The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories: China from the Bottom Up

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 society: 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 others–people 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.

• China in Ten Words
• Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory
• The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers
• Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China
• Small Fry
• A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century
• Wild Grass: Three Stories of Change in Modern China
• The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World
• God Is Red: The Secret Story of How Christianity Survived and Flourished in Communist China
• Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China