The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories: China From the Bottom Up Read Online Free PDF Page A

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