num_pages: 336
description: The Corpse Walker is a compilation of twenty-seven extraordinary oral histories that opens a window unlike any other onto the lives of ordinary often outcast Chinese men and women. Liao Yiwu (one of the best-known writers in China because he is also one of the most censored) chose his subjects from the bottom of Chinese people for whom the new China--the China of economic growth and globalization-is no more beneficial than the old. By asking challenging questions with respect and empathy he manages to get his subjects to talk openly about their lives.Here are a professional mourner a trafficker in humans a leper an abbot a retired government official a former landowner a mortician a feng shui master a former Red Guard a political prisoner a village teacher a blind street musician a Falun Gong practitioner and many otherspeople who have been battered by life but who have managed to retain their dignity their humor and their essential complex humanity.Liao crafted the interviews (conducted between 1990 and 2003) with sensitivity and patience working both from notes and from his own memory of these remarkable conversations. The result is an idiosyncratic powerful and richly revealing portrait of a people a time and a place we might otherwise have never known.
language: English
title: The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories, China from the Bottom Up
publisher: Pantheon