Five decades of China's history from the perspective of the marginal and the forgotten, the derided and the outmoded.

The past belongs to people at the top. At least that is what the Chinese authorities appeared to believe when, back in 2002, the government banned Liao Yiwu's expansive volume of oral history, a view of five decades of China's history from the colorful perspective of the marginal and forgotten, the derided and the outmoded. Liao's collection of 60 interviews includes the savory reminiscences of an abbot, a leper, a corpse walker, a blind musician, a former Red Guard, and a Falun Gong practitioner. An English translation of the book, "The Corpse Walker: Real-Life Stories, China From the Bottom Up," has just been published. The volume includes 27 interviews, offering a wide range of glimpses, from the spicy to the poignant, of what it took (and takes) to live on the fringes of Chinese society.

Translator Wen Huang

In his preface to the book, Philip Gourevitch writes that Liao is "a ringmaster of the human circus, and his work serves as a powerful reminder -- as vital and necessary in open societies lulled by their freedoms as it is in closed societies where telling truthful stories can be a crime – that it is not only in the visible and noisy wielders of power but equally in the marginalized, overlooked, and unheard that the history of our kind is most tellingly inscribed." The World Books' Bill Marx spoke to the book's translator Wen Huang about Liao, a dissident writer who in this book wanted to show his affectionate respect for the memories of ordinary people.

The World:Why choose this volume of interviews to translate?

Wen Huang: My enthusiasm has a lot to do with my experience with the writings of Studs Terkel. When I was growing up in China I accepted a stereotypical view of America: it was a savagely capitalist country where people on the bottom were starving. But when I went to college here my impression changed after I read Stud Terkel's collection of interviews entitled "Working," which gave me a compelling picture of the lives of ordinary people in America. In 2002, when I heard about Liao Yiwu and his book I felt that he might be the Studs Terkel of China. His interviews would give Americans a clearer idea of what life was like in China for ordinary people

In the ‘60s and ‘70s Americans saw China as a poor country, its people wrapped like mummies in gray Mao suits. Today, because of China's growing economic power, the stereotype has changed: people see the skyscrapers in Shanghai and the wide streets in Beijing filled with bicycles, cars, and pollution. "The Corpse Walker" shows what ordinary life is really like in contemporary China.

The book also offers a good way to learn about contemporary Chinese history. Everyone who grew up in China during the ‘60s and ‘70s was deeply influenced by the Cultural Revolution, by the Anti-Rightist movement, and by the Pro-Democracy movement. "The Corpse Walker" shows the impact of these traumatic events on the lives of ordinary people and that perspective is particularly valuable now, during the Olympics, because on TV people will be fed the official, airbrushed image of China. This book will give readers a sense of gritty Chinese realities.

The World: But Studs Terkel was not tossed into jail for talking to ordinary people. Liao Yiwu was.

Huang: Yes, in 1980 Liao Yiwu was inspired by the Pro-Democracy movement and horrified by the government's crackdown. He composed an epic poem called "Massacre," recorded the piece on tape, and then distributed it via the underground. Because of this he was thrown into jail for four years. When Liao came out he lost his job and his wife left him. He had to make his living on the street. He did gigs as a musician because he had learned how to play the flute when he was in prison. As Liao got to know the people on the street he decided to record their life stories.

When the book, which contained 60 interviews, was published in China the government was shocked by Liao's revelation of the dark side of ordinary life. The authorities saw it as an expose of the dark side of Socialism. The Communists had set out to build a utopian society, an egalitarian culture where nobody was left behind. But Liao shows a society filled with people struggling to survive – the current government considers that to be dirty laundry that must be kept hidden from the world. So Liao was often detained, sometimes for what the police called "conducting illegal interviews."

Still, things are changing as China opens up more and more to the outside world. In December of last year Liao was in Beijing to attend a PEN awards ceremony. He was detained, but rather than throw him in jail the police sent him back home, warning him that if he stays away from Beijing and the Olympics he will be free to write about whatever he wants and move around the country without fear. In China, progress and paranoia go hand in hand, especially when it comes to treating dissent authors.

The Corpse WalkerThe World: You say "The Corpse Walker" is about ordinary people, but its pages are filled with eccentric people working at some mighty strange jobs. Why is Liao drawn to the unusual if his goal is to evoke everyday life?

Huang: Because as China becomes more Westernized a way of life is beginning to disappear. For example, there is a profession, which began in the ‘40s, called corpse walking. There is a Chinese saying that "a fallen leaf should return to its roots." If a family member dies in a distant part of the country, away from his or her relatives, the body had to be brought back to the village. So the relatives hired kung fu masters to go and get the body. In those days modern transportation was rare and expensive, so corpse walkers would travel, by foot, hundreds of miles with the body, which had been draped in black. This is a fascinating practice you no longer see in China.

Also, Liao wants to preserve history. For example, in the book there is the story of a landlord who was persecuted during the land reform movement in the ‘50s. That was a brutal time of Communist repression when land was confiscated from the middle classes by the government. Millions died during that time, as well as in the famine of 1959-1961. A lot of people who lived through that period are old now, and their stories must be told to a younger generation that has no idea of what happened becasue the government still covers up Chinese history. Liao wants to preserve the past and its truths, the positive and the negative.

The World: Are works of non-fiction regularly censored in China?

Huang: "The Corpse Walker" was published and banned in 2002. But today a growing number of non-fiction works are published without interference from the police, even though some of these books criticize corruption in the government. In fact, books about the lives of real life people are enormously popular today -- true stories sell well in China. But the government's heavy hand, via self-censorship among publishers, still influences what is printed. If an author tackles a sensitive topic and publishers feel that the government would disapprove, they market it as fiction. So you have a paradox: on the one hand, more non-fiction is available, on the other, censorship continues because publishers are reluctant to print anything that might be seen by the authorities as threatening China's economic stability, its carefully maintained image of wide spread economic prosperity.

The World: It must have been an enormous challenge to capture all the different voices in this book. How well do you think you did?

Huang: First, you must understand that there is no oral tradition like Stud Terkel's in China, The idea of putting a tape recorder in front of people and transcribing what they say is novel. Also, in China there is a huge difference between conversational Chinese and the written language. It is highly unusual to import, completely, conversational Chinese into written works. There is a strong tradition among Chinese writers of polishing spoken Chinese in order to make it "respectable" and presentable. Thus all the interviewees in Liao's speak coherently. He reconstructed and embellished all the interviews – this is not a word for word transcript. That's why many of the figures in the book sound the same on the page despite their different backgrounds.

Still, even though all the people in "The Corpse Walker" live in the Sichuan province they speak various dialects, some of them pretty crude. Liao tried very hard to preserve some of these linguistic distinctions. When I translated the book I struggled to keep the flavor of the conversational Chinese and the colorful dialects used by the characters. The speakers use a lot of Chinese proverbs, which are very hard to translate. So I drew on American slang to suggest the informality of the Chinese. That is why some people may not like my translation – I kept in a lot of the original book's obscenities.

Still, some parts of Liao's book were not translatable. The reason we picked 27 stories out of the 60 in the Chinese version was because of cultural reasons and the challenges posed by the speaker's dialect, which in some cases was impossible to translate. There was one interviewee who talked about prisoners, drawing on a particular language that immates use when torturing each other. It was a very interesting story but I gave up on it because I couldn't capture its flavor in English.