Liu Xia’s (劉霞) wedding day in 1996 turned out to be good preparation for the following 14 years of married life. She and her groom, Liu Xiaobo (劉曉波), ate a modest celebratory lunch with relatives. Then she returned home, leaving her new husband to continue serving his sentence in the re-education-through-labor camp.
It does not sound like much of a wedding, but the poet still smiles when she thinks of it.
“I was very happy,” she says, “because once we were officially married I could visit him.”
PHOTO: AFP
In 1996 her husband was serving a three-year sentence for speaking out against China’s one-party system. Now nearly a decade and a half on, Liu Xiaobo has become the most high-profile dissident in China, and married life is compressed again into brief, infrequent meetings overseen by guards.
Police detained Liu Xiaobo at the couple’s home in west Beijing in late 2008, hours before the publication of Charter 08, a groundbreaking call for political reforms that he co-authored. One year later, a court in the capital sentenced the author and literary critic to 11 years for incitement to subvert state power — one of the harshest sentences delivered to a dissident in recent years.
HARDSHIP
Being accustomed to separation makes it no less cruel. And being Liu Xiaobo’s wife brings its own particular hardships.
“It’s daily life I miss most; going to the market to shop for food and asking him what he would like. Just things like that,” Liu Xia says.
We meet at an incongruously plush hotel, because no one has been allowed to visit her home since last June. Liu, a tiny, almost fragile figure, looks even smaller in a huge velvet armchair.
With her shaved head, wire-framed glasses and slim leather jacket she could pass for a graduate student at first sight. But she is 49, and she radiates calm as she sips her coffee and inhales from a cigarette. Despite her self-possession, her smile of welcome is luminous.
‘SELFLESS LOVE’
“Ask me what has been my most fortunate experience of the past two decades, and I’d say it was gaining the selfless love of my wife,” Liu Xiaobo wrote in a statement to the court that tried him.
Both writers were married when they first met in 1982; for a long time, they were friends, brought together by their love of poetry. It was only in the 1990s, following their divorces, that they became a couple.
“At the very beginning, we fell in love because of literature; he always liked my writing. And my cooking,” she adds with a grin.
“He loves meat — all kinds of it. That’s what prison [food] lacks most,” she says. “Since he left, I’ve been laid off as a cook.”
They celebrated their wedding with their families in early 1996, but were unable to legally register their marriage because Liu Xiaobo’s household registration was in his hometown of Dalian.
“Right after that he was put into a labor camp. When I said I was his wife they would ask for the marriage certificate. So I couldn’t see him for 18 months,” Liu Xia says.
Eventually, their lawyer used connections to win them dispensation to wed in the camp. Liu Xia was waiting for her husband when he re-emerged in 1999. It had been his second term in detention; he had already served two years in jail for his role in the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests of 1989.
“I’m not so interested in politics and I don’t have much hope of changing society … I seldom read what he writes,” his wife says. “But when you live with such a person, even if you don’t care about politics, politics will care about you.”
Her husband, now 54, has struggled with that knowledge.
“My love for you is full of guilt and regret, sometimes heavy enough to hobble my steps,” he wrote in his court statement.
I ask what influences shaped her husband and she says their youth was a “desert” — both are of the generation that grew up in the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. Later, when Liu Xiaobo went to university, he began to devour Western philosophy.
“We also like Kafka and Dostoevsky,” Liu Xia says.
She is allowed to send books and money to her husband, but he has received only about 10 of more than 100 titles she has chosen. They include four by the Czech writer. Did she see parallels between Franz Kafka’s work and their lives?
“Sometimes we feel that he is exactly writing about us,” she says dryly.
It is books that have forged the serenity others find in religion.
“After so many years of reading, I had already experienced other lives — more extreme experiences, such as that of the Jews [in the Holocaust],” she says. “I have come across disappearance, worries and pain in other lives. So when it happened, I simply considered it another book to read.”
She had also predicted her husband’s detention, confiding her fears to a close friend on the day that he was taken.
“I had always told Xiaobo the police were coming, but he didn’t believe it,” she recalls. “I went home and saw Xiaobo sitting at the computer, working busily on Charter 08. And at about 11pm there was a knock on the door.”
She begins to laugh as she recalls the absurdity.
“The funniest thing is, before he opened it, he asked me to ring a friend on his mobile,” she says. “He didn’t realize I had never used one. I waved it at him and said: ‘Forget it.’”
Her husband believed Charter 08 was “peaceful, rational and low-key,” she says.
NUMBERS
It seems likely the authorities were partly worried by the number of signatures on the document: more than 300 when it was published online and thousands more subsequently, although the charter was soon wiped from Chinese sites. Even so, Liu’s sentence was tougher than most expected.
“All these years I have been worried. When Charter 08 came into my sights, I thought he was going back in again. He might have worried himself, but because he wanted to reduce my anxiety he would never say that,” his wife says.
“I told him, ‘They will send you to another city. I’m getting old and I’m too tired to travel to visit you.’ He said, ‘Okay, I will only sign my own name [and not gather signatures],’” she says.
Despite her fears, she chose to say nothing when he became more involved.
“Later, I thought, people have only one chance at their life. That’s what he chose, so let him live by his choice,” she says.
Now the absence of her husband is mirrored by the presence of the police who sit in their apartment block’s lobby.
“Usually no one interferes when I go out,” she says, as if giving them their due. “Sometimes, after they hear things over the phone, they will come and ask if it’s possible not to go to certain events. I think what they mean is I probably can’t go.”
When she does leave the compound, a car is waiting, “not to interfere; just to follow me.”
How does it feel to live under watch? She pauses.
“I feel it’s ridiculous,” she says. “It’s even more strict than when Xiaobo was at home. When he was here the police would come on certain occasions; now they’re here every day ... Why bother to use so much taxpayers’ money watching someone like me?”
She will be 60 by the time her husband is freed.
“I feel very grateful to have so many people from outside standing up to support Xiaobo. That’s already been beyond my imagination,” she says. “I hope people will continue to care about him, because their attention is not only on a person but on China’s real human rights situation.”
Governments and campaigners have protested against Liu Xiaobo’s verdict and sentence. Others, including former dissident and Czech president Vaclav Havel — a principal drafter of Charter 77, which inspired Liu Xiaobo — have supported his nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize. But the outcry has had little effect on authorities in Beijing. Early last month, a court rejected his appeal.
“China has no ‘dissidents,’” Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu (馬朝旭) said when asked about the case. “There is only the difference between criminals and those who are not criminals.”
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