Book Passage of the Week – from The Corpse Walker (9/17/2016)

Just finished The Corpse Walker by Liao Yiwu. I’m writing a full review as we speak.

From Zhou, the Public Restroom Manager:

My monthly profits are about two hundred to three hundred yuan. I’m pretty content with that. And for an old guy like me, managing toilets is easy work. Life is tough and tiring. All my nerves are strained. One of these days, one of the nerves will snap, and then I’ll be gone.

Luo, The Corpse Walker:

Country folk seldom got to visit the city and had no access to entertainment all year long. Public denunciation meetings offered free drama for many onlookers. None of them wanted to miss it.

Huang, the Feng Shui Master:

At the moment, my life is coming to an end, reaching zero. Zero is nature. The mountain is my home.

Deng Kuan, The Abbot:

When you turn one hundred, and look back on the early part of your life, a couple sentences are sufficient.

And let’s not forget the introduction, written by Wen Huang:

During the famine, [Liao Yiwu] suffered from edema and was dying. Out of desperation, Liao’s mother carried him to the countryside, where an herbal doctor “held me over a wok that contained boiling herbal water.” The herbal steam miraculously cured him.

There is a lot of mythologizing about Liao Yiwu. Not only was he born the year The Great Leap Forward was launched, he was also “miraculously cured”, a presumably divine act that would later allow him to live on the lam as a dissident writer, barely known in his own country.

Also, this is an abridged work; according to the introduction, Wen Huang chose twenty-seven stories they felt were both representative of the work and of interest to Western audiences.

I’ll be covering this and more in my full review.