“Lin Zhao? Who’s that?” Hu remembered asking.
His friend hesitated a moment before answering. Lin Zhao was a young woman who attended Peking University in the 1950s, she said, a talented poet and writer who grew up not far from Nanjing, in the ancient canal city of Suzhou. Of all the students at the university, she was the only one who refused to write a political confession during Mao’s Anti-Rightist Campaign. Her intransigence was rewarded with a prison term, and later, during the Cultural Revolution, with a death sentence. But she left behind a secret legacy: she had continued writing in prison, using her own blood as ink.
Hu was stunned. He considered himself a well-informed and educated person, but he had never heard a story like this, never imagined that anything like it could happen in China, even during Mao’s rule. His head was swimming with questions: Why was Lin Zhao executed? What did she do? And what about her prison writings? He knew there was a tradition in ancient China of government ministers and military commanders sending urgent messages to the emperor in their own blood. But what would drive a young woman, living just a few decades ago, in a city not far from his own, to cut her flesh and write in blood? Surely, Hu suggested, she must have scrawled out only a few words. But his friend said no, apparently she had written hundreds of pages.
Hu wanted to hear more. He had been searching for a new subject for a documentary, and this seemed to have potential. When he asked his friend for help, she agreed to go to her parents for more information. In the weeks that followed, Hu began looking into Lin Zhao’s story, and he was quickly drawn in. It was as if he had stumbled upon a lost and precious piece of history, a mystery waiting to be unraveled. If he had been merely curious at first, soon he found himself thinking about the dead woman at all hours, at work, during meals, as he lay in bed trying to sleep. The more he learned, the more questions he had. He knew he was poking around where the authorities didn’t want him, and his instincts told him that what he was doing might be dangerous. But he pressed ahead, because despite the passage of time, what happened to Lin Zhao felt urgent and relevant to him, while the risks of pursuing the story seemed vague and uncertain.
But the risks were coming into focus now. Would his wife lose her job at the bank? Could they be evicted from their apartment? Would his teenage son be denied admission to university? He suspected the Ministry of State Security was behind his firing, and if the secret police was involved, anything was possible, even arrest and imprisonment. The thought made him nervous, and angry. It seemed ridiculous that that could still happen in China, which had come so far and changed so much in his lifetime. He just wanted to make a documentary, about something that had happened long ago, and now he was out of a job and worried about going to jail.
Hu knew the safe thing to do would be to abandon the Lin Zhao research. He knew his firing from Xinhua was a warning. Still, he could not shake a feeling that he was meant to uncover what happened to that young woman so many years ago and record it for the future. Now that he was unemployed, he had the time to focus on the project, but he wondered if he had the courage. Years later, when he described the moment for me, Hu said a passage written by the ancient Confucian philosopher Mencius came to mind as he wandered the city on his bicycle:
So it is that whenever Heaven invests a person with great responsibilities, it first tries his resolve, exhausts his muscles and bones, starves his body, leaves him destitute, and confounds his every endeavor. In this way, his patience and endurance are developed, and his weaknesses are overcome.
“I just kept thinking about her story, and how it might be lost forever,” Hu told me. “And I thought, if I didn’t preserve it, who would?” By the time he got off his bicycle, he had made up his mind.
THERE WAS LITTLE in Hu’s background to suggest he would press ahead with the Lin Zhao project, much less devote the next five years of his life to it. He had no formal training in history, or journalism, or even filmmaking. His parents had been factory workers, and like most Chinese of his generation, his schooling had been haphazard, disrupted by Mao’s final and most destructive political movement, the Cultural Revolution. He was eight when the campaigns began, and he stopped going to regular classes soon afterward. Instead of high school, he worked in a machinery factory. At age nineteen, a few months after Mao’s death, he enlisted in the military.
What little Hu did pick up about his country’s recent history was limited to the rosy version of events promulgated by the party. In these accounts, Mao was “the Great Teacher, the Great Leader, the Great Commander, the Great Helmsman,” “the reddest of red suns,” and “the greatest genius and teacher of revolution in the present age.” The Communist Party was “the mightiest, most glorious, most correct, most lovely party,” “the great emancipator of the toiling masses of the Chinese nation,” and even “our dear father and mother.” In newspapers and on the radio, in textbooks and in speeches, the economy was always setting new records and the waves of political purges ordered by Mao were described, if they were mentioned at all, as victories against “reactionaries,” “counterrevolutionaries,” or other enemies allied with the forces of “international capitalism” and the “American imperialists.” It was history scrubbed clean, an elaborate fiction designed to sustain the party’s rule. Fabricating and controlling history was so important to the party that it devoted a vast bureaucracy to the task, an army of propagandists, ideologues, and censors who labored to deceive the masses in the name of serving them. By some estimates, the party employed one propaganda officer for every hundred citizens. The result was a complex tapestry of truth and lies intended to bury unpleasant memories and obscure inconvenient facts. Those who built and served this official history twisted even the Chinese language to their purpose: blessing certain phrases with the approval of the state, stripping others of meaning or legitimacy—trying to manipulate not only how people talked but also what they thought. Those who challenged the official truth did so at their peril.
But after Mao’s death in 1976, things began to change. The trauma of the Cultural Revolution damaged the party’s authority, and its control over history weakened. In the 1980s, with the government in retreat, a wave of freethinking swept the country, and prohibited material—literature, films, music—suddenly became available. The old orthodoxies—Marxism, Leninism, “Mao Zedong Thought”—had been discredited, and people were searching for new answers. At the height of this intellectual fervor, the military pulled Hu from his duties repairing jets and sent him for training as an officer who would be responsible for the indoctrination of troops in party ideology. Yet even the Air Force Political Institute in Shanghai was not immune to the changes taking hold in the nation. A liberal-minded general there suspended almost all classes in the tired socialist canon, replacing them with lessons in market economics, Western political theory, and Freudian psychology. History was still largely off-limits, but Hu began to question what he knew. Later, as the party tried to reassert control, it sent Hu materials condemning books and other writings that it had banned, so he could better indoctrinate the soldiers under his command. But Hu found himself more interested in the prohibited works than in the party’s critiques of them. He read the investigative reports on party corruption by the journalist Liu Binyan, the underground verse of the soldier-poet Ye Wenfu, even a Chinese translation of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago.
After the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, the party clamped down again and redoubled its efforts to shape the public’s understanding of events. Mao’s cult of personality had collapsed, the ruling ideology had been exposed as a terrible mistake, and now the state had ordered soldiers to kill students in the heart of the capital. The party’s ability to define history—to suppress memories and guard its secrets—was more important than ever to its grip on power. The propaganda machine pressed harder. Newspapers and magazines were “rectified.” Scholars and journalists were purged or silenced. But the party could no longer dominate popular consciousness as it once did. To
o much had happened. Too much had changed. Too many people refused to forget.
Until he heard the story about Lin Zhao, Hu had never given much thought to his country’s recent history. But he knew that what he had been taught was incomplete, that there were gaps and blank spots, facts that had been hidden and people who had been erased. He knew just enough to make him curious.
THE MONDAY MORNING after he lost his job, Hu was standing in the crowded lot of Nanjing’s central bus station, video camera in hand. Throngs of travelers, most of them migrant workers laden with bundles of goods to be sold in the countryside, jostled for position around a fleet of mud-splattered buses. In the chaos, Hu focused his camera on an elderly woman waiting to board a bus headed for Hefei, a provincial capital a few hours to the southwest. She was in her late sixties, small and frail, with graying hair and a slight shuffle to her step, but there was something about her that projected strength. Hu zoomed in on her wrinkled hands, which were clenched around a small brown bag. Inside the bag, he knew, was a bundle of papers: poems, letters, essays, and other tributes to Lin Zhao written by people who had known her. The old woman had spent years collecting them, and now she gripped them tightly, as if worried they could be scattered by a breeze and lost forever. Those papers—and her own fading memories—were all she had left of an old friend.
The timing of Ni Jinxiong’s visit to Nanjing was a lucky coincidence for Hu; she was passing through the city the week he lost his job. A mutual friend arranged for the two to meet, and when Hu explained his plan to make a documentary about Lin Zhao, the woman agreed to help. Half a century had passed since Ni and Lin Zhao first met as teenagers. The nation was in turmoil then, torn by civil war and teetering on the brink of revolution. Lin Zhao had run away from home to enroll in a journalism school sympathetic to the Communist cause. Ni was a student there, and she befriended the runaway. Now, in her twilight years, she was traveling the country, searching for people who knew her classmate and gathering their remembrances of her, which she hoped to publish in a book. Hu planned to follow Ni on her journey and build the documentary around her. He could tell her story, and slowly, through her, he could tell Lin Zhao’s story as well.
Hu had started shooting documentaries only four years earlier, at the suggestion of a friend. He was struggling to make it as an oil painter at the time, indulging a longtime interest in art after an honorable discharge from the air force. He had seen enough of China as a soldier to understand the punishing poverty that many people still lived with, but whenever he tried to portray their lives on canvas, critics attacked his work as inaccurate and insulting to the Chinese people, or dismissed it as excessively faithful to reality and therefore lacking in creativity. Documentaries, Hu decided, might be a better fit for him. Though the state had always produced propaganda films, independent documentary moviemaking was a relatively new field, emerging as the party’s control of the media weakened, and cameras, computers, and other tools became more affordable. Those who pioneered the form in China favored a simple, observational style, and Hu’s first films adopted the same approach. They were all set in the present, focusing on ordinary people such as coal miners or farmers, shot using a handheld camera, with few sit-down interviews and little narration. But the Lin Zhao project presented a new challenge. Hu wanted to read what she had written with her blood in prison. He knew that was critical, that it would be the heart of the film. But he had no idea how he would find the writings.
Meeting Ni was Hu’s first big break, and she lifted his spirits as well as his confidence. She was his strongest lead, but just as important, she was also the first sign that he was not alone in his quest. So many of his friends wanted only to look toward the future, which seemed so bright, and they chided him for his fascination with such a dark corner of their nation’s history. They felt the past was better left alone, that it was best not to pick at old scars. Hu could sense their discomfort whenever he talked about his project, so he forced himself to stop bringing it up. Even his wife and his son disapproved. So Ni’s commitment to recording Lin Zhao’s story comforted him and gave him strength. Listening to her stories, going through the material she had gathered from across the country, Hu realized there must be many others out there who refused to bury their memories. It reminded him that while it was common to forget, it was also normal to want to remember.
As he sat with Ni on that first bus trip, watching the old woman doze and the countryside rushing by, Hu felt as if they were making a forbidden journey into a secret past. At the time, he was unsure how much Ni knew of Lin Zhao’s story. He could sense that she was still nervous about talking to him, that she did not trust him entirely. He understood her apprehension. It made sense, given the times she had lived through, and his own background with the military and Xinhua. Why, after all, would a stranger with the credentials of a party loyalist take an interest in her efforts to publish a book about Lin Zhao? So Hu didn’t push. In their first meetings, he didn’t even take out his camera. He just let her talk, and he resisted the urge to ask all the questions he had. Slowly, though, on that first trip, and in the weeks that followed, Ni opened up, and what she knew about Lin Zhao’s life began to come out.
Lin Zhao was actually born Peng Lingzhao in 1932, the eldest child of a prominent family in Suzhou. Her father was a university graduate who had studied in England and written his thesis on the Irish constitution. Two years out of college, he took the civil service exam and was appointed a county magistrate in Suzhou. Her mother was a successful entrepreneur, a banker who sat on the board of a bus company. At the time, the Nationalists and the Communists were fighting a civil war, and Japan had seized control of northeastern China and established a puppet state. Closer to home, Shanghai had been carved into concessions controlled by France, Britain, the United States, and Japan. It was a time of violent political passions, and the nation’s divisions strained the Peng family. Lin Zhao’s father served the corrupt and failing Nationalist government, but her mother favored the Communist rebels, who vowed to do more to fight the Japanese. She secretly funneled money to the Communists, established an underground radio station, and was once arrested by Japanese forces. The couple often fought, and their arguments sometimes focused on their daughter and what political values she should be taught.
She was a delicate child, prone to illness, but a voracious reader and a gifted writer. She was also headstrong, and by age sixteen, she had made up her own mind about her loyalties. She joined an underground Communist cell, began writing articles criticizing government corruption using the pen name Lin Zhao, and earned a spot on a blacklist maintained by the Nationalist military authorities in the region. Both of her parents were alarmed—one of Lin Zhao’s uncles had already been executed as a Communist—and after their daughter graduated from high school, they tried to send her to university overseas to wait out the civil war. But the teenager wouldn’t leave. She was caught up in the fervor of the times, and wanted instead to attend a journalism school run by the Communists in territory they controlled nearby. When her parents refused to let her go, she packed a bag and left on her own, promising never to return. Three months later, on October 1, 1949, the Communists completed their revolution and established the People’s Republic of China.
When Ni met her at the journalism school, Peng Lingzhao had already started introducing herself as Lin Zhao, giving up her surname to distance herself from her family. She was pretty and still girlish, a slender young woman who wore white blouses under tailored workman’s overalls and braided her hair in long pigtails with ribbons tied on the end. She was as devoted to the Communist Party and its cause as anyone in her class, and she developed a reputation at the school for her graceful poetry, her quick wit, and her sharp tongue.
Like her classmates, Lin Zhao was assigned in the summer of 1950 to travel the countryside as a member of a land reform work team, one of thousands the party dispatched to dismantle the unequal system of land ownership, abusive rents, and high taxes that had trapped the
nation’s peasants in misery for generations. The work teams moved from village to village, redistributing farmland from landlords to the peasants who once toiled for them. To succeed, the work teams needed to reassure a rural populace uncertain the Communists would last and still fearful of the influential elites who had held sway in their villages for so long. It was not an easy task, and in much of the country the teams resorted to violence. Mass meetings were organized in which peasants were encouraged to “speak bitterness” about their past suffering while landlords were dragged out and humiliated and tortured. Mao told the work teams not to intervene when peasants lashed out at these “class enemies,” and in almost every village, at least one and sometimes several landlords or their relatives were beaten to death or executed. By 1952, the death toll had climbed as high as two million. The landlord class, which had dominated rural society since the Han Dynasty more than two thousand years ago, was all but wiped out, and nearly half the nation’s arable land was confiscated, divided into small plots and given to peasants, including for the first time women. With land reform, the party proved itself capable of providing a better life for ordinary people in the countryside—and established itself as a force to be feared.
If Lin Zhao had any misgivings about the use of such brutality to achieve the party’s goals, she never expressed them to her classmate. “We all understand that land reform is an important step in strengthening our motherland,” she wrote in a letter to Ni at the time. “Our posts are combat posts. When I think of this, I must work hard, otherwise I will never live up to the expectations of the party and the people.” In another letter, she added: “My hatred for the landlords is the same as my love of the country. This kind of love and hate—they are both forces pushing me forward.” With Ni’s help, Hu tracked down the leader of Lin Zhao’s work team, now a retired civil servant. The three of them traveled together to Bali Village, a hamlet near Shanghai where Lin Zhao had been stationed. Standing amid the lush green rice fields, the man recalled how Lin Zhao had once ordered a landlord placed in a vat of freezing water overnight. Later, she told her comrades that his screams made her feel “cruel happiness” because residents of the village at last would no longer be afraid of the man.
Out of Mao's Shadow Page 4