In the same vein as Studs Terkel's
Americans, Liao Yiwu offers first hand accounts of the working life of lower-class Chinese in Post Maoist China, with an English adaptation of I
nterviews with People from the Bottom Rung of Society. The English version, titled
The Corpse Walker, contains twenty-seven of the original interviews in English translation. Anyone interested in the lesser known side of the "new" China and its burgeoning free-market economy, would do well to read this wonderful offering. It includes interviews of a pimp, a teacher, a Safecracker, and a Falun Gong practitioner, as well as many other similar stories of the denizens of the lower rung. China is a quickly changing country, and is of course still adapting to a Communist Totalitarian Government embracing free market economics and all the promise and hope it potentially will bring to the masses. Of course China has always had dissidents, but with a shrinking world and mass media, and much more access in and out of China, thjose of us living outside of China are more and more exposed to the works of art and literature the government of China openly attempts to suppress, destroy, and ultimately pretend that creative dissent does not exist.
Liao Yiwu is certainly a hero. He has spent much time in prison, custody, interrogation, detention, and continuous surveillance. This has not deterred him in any way. He continues to write and, with help from sympathetic friends outside as well as inside China, publish works in Chinese, via Taiwan, as well as English from publishers in the West. I am certain he knows how many of us here in the United States and many other Western countries wholeheartedly support him in his efforts.
