China's Underground Historian.

• Author: Awehali, Brian
• Position: Liao Yiwu

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Almost none of the students in his hometown of Chengdu knows Liao Yiwu's name, though he is one of China's most important historians. Liao was born in 1958, almost ten years after the founding of the People's Republic of China, and his embattled life and volumes of work, mostly oral histories of the lower strata of society, illuminate the collision between the Chinese people and its modern state.

He's been imprisoned and tortured for his writing, and though his work has received international acclaim, it's banned in China.

"Why should the government fear me?" says Liao smiling, the first day we met, along with an interpreter, at a riverside teahouse outside of Chengdu in Sichuan province. 'I'm just a guy who tells stories."

Liao has his own compelling life story.

During the extreme ideological duress of the Cultural Revolution, Liao's parents were jailed for being "rightists." He became a self-described "wandering child," unable to attend school because of his parents' political complications. But in this regard, he considers himself lucky.

"I didn't have to memorize Mao's Little Red Book !" Liao says, laughing. "I didn't have all that brainwashing. So in some senses, I was more fortunate than you may think."

He became an adult during the period of Deng Xiaoping, when the atmosphere became freer. "I was able to learn about [banned] Western music and literature, I read poetry, enjoyed music like the Beatles, wrote, and my poetry became famous," he says.

But in 1990, he was jailed after writing a poem dedicated to those who were killed at Tiananmen. "It's true that I suffered greatly in jail, tried to commit suicide twice, and suffered torture, and almost went crazy," he says. "But I didn't go crazy. For all of my suffering in jail, there were many people who went to jail and never got out."

As Liao says all this, he appears relaxed and bright, and he speaks almost as much with his hands as with his mouth. He is stocky, with a shaved head and alert eyes behind rimless glasses. He wears baggy black linen pants, a nondescript T-shirt, and navy blue flip-flops. The first day I interviewed him, it was sunny in a way peculiar to Chengdu and the basin in which it's situated. Ambient light filters through natural and industrial layers of monochrome haze in such a way that leaves everything shadowless. Many factories have moved away from the area in recent years, but pollution remains a grim reality here, as it is for much of...