translated by Wen Huang

 

XICHUANBANA is the launch pad for hundreds of Chinese who yearn for a new life. There, the broad leaves of banana trees with stems as thick as buckets shelter the footpaths and their traffic of Dai women in traditional bright-coloured skirts with silk satchels wrapped around their waists past Dai-style houses standing lonely amid drab concrete buildings at the southern-most tip of Yunnan Province. It wasn’t at all what I had imagined.

     All that I knew came from Ai Wu’s Journey to the South, which chronicles the author’s early life as a vagabond in Southeast Asia. Ai had fled his native city of Chengdu to escape an arranged marriage and a stifling education system. The young writer hitchhiked south to Kunming where, weak and vulnerable, he wandered the streets by day, and at night slept in any available bed in a small rundown inn, a pair of old shoes as his pillow until the shoes were stolen by an even poorer guest. Ai’s 1935 journey took him further south, to Xichuanbana, from where he crossed without visa or passport into Burma, reaching Rangoon and filling his book with descriptions of that exotic land.

     Journey to the South isn’t as famous as Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, which helped define America’s Beat Generation, but for my generation of Chinese it had much the same effect. ‘Go south, further south’ was for years a popular mantra among my friends; now it is debased as a motivational slogan.

     In the 1980s, I dated a girl who read Journey to the South with tears slipping down her cheeks. She re-read the book on the night before she broke up with me and then followed the path mapped by Ai. She went south, further south, and was arrested by border police. She spent six months in a detention centre, where she endured the abuse and harassment of fellow inmates, most of whom were prostitutes and drug dealers. She returned to Chengdu, but only to better plan her next journey south. She sold everything she had and used the cash to bribe a private guide from a Dai village to take her across the border.

     She is now a wealthy woman, with a home in Bangkok and several properties in Chengdu – and two beautiful children. In 2001, during one of her visits to Chengdu, she treated me to a sumptuous meal and, over hard liquor, scolded me: ‘You gave me Journey to the South when I was still in my early twenties. I was inspired and wanted you to be part of my adventure, but you couldn’t be bothered. Look at yourself now: a middle-aged man shadowed by public security people. That’s pathetic, don’t you think?’

     Jing Bute went further south too. He was a leader of the underground ‘spoilt brat’ poetry movement, one of the trendy literary styles of the 1980s. In the mid-1990s, he slipped across the border from Xichuanbana, following Ai’s trail to what is now Yangon, where he was picked up as a street person and thrown in jail for more than a year. Rumour has it that his cellmate was a leader of the Myanmar Communist Party and, with his help, Jing was released and joined a group of labourers being shipped off by the government to work in Europe. He lives in Denmark now, the home to Hans Christian Andersen. Friends who have seen him say he has shaved his head and seems content.

     Yang Wei and Wu Ciyu were neither poets nor adventurers but fellow ‘counter-revolutionaries’ imprisoned after the government’s crackdown following Tiananmen in 1989. Before heading south, they were frequent guests at our house and got along superbly with my then wife, Song Yu. On their last visit, Yang took my copy of Journey to the South, which had lost its cover, and Wu took my flute, as well as a copy of my book Interviews with People from the Bottom Rung of Society. They harboured grand ambitions.

     Before leaving, they tried to persuade me to go with them. Wu, who had already visited Xichuanbana three times, secured the services of private tour guides in Dai villages and scouted their crossing point; every detail was meticulously planned. But I couldn’t commit myself. Next I heard they had reached Thailand and for several years roamed the streets in Bangkok as ‘international beggars’. I lost touch with Yang after Canada accepted him as a political refugee. As far as I know, Wu is still in Thailand. I received a letter from him recently:

 

There’s been some disturbing news. The Thai military government has ordered the UN Refugee Agency to cease its operations in Thailand. A translator working for the agency told me that the agency could leave Thailand anytime now. If that’s the case, I’m losing my last ray of hope. My situation here will further deteriorate. Brother Yiwu, no matter how hard it is, please help me.

 

I forwarded his message to friends who might have the right contacts, saddened by thoughts of what had become of him.

     When Hong Kong returned to China in 1997, following in Ai’s footsteps became the only viable means of escape from the mainland and ‘go south, further south’ the only advice one could offer those seeking a way out. Xichuanbana was often a topic of conversation among friends. Fellow inmates Xu Wanping and She Wanbao often talked – with the passion of young lovers planning their honeymoon – of sneaking across the border. I heard ‘Xichuanbana’ so often I thought it would blister my eardrums.

     And now I, too, had gone south, thinking of my friends and their dreams. ‘Go south, further south,’ I mumbled to myself. My travel companion, a Christian doctor with the family name Sun, who knew the region well, heard me.

     ‘Is another poem in the making?’ he teased.

     I laughed. ‘Do you find Xichuanbana poetic?’

     Dr Sun shook his head. ‘I came here in 1974 as a sent-down youth after graduating from high school. Jinghong was a forest town then: monkeys shuffling between bamboo houses, teasing and playing with the children and the Dai girls in their colourful dresses. It’s all gone. The city is getting bigger, and dirtier, by the day. It’s like anywhere else now.’

     He was right. We walked several of the mile-long streets, boxed in by ugly concrete buildings with monotonous façades. It could be a city in Sichuan.

     So we went in search of the authentic Xichuanbana. We asked a taxi driver to take us to a ‘real’ Dai village. The driver appeared nonchalant. The Dai villages had apparently become a major tourist attraction, he explained. Some have been converted into luxury resorts. Dr Sun was persistent: ‘But can’t you take us to a village where ordinary Dai people live?’ The driver’s face collapsed into confusion, so we had him stop and we tried other taxis, encountering the same reaction from each of the four we approached. The fifth driver was a Dai woman and she offered us a ride to a cluster of Dai villages near the Jinghong airport. I was in the middle of interviewing people for a book I was writing about the Land Reform Movement of the 1950s in Yunnan, and the prospect of talking to Dai villagers thrilled me. Dr Sun was excited too by the rare opportunity of a glimpse into the past.

     Traffic was light and our taxi zoomed onto the airport highway, where the narrow road suddenly expanded to five lanes. ‘We should be there in just a few minutes,’ our driver said. ‘Only twenty kilometres, very close to the border with Myanmar.’

     We began to see exit signs in both Chinese characters and the local script that pointed to Dai villages, but the driver appeared lost, making several calls on her mobile phone for directions. I began to despair until she turned off the highway and followed a side road for several kilometres before stopping and asking for payment. ‘You’re on your own now,’ she said, and pointed to the head of a path barely discernible amid the thick vegetation. We thanked her and set out along the pathway, which steadily narrowed the deeper in we went. Banana trees closed in until their leaves formed an impenetrable canopy and I imagined us walking in a deep, dark place. ‘This is what I used to see in Xichuanbana,’ said Dr Sun, clearly elated by the surroundings.

     The path led us to a wall and we followed that for some two hundred metres before coming to an old archway, which announced itself as the entrance to a village named ‘Manjingbao’, and we saw what the wall had been hiding: domed Dai-style houses – some old and dilapidated, others new and elaborate, some constructed with stone, others traditional bamboo structures with soot-covered roofs, densely packed together, the populace going about their business. We wandered around for about fifteen minutes before happening on a family inn and restaurant. The first level of the bamboo structure stood about two metres off the ground. I peeped inside the closed-in ground level, dark as a cellar, and could make out the thick timber poles that supported the house, which was as big as a basketball court. We climbed its steps to the second level, where there were several bedrooms with floor mattresses, a kitchen, dining and living rooms. The roof resembled the cover of a bamboo steamer. Dr Sun and I were led to our room, which had a strong musty smell, and two rectangular mattresses were pulled out and spread on the floor. Dr Sun sat down to test his bed. He nodded his head and said: ‘I feel as though the clock has been turned back.’

     We were treated to a Dai meal on the balcony: stewed chicken, spearmint leaves with beef, some unnameable indigenous vegetables and fried tree leaves. With a couple of drinks, we were all smiles. After lunch, Dr Sun went out with his bag to scout candidates for my interviews.

 

*   *   *

 

I used the quiet to work through some old newspapers that I had brought along in my satchel and reread a story about child slaves in brick kilns. I had seen the same story online: two mothers in the central province of Henan had gone looking for their missing children. In the course of their search, they went to various brick kilns in nearby cities and stumbled on a horrifying scandal of children abducted to work in slave-like conditions. They contacted a journalist and, with several other mothers who had also lost children, returned to the kilns in disguise and secretly videotaped what was happening to the children. The tape was broadcast on television and the nation was shocked. Police rescued more than 400 children. The public outcry spurred the Chinese leadership into ordering a crackdown on human trafficking.

     I had seen the video and listened to the commentary: children, ranging in age from eight to their early teens, worked for up to nineteen hours a day inside dark brick kilns; guards and vicious dogs monitored their movements; a lack of nutrition and excessive hard labour had reduced them to mere skeletons. As children, the Communist Party had us visit museums with exhibits purporting to expose the brutalities of so-called evil landlords against poor children and adults in rural areas. That such crimes against children could happen in modern times only fuelled public anger, as did the allegation that control of thousands of illegal brick kilns had been monopolised by local Party secretaries and officials. Children were abducted and sold to the kilns at 300 to 400 yuan each. Many of the illegal brick kilns under investigation were in provinces that supplied Beijing’s property developers and construction projects related to the 2008 Olympics. I think it was Karl Marx, revered grandfather of the world’s Communist movement, who wrote with gothic flair of ‘Capital which comes into the world soiled with mire from top to toe and oozing blood from every pore’.

     It all reminded me of the illegal coal mines I saw twenty years ago when I worked as a truck driver and travelled to remote villages in Sichuan Province. Private coal mines owned by former Communist officials and new entrepreneurs had turned the mountain slopes into a honeycomb of small mines. Adults and children crawled through entrances no bigger than dog holes, torches tied to their heads and headbands tied to a basket that trailed behind them. They would crawl to the coalface, load the basket and crawl back. For each basket of coal, they received a paper slip, and at the end of the month the slips were exchanged for wages, from which random deductions for something or other were common, such as rent for the dorms in which they were locked each night. There was no compensation for work-related death or injury. Guards with dogs were a constant presence, in case they attempted to break their ‘contract’ with the mine-owner and run away.

     Such scandals were becoming commonplace.

     My friend Yi Ping from the United States emailed me after one such scandal:

 

Isn’t it true that the Chinese people are hopeless? Is this what we get after receiving years of Communist education, which admonishes people to be altruistic and devote their lives to the Party and the masses?

 

I still don’t know how to answer him. China is a rising power, many overseas students are returning to profit from the economic boom, while many who will never benefit from China’s success are desperate to flee the fate to which the Party has condemned them. Some who plan their escape seek freedom; others, like corrupt Communist officials who sleep on stacks of one-hundred-yuan bills and worry about being stripped of their ill-gotten wealth by more powerful robbers, are also planning their escapes. Confucius advised us two thousand years ago that ‘A sage will not enter a tottering state, nor dwell in a disorganised one. When right principles of government prevail he shows himself, but when they are prostrated he remains concealed.’ I read on the internet a poem by someone called Wang Xinwen, entitled ‘Brick Kiln Slaves’:

 

     I know the whole nation resembled a brick kiln, dark and its doors shut

     Nobody inside can escape the tragic fate

     I therefore turn myself into a worm, dive deep

     And swallow mouthfuls of poisonous dirt.

 

The solution is to ‘go south, further south’, dodge the gunfire of the border police, dash across the border as fast as your legs will carry you, and find a new home, perhaps on another continent. Once settled securely, you can turn around with hands on hips and watch with ease the troubles in your native land and then, only then, open your mouth and say what you wish.

 

*   *   *

 

Dr Sun returned around dusk, sweaty and exhausted. He forced a smile. His visits to three Dai villages had produced nothing. Two people labelled ‘evil landlords’ and persecuted during the Land Reform Movement had passed away. Their descendants were too young to remember anything. I suppressed my frustration. When Dr Sun went to take a shower, I picked up a book, sat on the squeaking bamboo balcony and watched the bloody rays of sunset soak the banana trees.

     Then, the moon was out. Stars filled the sky. Dr Sun returned with renewed optimism. He touched the low eaves with a hand and said: ‘We have another new lead. He lives in Mannan Village, on the other side of the airport.’

     ‘Are you sure this will work?’

     ‘We’ll have to see what God’s plan is,’ said Dr Sun, and he laid out what he had learned. ‘The father of the family became a target for condemnation during the land redistribution campaign. So he took his son and attempted to escape to Myanmar. They were caught. The father was shot on the spot and the son was sent to a forced labour camp.’

     That was another border-crossing story. A comet flashed through the clear black sky. I shuddered in the evening chill. I wasn’t a Christian, but I said a prayer in my mind. If God truly cared about what happened in China, he would make the meeting possible so I could record the suffering of his flock.

 

*   *   *

 

From Xichuanbana one can cross the border by land, passing through the pristine forests, and walk to the end of the ancient path of Chama, or one can go by water, floating all the way down the Lancang River until it becomes the Mekong River that meanders along the borders of Myanmar, Laos and Thailand. People are like birds and beasts. We are born to be free. Unfortunately, the bullets of border police target humans, not birds or beasts. But if you are lucky, the bullets can be dodged.

     I recalled an email from a friend who had spent twenty-one years in prison for his anti-Party activities. He went to the United States after his release. This friend invited me to have a drink with him in America. He said he hadn’t had a drink for three years and he hadn’t had the opportunity to speak Chinese for several months. He was busy at work and at home. His email said:

 

Come on over. Bring your flute and bring your voice. We can drink, play and sing together, just like we used to do in China.

 

I wrote back saying the government wouldn’t give me a passport. He replied:

 

What are you afraid of? You attempted suicide twice when you were in jail. You were never afraid of death. Why don’t you run over to Xichuanbana, bribe a local Dai guide and go south, further south? You have nothing to lose. Thousands of people have already laid down their lives along the border. Their bodies are piling up in the netherworld. When you fall into the netherworld, you will at least have a soft landing.

 

But I’m not in Xichuanbana to escape. I am here with Dr Sun on another mission. Dr Sun didn’t intend me to go so far south that I didn’t come back. He had been in the border region for many years, doing missionary work among the poor. He could easily cross to the other side, but he didn’t. Why should I?

 

*   *   *

 

Fatigue had set in, but Dr Sun stood out on the balcony looking up at the stars and began to talk to me about God. ‘Only God has the power to judge what happens in this world. We, as human beings, are not in the position to be judgmental.’

     I asked: ‘Shouldn’t we be judgmental and speak out against a totalitarian society?’

     ‘We don’t need to,’ he said, ‘because God has already reached his verdict for us. You already know what God’s judgment will be. That’s why you are not following the paths of other Chinese writers who make up stories to please those in power. You come here to document history and to record people’s suffering. You write about topics that nobody dares to write. Even though you have not been baptised, God will take special care of you. Stay and continue to write.’

     Fine sentiments, but I didn’t see how religious faith was going to make that any easier.

 

*   *   *

 

In January 2009, news came from Melbourne that the Chinese version of The Big Earthquake had won me an award from something called Qi’s Cultural Foundation. I looked up the organisation on the internet and learned that the award was set up in memory of a former Chinese political prisoner, Qi Zunzhou. Qi was an alumnus of the No. 2 Sichuan Provincial Prison, where I spent two years for writing and distributing my poem ‘Massacre’ after the Tiananmen crackdown.

     The prize came as a shock. It was encouragement from one political prisoner to another. I was touched and enticed, like a prisoner hearing the sound of keys outside his dark cell. This was an award I wanted to collect in person and it was as if an invisible hand was leading and guiding me in life. Then my phone rang. It was the local police. They wanted a meeting.

     It was a sunny afternoon, right after Chinese New Year. Mr Zeng, the local police chief, looked weary and distracted. He said he had to officially convey to me the government decision to reject my application for a passport. When I asked for more explanation, he said: ‘You know what I mean.’

     I nodded in response: ‘Of course. It’s going to be an eventful year – one year after the earthquake, the twentieth anniversary of Tiananmen, the tenth anniversary of the government’s crackdown on Falun Gong, the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Those milestones pose many potential headaches for the government. I know … but what does this have to do with my travelling abroad?’

     Mr Zeng warned me not to pursue the matter any further.

     Public security officials in my hometown were busy handling the aftermath of the earthquake and it was relatively easy for me to change my residential registration and obtain a new one at a small town nearby. With the new registration card, I was able to obtain a passport – the public security bureau in Chengdu had denied my application nine times.

     With my new passport, I submitted my visa application at the Australian consulate and went there for an interview, during which I promised: ‘I won’t use this award as an opportunity to escape to your country and claim political asylum, as many of my pathetic fellow countrymen have. I have no ulterior motives. I’m a writer who thrives on the tales of people living at the bottom rung of society. I’m rooted here despite the fact I hate it. The air in Australia is fresher, but I can’t live on fresh air alone.’

     The tone of my voice was one of confidence, but deep down I had a gnawing pain. It's a hard life, being a writer. In the past two decades I have interviewed more than 300 people at the bottom of society and chronicled their lives – particularly harsh lives because of disasters and tumultuous political campaigns. None of my books is permitted in China, but my writings have reached the internet and, despite attempts by the authorities to censor cyberspace, a growing audience at home.

     I was granted a visa, reluctantly, I think, and only because the Australians feared the adverse publicity more than the annoyance of Beijing. As I made my preparations, my intellectual friends determined I was acting ‘recklessly’.

     ‘We are living in a big country ruled by a powerful totalitarian government,’ they said. ‘Don’t even go near the immigration checkpoints at major airports. You could get yourself into trouble.’

     I argued that I had all the necessary legal documents. They snorted with laughter. ‘Old Liao, you are over fifty years old, yet you still haven’t grown up. Your longing for freedom has blinded you; you cannot see reality.’

     My lawyer told me not to relinquish my passport to anyone. ‘Don’t let them snatch it away.’

     My plan was an elaborate one, worthy of Ai Wu himself. I would go south, further south, but not through Xichuanbana. That would be too risky. My girlfriend and I would put together a large parcel, much like the ones hauled back and forth across the border by travellers and traders, and board the train from Chengdu to Nanning, in Guangxi Province. I planned to cross at the China-Vietnam border, and would erase any trace of my escape by turning off my mobile phone and shutting my email accounts. The only thing I didn’t do was have plastic surgery.

     As my girlfriend and I joined the crowd filtering through immigration, an officer asked me to step out of the queue. I released my package, which stood as tall as me, and handed over my passport.

     ‘Is this your first time travelling abroad?’ he said, scrutinising the photo and details, testing the surface with his thumb, flicking through its blank pages. ‘ID card,’ he snapped.

     The immigration officer went to a nearby desk and, pecking at the keyboard, tapped my information into the computer. He then raised his head and looked at me for a few moments. ‘There’s a problem. Wait inside this office for a few minutes.’

     ‘Do you want to check my luggage?’ I asked, trying my best to feign innocence.

     ‘Yes,’ he said. Four police officers followed me into the office and leaned against the walls. They didn’t search me. They didn’t ask me any questions. I sat on a hard chair for more than two hours. The immigration officer came in with a piece of paper and read from it: ‘Liao Yiwu, based on Article 8 of the Chinese Immigration Regulation, you have been barred from leaving the country.’

     I didn’t argue with them.

     After leaving the immigration office, I went to an adjacent village and from there looked at the border – a huge muddy pool with several wooden stakes marking a line through its middle. No barbed wire or searchlights; really nothing more than a line on a map.

     From the bus station, I headed for Yunnan Province and, twelve hours later, reached Mengzi. Another five or six hours further on and I reached Hekou County. I could see Vietnam from across the river. But when I reached immigration, the computer delivered the same message. As the saying goes: ‘The net of heaven stretches far and wide, coarse mesh letting nothing through.’

     In two weeks, I traversed thousands of kilometres of border, looking for a legitimate way through, before finally I conceded that my plan had failed miserably. I returned to my hometown, exhausted. It was a beautiful dream of freedom while it lasted. Now I am awake, and I am still here.

     As I wrote my book about the earthquake, my mind reached a point of saturation. I was reluctant to talk about the book. I didn’t want to revisit the purgatory of death and pain I had witnessed. I thought the award might
let me see the ocean on the other side of the hemisphere and breathe some fresh air.

     I used to blame fate for the obstacles I encountered in life. But I had survived prison, while others had died within its walls. And I had survived a devastating earthquake while so many others perished. And hundreds of people are arrested or shot crossing the border. I don’t have a single reason to complain.

     I accept my fate, which is to stay, and write.