10, 1995, police raided my apartment in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, confiscating the handwritten manuscript of For a Song and a Hundred Songs. As a punishment for what they called “attacking the government’s penitentiary system” with my writings, I was placed under house arrest for twenty days.
I started on my book again from scratch. It took me three years to finish a new version, which was seized in 2001, along with my other unpublished literary works. This time, the police also absconded with my computer.
Writers like to wax poetic and brag about their works in an attempt to secure a berth in the history of literature. Unfortunately, I no longer possess many physical products of my years of toil. Instead, I have become an author who writes for the pleasure of the police. Most of my past memories—the manuscripts that I have painstakingly created about my life, and my poems—are now locked away at the Public Security Bureau. In a grimly humorous twist, the police used to peruse my writings more meticulously than even the most conscientious editors.
Chinese career spies have amazing memories. A director of a local public security branch could memorize many of my poems and imbue them with more complicated ideas than I had originally intended. So in a sense, my writing found a way to the minds and lips of at least one eager audience.
Indeed, the police proved to have an insatiable need for more of my work. So after each successive raid, I dug more holes like a rat, and I hid my manuscripts in deeper and deeper crevices across the city, in the homes of family and friends. My furtive efforts to conceal my work called to mind those of the Nobelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose handwritten manuscript of The Gulag Archipelago had famously faced similar threats from the KGB. The only way to preserve his writings was to get them published.
In early 2011, after this book was finally smuggled out of China and scheduled to be published in Taiwan and in Germany, I again met resistance from the Chinese authorities. My police minders, who were occasionally stationed outside my apartment during the height of the Arab Spring, invited me out for “tea.” In a nearby teahouse, they asked me to sign an agreement canceling publication. “Your memoir tarnishes the reputation of our country and harms our national interest,” said a police officer who had read the confiscated manuscript.
“Why can’t you write books about harmless romances, and we can get them published here and make you rich?” the officer added in a matter-of-fact way.
When I politely declined, the officer issued me a warning:If I disobeyed, they would either prosecute me or have me “disappear for quite a while,” just as they had done with other writers and artists such as Ai Weiwei and Ran Yunfei.
I never signed the agreement and opted, instead, to leave my homeland of China. With the help of intrepid friends, I crossed into Vietnam and safely landed in Germany, just in time to promote the release of this chronicle of my life, which was twenty years in the making.
In China, the government continues to erase and distort the collective memory of the country to suit its all-encompassing political agenda. However, an individual’s memory, with its psychic encoding and indelible scars of oppression, will forever hide a deeply etched record in blood and intellect. Its imprint, like history, can never be erased.
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