Free The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories: China From the Bottom Up by Liao Yiwu

you have any contact with leprosy patients while you worked there?
    ZHANG: Of course. We hung out together all day long. It was no big deal. Nothing happened to me. When I got home, the world had changed. Chairman Mao had already died, and Deng Xiaoping had taken over. The commune no longer existed. They'd had a public meeting and distributed all the land to individual households. Since I wasn't around, they didn't leave me anything, not even a piece of dirt. Even if I had been around, they would have told me that I wasn't eligible because I was a leper. So I became homeless overnight—no land and no home. But I didn't give up, and I began to petition the local government. I told those officials: I come from generations of poor peasants. Didn't Chairman Mao say that poor people are the pillars of the Communist society? Why should I have to put up with this shit?
    The government offices didn't know what to do about me. Finally, a leader from my village made a proposal: since I was a bachelor and was way past marriage age, he promised to fix me up with a girl from another county. In this way, I could move out of the village and get a wife and some land in another county. Why not? That didn't sound too bad. So I accepted. The girl's name was Xu Meiying. Neither of us was picky. Soon after we met, I thanked the matchmaker, held a wedding banquet, and moved out of Shimenkan. As you know, in the rural areas, women normally move in with the guy's family after marriage. I did the opposite. The locals called me a relocated son-in-law.
    LIAO: Did your wife know about your past at the leprosy sanatorium?
    ZHANG: She had stayed at the same leprosy sanatorium for a while and was also released, like me, because her test results came back negative. Even so, people were afraid to be around her. That was probably why they fixed us up together. Even now, people here are scared of leprosy. If they think you might have it, they'll immediately lock you up in an isolated ward. Over the years, many healthy people have been sent to the hospital because fellow villagers suspected they had leprosy. So Xu Meiying and I turned out to have a similar history. Before me, she had several boyfriends. None of them had a good reputation. None of them made an honest living on the farm. They were either petty thieves or scoundrels. Compared with the other guys, I was a much better catch.
    I moved in and we began to sleep in the same bed. She was about three years younger than I was. When we first lived together, they had just started building this road. That shows you how long ago it was. We farmed together and life was OK.
    LIAO: Did you have kids?
    ZHANG: No. My wife was sick for many years.
    LIAO: I was told that they burned her to death. When did that happen?
    ZHANG: I don't remember exactly. I think it's been ten years. She had met an evil dragon and was possessed by its spirit, and we couldn't find a cure. It all started in the spring. As I was plowing the field, another Ma snake jumped out at me. I didn't want to kill it, but the snake looked so menacing. I was scared and smashed it to death. Soon after that was the Qingming festival, when everyone in the village goes to visit the cemeteries and pays tribute to the dead. My wife visited her mother's tomb on that day. After she came back, we had a guest—a relative of hers from Fumin County. She stayed with us for over three months. This relative gave her some colorful new cloth. My wife made a quilt out of it.
    LIAO: Wait, I'm lost. Let's go back to the evil dragon.
    ZHANG: That night, there was a terrible thunderstorm. Pouring rain. Right before dawn, a big clap of thunder struck. Our whole house shook. Suddenly, the evil dragon appeared along with the thunder, coming down like the lid on a big cauldron. I could see the head of the dragon half-hidden inside the cloud, its tail wagging back and forth over the village cemetery. My wife opened the window and tried to peek at what was going on outside. As