Tienchi Martin-Liao:“Our love is a firm religious sentiment”: Love Behind Bars

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December 19, 2012

The true love story of Liu Xiaobo and Liu Xia.

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Liu Xia

Liu Xia cries on December 6, 2012, as AP reporters sneak into her house for her first interview since Chinese authorities placed her under house arrest two years ago. Photo: YouTube, AP.
This is a picture that makes all of Liu Xia’s friends break into tears.

Liu Xia is a sensitive poet and photographer. More than that, she is strong and dedicated, and the years she has spent with her husband, Liu Xiaobo, have “re-formed” her. In that time she has bolstered her delicate and even sentimental semblance with a hardened core. In her circle of friends she is famous for quarreling with the police when they knocked at her door to harass or try to take her husband away.

She married Xiaobo while he was in jail for the third time. Now, he is in jail for the fourth time and will not be out till 2020. She has had to endure the loneliness that accompanies being with her husband for a long time. We can see this in her August 1995 poem to Xiaobo, “Lonely Vigil”:

“I am a bitter fruit
In darkness
Sleeping in a dreamless page
Of this thick book
Not a permanent companion
On your journey”
(translated by Zhang Yu and Edited by Bonny Cassidy, ICPC Archiv)

She waited like this for him and his day of freedom for years—if only things had not been messed up by that Nobel Peace Prize!

Liu Xia’s own ordeal began in October 2010 with the announcement that Liu Xiaobo was to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Days later, Liu Xia disappeared in front of her family and friends. Months later, it was clear that not only had the author of “No Enemies, No Hatred” become a “state enemy,” but his innocent wife had also been branded with the same label. Apparently the Chinese authority wanted to retaliate against the international community for honoring Liu Xiaobo with the Nobel, so it took its revenge on Liu Xia. Since then she has lived under strict house arrest, totally isolated from the outside world. She is only allowed to see her parents occasionally and to visit her husband in Jinzhou prison, some 450 km (271 miles) away from Beijing, once a month.
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