paul allison said:

“After reading a review of this book in the Nation a week or so ago, I decided to order it. It arrived a couple of days ago, and I just finished reading the "Introduction: The Voice of China's Social Outcasts," which was written by the translator, Wen Huang.

What a mythic-in-our-own-time character Liao Yiwu is! He gains a lot of credibility from the persecution of his father and his own jail time, add to that his popularity, his world-wide recognition, his talent as a poet... and still what is his profession? He's a street musician.

After being in jail for four years, Liao "returns home to find that his wife had left him, taking their child. His city residential registration was canceled, rendering him unemployable and subject to expulsion to the countrysde. His former literary friends avoided him in fear. His only possession was a flute, which he learned to play in jail. Liao walked through the noisy streets in his native city of Chengdu and began his life a new as a street musician" (p. xi). How is that for a character sketch for a movie? This guy is pretty remarkable!

I like that Huang describes Yiwu's interviews as "literary as well as journalistic--reconstructions rather than transcriptions of his encounters with his subjects" (p. xii). As a teacher, my reading of this book is inspiring me to think about using oral history research and writing in my classroom, and it's good to have an example like this that reminds us that this is as much a storytelling act as it is one of reportage.

As I thumbed through the book I was struck with how similar it felt to Studs Turkel's work, and on page xiii, Huang makes the same connection. He writes that "Working introduced [him], and many other Chinese, to the real America and the lives of ordinary Americans... Similarly," Huang believes "the true-life stories in Liao's book will serve the same purpose for Western readers, helping them understand China from the perspective of ordinary Chinese." I love Sutds Turkel, especially working, and I've used that work before in my teaching connecting it to oral histories my students were collecting, using the stories to spark inquiries, and using the writing as a model. Maybe Liao's stories can be used in similar ways at my new school East-West School of International Studies.”

posted Monday, July 28 2008