The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories: China From the Bottom Up (3 page)

The more I thought about it, the more despondent I became. The more I thought about it, the more suicidal I became. I burst into tears. I opened my eyes wide, staring at the sky, at the blaring sun, without blinking. I lost all my senses. I couldn't see anything or hear anything. I wailed my heart out. I kept punching myself on the chest and then reached my fists into the sky, as if I were wrestling for life with the Heavenly God. Then the person with the slingshot aimed at me. All I could hear was
bang,
and my head was hurting and spinning. I tried to keep my face upward. As long as my face was not bleeding, I would continue to wail. When the white flag flashed several times to signal my victory, I didn't even notice it. Later on, I was told that my opponent lost his voice way before I did. I still kept on for more than ten more minutes, bringing down tears in the crowds, who began to join and wail in a loud chorus. Even those triad guys had misty eyes. They were heard sighing: We have treated those out-of-towners unfairly. It's so sad. It's so sad to see that kid on the stage.

LIAO:
During Mao Zedong's Smashing the Four Old Elements campaign, in the time of the Cultural Revolution, after the Great Leap Forward, were you still allowed to perform?

LI:
I've never changed professions, but I have changed the tunes I play. While celebrating China's liberation, everyone loved folk tunes and folk dances. Our funeral troupe turned around and began to play in unison, “The Sky in the Communist Regions Is Brighter.” We performed similar revolutionary tunes during the ensuing political campaigns. Singing and performing helped to mobilize the masses. Whatever tunes the leaders wanted us to play, we followed orders. Performers like us were happy if we were fed three meals a day and given a comfortable bed at night. We seldom harbored any discontent or anger. Let me tell you, during the three-year famine, as waves and waves of people died of starvation, I continued to play rosy tunes, praising peace and prosperity. I guess after you act at funerals for too long, you become heartless. In this world, one shouldn't be too hot-blooded. Today, the Party allows you to speak your mind and has relaxed its political control, so you feel encouraged and excited. But if you get too carried away, the Party will send you to labor camps. Then you end up living with your tail tucked between your legs in the camps for ten or twenty years.

LIAO:
Your troupe disbanded, didn't it?

LI:
We broke up in 1951. Since then, I followed the example of many local suona players: doing farmwork during the daytime, and moonlighting when opportunity arose. Whenever someone got married, had babies, or died, people in the region would come get me because I was pretty well-known. Someone suggested that I form a new troupe and look for gigs. I gave it some careful thought and then said, “Uh-uh, no.” If I had a troupe, it would be considered a nongovernmental organization. Which government agency would it fall under? I wasn't aware of any, and in that case my troupe could be considered an illegal organization. If you were labeled illegal, you could be charged with counterrevolutionary activities. I wanted to avoid that.

I did have some auspicious years, but they seem to be so far away now. Immediately after China started its economic reforms in the late 1970s, my fortune changed. The old traditions were revived, and I became popular for a little while. But it didn't last long. Nowadays, people no longer follow the traditional practice of having suona music during weddings and funerals. Fewer and fewer invitations come my way. Country folks follow urban fads very quickly. Young people in the cities watch too many Hong Kong and Western movies. They begin to imitate everything in the movies. People no longer go through the kowtow ceremonies. Of course, country folks can't afford a Western-style wedding, but with a single phone call, they can easily rent a big limousine. That is much more grandiose than the traditional red bridal sedan chair followed by a band of suona players.

I have to stay away from the urban areas and try to find opportunities in the remote mountainous regions. It's really hard because you can never plan anything. Plus, I'm getting old. Traveling is no longer an easy task. I used to have several apprentices, but they have all given up and changed jobs. Young fellow, playing the suona in the old days was never considered a degrading profession. Rich kids might have looked down on us, but they were notoriously phony. Actually, the pioneer and founder of this profession was his holiness, Confucius. In his early years, he played the suona to support his mother. He performed at funerals, dressed in mourner's outfits made from white linens. He was also a professional wailer and coffin bearer. That's why you see the portraits of Confucius or his memorial tablets in many suona players' homes.

We are in a different era. Not so many people want to learn how to play the suona. Nowadays, once a tent for the wake is set up, relatives immediately pull out several mah-jongg tables and play gambling games all night long. The mourners are more preoccupied with winning games than with the deceased. People are not what they used to be. They don't even bother to pretend to be sorrowful.

LIAO:
What about funerals? The suona tunes still make the ceremonies more touching.

LI:
You seem to be out of touch with the current market economy. My village has easy access to modern transportation. When a person passes away, a family just has to make a phone call. A company specializing in funeral preparations will show up right away, offering a wide range of services from wreath rentals to the organizations of wakes and funeral processions. They call it one-stop service. In the old days, families invited monks to chant mantras to pave the way for the dead to cross to another world. Suona music accompanied the wailing of the devoted children. Nowadays, deaths are considered festival occasions here. People host pop concerts during the wake. Friends and relatives will fight for the opportunity to order songs on behalf of the deceased. These can be any kind of pop songs. Sometimes mourners use a popular song and change a couple of lyrics to make it fit the occasion. People go crazy over that. As for the funeral procession, the children and relatives of the deceased are no longer required to carry the coffin. People use cars or limos. Western instruments lead the procession. With loudspeakers, the funeral music can be heard miles away and everyone knows that a person has just died.

LIAO:
You know so much about funerals. I used to hear my grandpa tell stories about “walking the corpse.” Is it true that this was a profession, and people used to pay those professionals large sums of money to transport home the body of someone who died hundreds or thousands of miles away?

LI:
Correct. In the old days, there were people who specialized in walking the corpse. They normally traveled in the evenings, two guys at a time. One walked in the front and the other at the back. Like carrying a sedan chair, they pulled the body to walk along, as fast as wind. They would utter in unison, “Yo ho, yo ho.”

If you looked from a distance, you would see that the dead and the living march to the same steps. They used gravity to keep the corpse walking to the same rhythm. It was hard for the trio to change gait and make a turn, never a sharp turn. If you happened to see a walking corpse coming, you got out of the way. Otherwise, it could walk right into you.

I saw this in 1949. A local merchant was accidentally shot by a group of army deserters in Jiangxi Province. This merchant's name was Lu. I helped arrange his funeral. At that time, there was no easy means of water or land transportation to bring his body back home. His friends couldn't bear to bury him in another land. They paid money to those professionals to get his body home. It took them over a week, and when they got there his body looked as if he were alive.

Since most of these corpse walkers slept during the daytime, young people like me were quite curious. I licked a small hole in the window paper, and checked what was in their room. It was pitch-dark. All I could hear was the thunderous snoring. A guy called Xiao Wu wanted to sneak in and steal the wand used by the corpse walkers. We all wanted to see if there was any magic to it. But the moment he stealthily opened the door, a dark shadow jumped right onto him. It was a black cat.

Corpse walkers always brought a cat with them wherever they went. Before they set off, they would move the corpse, which was standing against the wall, the same way they would open a door. They would then carefully move the corpse outside, and support it from the front and the back. After that, a cat would climb all over the corpse three or four times. They called it “electric shock.” The three of them would march in unison on the same spot for a while, just like an army exercise. Then they began to move with “Yo ho, yo ho.”

LIAO:
I still don't know what to believe.

LI:
It's a true story.

THE HUMAN TRAFFICKER

Abducting or trafficking in women is a criminal trade that has a long history in China. In the old days, this profitable business was controlled by crime syndicates—the triads—which lured rural girls and women with offers of nice jobs in big cities, then sold them into brothels at a high price. After the Communist revolution in 1949, the government eliminated the triads in many parts of China. The business of domestic human trafficking has now been largely taken over by country bumpkins like Qian Guibao, whom I visited at a detention center in the city of Chongqing. I interviewed him for over two hours; since I was not allowed to bring any recording equipment into the prison, I had to write up the interview from memory.

LIAO YIWU:
You look like an honest hick. How did you end up in this trade?

QIAN GUIBAO:
My experience was nothing unique. I was a peasant in River Valley Village in Pinggu County, Sichuan Province. Have you heard of Pinggu, home of the famous pandas? In the old days, the mountain next to our village was covered with lush forests and provided us with everything we needed for a living. We would pick up the timber left by the lumber mills and sell it. It was pretty good money. In addition, the mountain was rich in many natural food resources. But as the demand for lumber increased, the trees disappeared fast. Soon the forest was gone. The lumber factory closed, we had no more leftover timber to sell, and it was impossible to plant crops on the bare, deforested mountains. You probably haven't visited my hometown, but you can't make a living there as a peasant. Before I turned twenty-eight, I had violated the one-child family planning policy because my wife had given birth to three girls. I couldn't even afford to buy pants for them.

Everyone else in the village was pretty much in the same situation. Men would wear pants made from dry grass when working in the field. They left their real pants at home, saving them for holidays and special occasions. In the wintertime, women and girls would be stark naked, huddling next to the stove to do housework. We led miserable lives until 1992, when a couple of young guys in the village decided to take the leather goods that many families had saved for years and sell them at the local market. With the money we got, we bought ourselves bus tickets and left the village. At first we found construction jobs in the county, and then we followed a contractor all the way to the northwestern province of Gansu. We soon gave up the hard labor jobs and I began to go from village to village, doing some small retail business. It was quite an eye-opening experience.

Northwestern China is enormous. In many places, there's nothing but barren desert. It was even hard to get drinking water. Locals would keep the snow in a big pond and the melting snow provided them with drinking water for half a year. In these villages, the men were honest and kind. They loved their women and followed them around. Since most families prefer boys to girls, there weren't too many women in the region. Young men would spend years pinching pennies so they could use all their savings to find a woman to marry. I felt so sorry for them. Each time they saw a woman, their eyes would brighten up with lust, ready to mount her and fuck her immediately.

My hometown in Sichuan was pretty poor, but I hadn't seen any men as desperate as these. As you know, the Sichuan women have a reputation for being industrious, good-looking, and nice to their men. Guys in the northern provinces love women from Sichuan. With that in mind, I saw a moneymaking opportunity.

LIAO:
What was your first experience like?

QIAN:
I couldn't sell anybody, so I married two of my daughters to two guys in a village in Gansu Province. My in-laws were considered relatively rich in the area. I received six hundred yuan and eight sheep. I sold the sheep to a peasant at the train station for fifty yuan each. So I ended up getting a thousand yuan [about $120]. I had never felt so rich. I was exhilarated beyond control. But a couple of days later, my daughters told me that they had met a few other Sichuan wives in the village. Those women were brought to the village by human traffickers, and guess the price those bastards asked for each woman: over two thousand yuan each. Basically, I lost money in the deal. Damn.

LIAO:
You sent your daughters to a faraway place and married them off to strangers for money?

QIAN:
What do they know about happiness? My daughters are the children of a poor peasant. As long as their husbands have dicks, that's all I care. The more often women get laid, the prettier they look. Of course with some women, after they give birth to a couple of kids, their looks are gone forever.

LIAO:
How did you manage to expand your business?

QIAN:
I realized that I could be pretty charming. When I started out, I was a little nervous and lacked confidence. I tried to do some honest business as a matchmaker for the women in my village. But it was really tough. I ran my tongue nonstop and talked up a storm, but my success rate was very low. Women growing up in the mountains had never left their native villages before. It was difficult to show up out of the blue and convince them to leave home and travel thousands of miles to marry a stranger. They wouldn't do it even when I threatened to kill their parents.

I had no other alternative but to entice them with beautiful lies. First I told them that I was running a restaurant in the north and recruiting waitresses to help out. I promised to pay them decent wages and cover their food and accommodations. Those lies didn't fly. So I came up with some new ideas. I had some fake identification cards made and claimed that I was recruiting workers for a textile factory in the north. I told the women that wool was cheap in Gansu since cows and sheep were abundant; it was an ideal location for the manufacture of sweaters and rugs. I told all sorts of lies, and finally some of them worked. Soon I became bolder and bolder. I set up contacts in several major cities in the northwest. My job was to transport the “goods” to a certain location, and my contacts would “distribute” them to the villages.

Practice made perfect. My tongue became as slick as if it were soaked in oil, and I could easily lure a real goddess from heaven into marrying a human on earth. There were many women who would swallow my crap like it was the most nutritious food they ever ate. If they believed in my crap and ended up getting sold, it served them right.

LIAO:
You were trading human flesh.

QIAN:
Comrade, that is certainly not a nice way to describe it. I didn't run a brothel.

LIAO:
Have you ever forced innocent women into prostitution?

QIAN:
A virtuous woman will never prostitute herself, no matter how hard you force her. But most women are just like men. They crave adventures and love easy money. It's true that I sold over twenty women in the past five years, but those women came to me on their own. I didn't threaten them with a gun. I wasn't a bandit or kidnapper. You didn't even have to use dirty tricks to lure them. There are so many poor bachelors in the north. I provided a service that linked those lovebirds thousands of miles apart. The beginning of their relationships might not sound too auspicious or tender. Sometimes the brides want to commit suicide. But after their initial reluctance or rebellious protests, most of them ended up accepting their fate. As time went by, their lives became better and more harmonious.

As for being tied up and beaten, it is quite normal in the countryside. A man cannot be considered a good man if he doesn't beat his wife or if he is too old to pick up a cane. Once, my wife and I were carrying some corn back from the field. I became so horny and wanted to have sex with her. She said she was having her period and that I'd at least have to wait until dark. I wouldn't give up and insisted that I fuck her in the daylight. She then said she was too tired, and didn't want to take off her pants. I got mad. Before I had the chance to grab a wooden pole and force her to strip, she bolted out the door. I chased after her. She jumped in the village pond, attempting to drown herself. Ha! Guess what? The water was only waist deep. She began to cry and scream when her body didn't sink.

Oh well, those girls that I transported to the northwest had much better luck than my wife. As the saying goes: Beatings and quarrels make good couples. I'm just trying to supply what the market needs.

LIAO:
You deceived those women and tricked them into the business. You ruined their lives.

QIAN:
I was also trying to provide a solution to a problem that the Chinese government faced. In some northern regions, there are too many bachelors. The regional climate is too dry and people are poor. Sooner or later, there will be disturbances. By taking women over there, I balanced the yin and yang. This helps dissolve young guys' sexual tension. As you know, the matchmaking service in the city collects fees. I was in the same business. Actually, if you deducted the cost of train fare, food, and other miscellaneous stuff, there wasn't much left as profit. Sometimes, after I negotiated with my contacts in the north and sent the girl over, the village bachelor would change his mind because he couldn't afford the fee. We'd have to sell her at a cheaper price.

LIAO:
Didn't you worry about bad karma?

QIAN:
Bad karma? That's such bullshit. If you read newspapers nowadays, you will constantly come across stories about how someone became enlightened and has finally come to realize the true value of life, blah blah blah. The so-called “value of life” is nothing more than not having to worry about money. When someone earns money without working hard, he begins to bullshit about the value of life. Just like a pop singer, who only needs to open his or her mouth, sing a couple of songs, and the money pours in like crazy. That's why everyone adores pop stars and models. I'm a peasant. Nobody envies the life of a peasant.

I admit that I lied to them and used deception. But in this world today, could you tell me a person who has not lied to get what they want? The only honest beings are animals, such as stupid pigs.

LIAO:
For victims of human smuggling, there is no such thing as a traditional wedding. In many cases, I'm told, the guy's parents hire some fellow villagers to tie up the girl immediately after the human trader hands her over and then the groom rapes her.

QIAN:
Rape? These guys are having sex with their wives. You can't call that rape. Of course, you're a city guy. You can meet girls at nightclubs or dance parties, or even at train stations. There are so many ways for boys and girls to meet in the city. If you're a shy guy, you can always join a government-run matchmaking service, or place a personal ad in the paper. If it doesn't work out with one date, you can meet someone else. Poor folks in the countryside are not so lucky. As for weddings, according to the local tradition, as long as you have a ceremony, with drums and horns, and invite everyone to a banquet, you are considered husband and wife. Country folks have been following these traditions for generations. They never follow the so-called “legal procedures.” Law just doesn't apply in those regions.

LIAO:
Well, the law applies to you. Are you going to get the death penalty?

QIAN:
I actively cooperated with the prosecution and they reduced my sentence to life imprisonment. I accepted the verdict and pleaded guilty. But I still can't accept the charges—that I've harmed the general public or caused lots of trouble for the government.

LIAO:
Is your human trafficking group still in business?

QIAN:
We used to have over ten people. Now, seven are here in this jail. Those guys working in the northwest were thrown into local jails. The two group leaders have been executed. I wasn't listed as a top criminal because I merely organized the goods and didn't abuse any of the women. I persuaded my colleagues not to touch the goods because northerners are pretty conservative people. They want the goods in their original packages. They want to see blood on their wedding night. Once you deflower the girl, you can't get a decent price.

LIAO:
Did you only target women from the poorest villages?

QIAN:
Mostly, but one time I managed to talk some university graduates into the deal. One of them was working on her doctoral degree at a university.

LIAO:
With that ugly face of yours?

QIAN:
Damn right. I acted very sophisticated. With those intellectuals, you could never use the lies you'd use to recruit for small companies or textile factories. They would see through your tricks right away. I dropped all my masks. I told them I was a peasant from a fairly well-off region, which was covered with fruit trees and thick forests, an uncultivated Shangri-la. When it comes to bragging about the abundant natural resources of the countryside, I'm an expert. It didn't take long for the female college students to change their minds. Then, I pretended to seek their advice on how to do business. I told them that my village desperately needed some educated folks to go help cultivate the natural resources. I invited one of the Ph.D. students to visit my village so she could refer more students to help my village do business. I told her we would hire college students and pay them high salaries. She fell for it so easily. I've got a remarkably slick tongue. Unfortunately, once you snatch those educated women, they can be a handful. One girl was locked up in a cell for over a week, but still wouldn't cave in to our demands.