Liao Yiwu’s The Corpse Walker

Wanted to give a plug to Liao Yiwu’s The Corpse Walker and Other True Stories of Life in China as it is a great book. I’m also going to point to this interview with Liao Yiwu in The Australian as the author comments on why the Chinese Communist Party still praises the work of novelist social commentators such as Lu Xun yet Liao Yiwu has been deemed a pariah by the communist state for his social commentary.

The Corpse Walker is a collection of twenty-seven extraordinary interviews that opens a window, unlike any other, onto the lives of ordinary, often outcast, Chinese men and women. Liao Yiwu reconstructs conversations he had between 1990 and 2008 with a range of remarkable people: a professional mourner, a human trafficker, 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 a corpse walker. The result is an idiosyncratic, powerful and dignified portrait of a people, a time and a place we might otherwise have never known.

Liao Yiwu is a Chinese poet, novelist, and screenwriter. In 1989, he published an epic poem, ‘Massacre’, that condemned the killings in Tiananmen Square and for which he spent four years in prison. In 2007, he received a Freedom to Write Award from the Independent Chinese PEN Centre. In July 2011, Liao Yiwu escaped to Germany after repeated attempts to publish his books were stymied by Chinese authorities.