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

ladies.” But the stonemason lacked the proper skills and none of the statues of young women looked pretty. You could hardly tell from their faces whether they were men or women. Building a tomb should be a private affair, but the township chief made it a huge public event.
    It's hard to blame him. Throughout history, there have been many people like him. For example, Emperor Qin Shihuang [259 bc–210 bc] defeated other kingdoms and united China. After he established the Qin dynasty, he racked his brain and tried to figure out how it could last forever. While searching for an immortal pill, he also began to build his own grave. He wanted to take his wealth with him. Guess what? He ended up dying at the age of forty-nine. Soon after his death, his empire crashed. Do you see any difference between Emperor Qin Shi-huang and our government officials? They are in constant pursuit of gain for themselves and their descendants. When you overdo it, you achieve the opposite result.
    Please excuse the digression. Since the township chief made a big deal of his tomb, he soon caught the attention of the local media. The pictures of his tombs were all over the paper. The county government read the report and sent out an investigative team to check how the tomb was financed. They found out that the chief had embezzled public funds. It became a huge scandal. A whole bunch of people under him—the village chiefs and the village party secretaries—were all implicated. They had all followed his bad example by illegally occupying public and private lands, and embezzling public funds to build their own tombs. Many peasants also followed their lead. Those who couldn't afford to get advice from a feng shui master began to build their own tombs near those of the officials. As you can see from here, there are several rows of empty tombs on the sunny side of the path.
    LIAO: Were you implicated in the scandal?
    HUANG: And how! The township chief blamed me for all his criminal activities. He told everyone that he had fallen into my superstitious trap. He said I had encouraged him to embezzle public funds to support his tomb-building project. He accused me of ruining his career and fortunes as well as those of his descendants. Then, many other party officials followed suit. They went to the police with the same accusations against me. Overnight, I became a criminal who was responsible for the revival of superstitious activities in the region. I had to run away and hide inside my own tomb for several months. Nobody knew where I was. They caught my nine-year-old apprentice and made him a scapegoat. The TV station shot a documentary about how the nine-year-old feng shui prodigy was a quack and deceived people with his tricks. After the documentary was aired, many people started to harass my family members. The public security bureau detained them for interrogation. Luckily, none of my family members knew the location of my hiding place.
    As the investigation expanded, police began to target other feng shui practitioners. They ended up arresting over twenty of them. Those poor guys were publicly denounced at village meetings and paraded through the streets along with other criminals. I heard several of the younger feng shui guys have been sent to a reeducation camp around here.
    Two years ago, there used to be an area in the marketplace for blind fortune-tellers and feng shui masters. I used to have a booth there and was in great demand. Many considered me a regional treasure. But police raided the area and made it illegal to practice fortune-telling and feng shui.
    LIAO: Are you still on the run?
    HUANG: No. Once the campaign was over, people forgot about me. Besides, I'm in my nineties. What can they do about me? I'm too old to do any physical labor if they decide to send me to the reeducation camp. If they do lock me up, I could corrupt more people in jail by giving them feng shui advice. Believe it or not, people love this kind of stuff. During the