by Xinran Xue
LIN: Yes.
XINRAN: Why? Could you describe your personality to me?
LIN: Your personality causes you to make choices. Take me: I've always been competitive, always hated losing – even to my father. We used to skim stones together, across the river by our house. You got a point every time the stone bounced on the water. When we started, he'd always win a lot more points than me because I hadn't got the hang of it, but quite soon I began to beat him. His stones would sink halfway across, while mine often got to the other side, fifty or sixty metres away. I still remember how surprised he was when I first managed it. I practised and practised, just because I didn't want to be beaten by someone else.
***
At this point, Lin – suddenly a teenager again – gave me a quick demonstration of his throwing technique. I had no idea how he had maintained his joy in life through those three lonely prison-like decades. How had someone as competitive as him tolerated so many years of public disgrace? For the time being, I didn't dare put such a sensitive question to him.
***
XINRAN: What shaped your personality?
LIN: I think I've been influenced by three people: my father, my aunt and my mother-in-law, the Double-Gun Woman. It was my aunt who first taught me never to accept defeat. Because my mother died while giving birth to me, my father sent me off to live with his older sister. She was incredibly good to me, treated me like her own son. From time to time, she even lectured her own children that they shouldn't bully me, because I didn't have a mother. She was very sensitive to complaints from her parents-in-law that I was getting free board, so at the start of each month, she would secretly give me five or ten yuan then get me to give it to her in front of everyone else and say my father had sent it to pay for my food. One summer, I remember, when my cousins all had white linen waistcoats to wear, my aunt gave me an extra two yuan, then got me to give it back to her in front of her husband and say my grandmother had sent it to pay for some summer clothes. The next day she produced the white waistcoat she'd already bought me. She would often say to me when we were alone that as long as I worked hard, I'd have a good life. But if I didn't work hard, if I didn't do something with my life, it would reflect badly on her. From that moment on, I struggled constantly to be the best at everything I did.
It was my father who gave me my belief in the Communist Party. I remember once, when I was still very small, seeing my father looking out over the river by our house, deep in thought. I walked over and asked him what he was thinking about. "All sorts of things," he answered. "I'll tell you when you're older."
"Don't worry," I said to him. "When I get bigger, I'll be a filial son and earn plenty of money to look after you and Granny."
Father shook his head. "I want more than a filial son," he said seriously. "When you're older, I want you to be a revolutionary, a comrade."
Though my teachers at school talked a lot about China's national crisis, about the heroes who were working to save the motherland, I didn't really understand much of it, and certainly didn't know what a comrade was, or why it was so important to my father.
"Comrades struggle together towards a common revolutionary goal," he told me. "Being a comrade is more important than being filial, because a filial son is loyal only to his family, while a comrade is loyal to his motherland."
"Let me be your comrade, Father! Tell me what you were thinking about just now."
Father smiled, then thought for a while. "Do you think I'm mad?" he said eventually.
"Only the local officials say you're mad. Ordinary people say you're a good person, and my teachers and classmates all say you're a good father."
Father smiled again. "You're sounding more and more like a comrade."
And then there was Chen Lianshi – my teacher, my surrogate mother almost. It was mainly through her guidance that I became the person I am today. It was through a winter coat that I first came to hear of her.
One evening, while I was eating dinner, a courier came to tell me that a big parcel had arrived for me. Hurrying to the post office to pick it up, I immediately saw it was postmarked Chongqing, which was where my father was, though his name wasn't on the parcel. Inside, I found a brand-new herringbone wool coat, but no message. Because it had been the middle of summer when I left home, I'd only brought thin clothes with me. Now, though, the weather had turned cold. A friend of my father's had given me a cotton-padded army coat, but it was too big – so long it reached down to my feet. Afraid of being laughed at, I only used it as a quilt at night. The friend's wife had also given me an old cotton jacket. Though it was warm enough, I was embarrassed to wear it, because I'd just started courting, and what I really wanted was a properly smart winter coat in which to parade up and down the streets of the small county town I was then living in. And now I had one: but who was my mysterious benefactor?
That evening, I dreamed my mother stood before my bed, her eyes red from crying. "It's so cold outside," she said, "and you've so few warm clothes. Your grandmother used to look after you when you were small, but now, you're all on your own, away from home. Why isn't your father looking after you? Here, try this warm coat I made you. Does it fit?"
The mother in my dream was so young, so pretty and kind. I buried my head in her warm, comforting chest, then looked up to see her smiling and crying. I began laughing with joy that I had such a beautiful and loving mother. My own laughter woke me, and I realised the whole thing had been just a dream – apart from the coat, which I was still lying under.
Unable to go back to sleep, I made up a poem in my head:
I was saved by a lucky star,
In the darkness, I saw a light.
A coat brought me warmth,
And my mother back to me.
The next day, I wrote to Father, asking him who had sent the coat; he was as surprised to hear about it as me. Much, much later, I finally received a letter telling me that a revolutionary heroine called Chen Lianshi had sent it to me. I began to imagine to myself what the great Chen Lianshi was like, wishing I could have had a mother like her. The first time I met her was with my father. By this point, I'd heard any number of stories and legends about her: about her incredible marksmanship, and about her generosity and concern for others, for the society around her. She wasn't one of those people who joined the revolution hoping for a better life for themselves and their families – she had a genius for sensing other people's needs. She'd learned honesty and a sense of justice from mountain bandits, simplicity and courage from workers and peasants, her moral principles from religion, and cunning and ingenuity from merchants and traders. She could cut through complexities and difficulties as easily as a fish swims through water. You've heard the jade bracelet story, haven't you? It took an extraordinary person to do something like that.
XINRAN: I read your four volumes of poetry last night. One is entitled Remembering Jun, in memory of your late wife. In another, Regret for My Family, you mention Hua – was she your daughter?
LIN: Our first daughter. When my wife was heavily pregnant with her, we got a tip-off that we were about to be arrested, that the police would come for us in the middle of the night. We left our home there and then, in a torrential downpour. But we couldn't think where to go: there was a friend of my father's, but we weren't sure he'd dare take us in. There we stood, in the rain, under the umbrella, until I managed to hitch a lift for my wife on a narrow, single-wheeled cart to the friend's house – I ran along beside it. He was very good to us, and hid us somewhere no one would find us. But soon after we'd got there, Jun's labour began. We didn't even have a bed for her to lie on; we just put lots of rice straw on the ground. We didn't have anything for the birth, nothing was sterile; we just had to make do. And even after the child was born, there was fighting to be done and we had to move on. As we couldn't take Hua with us, we left her with a local family. A little later on, she got pneumonia. Though it would be easily treated these days, back then the peasants were very ignorant and superstitious. They
all worshipped a dead carpenter, and believed that earth from his grave would cure any sickness. Without proper medical care, forced to eat mud, she died – just two years old. There was no one to blame, really, just ignorance, because the locals thought eating earth from a good man's grave could cure sickness. Thinking about it still makes me sad.
***
His voice died away.
***
XINRAN: I'm sorry. I shouldn't have made you go back over these painful memories.
LIN: Don't worry. I'm used to them.
***
He's become used to pain, I thought – another of the legacies of China's traumatic last century of modernisation. But should people have to get used to pain? I now decided to ask him the question I had backed away from earlier.
***
XINRAN: I cried yesterday when I read your books, especially The Red Monk and Happiness in Old Age. There's such a sense of mourning, of suffering in your books. You've said yourself that you've always been ambitious and competitive. But, for decades, you lived without public acknowledgement or understanding; society turned its back on you. You insist that you love your motherland, that you believe in the Party. You yourself know you're a good person. But when you were persecuted as a Rightist, when your children were suffering because of who their father was, did you ever feel regret at what you'd done? If you could live your life again, would you make the same choices?
***
For almost two and a half minutes, old Mr Lin sat before me, staring up at the ceiling, his face twisted with pain. I didn't press him for an answer. I know my question is one that many elderly Chinese people would like to be able to answer.
After two hours I felt that I had come closer to the real Lin, though I hoped the process had not distressed him too much. I hoped the act of speaking out had lightened the burden of memory for him. Concerned that our conversation had had a bad effect on his blood pressure and heart condition, I rang his youngest daughter, Ping, later that evening to check up on him. She was surprised by my anxiety; since the interview, her father's blood pressure had remained unusually stable.
Lin had seven children with Jun: one son and five daughters, in addition to Hua. The son I only saw three times, and found him to be very shy and introverted. The daughters, however, were a real phenomenon – true granddaughters of the Double-Gun Woman. There was the frank, forthright Xue; the refined, gentle Bo; the thoughtful, artistic He; the tough, stoical Zhi; and the multitalented Ping. When I asked them what they thought about the parentless childhood that their parents' and grandmother's radicalism had bequeathed them, they had no complaints. Xue, the eldest, said that she and her sisters had been too young to have any idea what was happening. They were divided when I asked them whether they thought their elders' revolutionary endeavours had been worthwhile. But when I asked them to name the single most important force determining the course of their family's life and suffering, all five sisters replied: "History." How should we define the force that is history? Who should take responsibility for it?
In a book that Xue edited about her grandmother, I found the following passage:
Imagine that Chen Lianshi had not fallen in love with the radical young man who became her husband; that they had not gone to university in Nanjing after marrying, or that their student careers had not coincided with the anti-imperialist demonstrations of 1925; imagine that her husband had not become a student leader and that he had not been captured by spies, thereby forcing him to return to his home village. Imagine, again, that the two of them hadn't joined the armed uprising against north Sichuan's warlords, or that they hadn't subsequently fled to Huaying Mountain to continue their struggle for ten long years. Would Chen Lianshi still have become the Double-Gun Woman? Assuredly not. She might have become a teacher, a scholar, or a painter, fulfilling childhood ambitions that remained with her to the end of her life.
I knew that Lin's daughters regretted how events had, in reality, turned out. But if things had turned out otherwise, there would have been no Double-Gun Woman, and no Lin as we now knew him.
Months later, back in London, I learned that, after two years' building work, the Huaying Mountain Uprising Memorial Hall had formally opened on 24 October 2006. Inside was an exhibition about the Double-Gun Woman and 116 of her comrades-in-arms, together with displays of the guns and everyday objects they had used, of works of art and literature describing the history of the uprising, and of a few memorials and poems written by fallen heroes.
I rejoiced that this tragic episode had become a part of public history in China.
I also learned that Lin had now completed his autobiography and was looking for a publisher in the West. I wished this indefatigable old man health and every success.
3 New Discoveries in Xinjiang, the World's Biggest Prison
Workers of 148 Corps in the 1950s.
With survivors of 148 Corps, 2006.
TEACHER SUN AND HER HUSBAND, and other ex-soldiers and ex-prisoners of Shihezi Farm and Prison, interviewed in Shihezi, Xinjiang province, north-west China, the biggest province in China (with various ethnic minorities) which shares long borders with Russia, Mongolia and other ex-USSR countries in Central Asia. From around 1950, the Chinese government transported more than half a million prisoners of war (and later their families) and criminals to Xinjiang, where they set up Xinjiang Military Farm, part of which was Shihezi Farm, a huge prison garrisoned by over 50,000 PLA soldiers. The prisoners built Shihezi, a modern city, out of the desert. No. 148 Corps, one of the military construction corps, helped build the city but they still live in houses made of mud without running water, and more than three hundred families share one public toilet. Teacher Sun was one of the first teachers of the Shihezi Construction Corps. Orphaned at thirteen or fourteen, she graduated from senior school in 1959 and went to Shihezi where she had to do farm work and then build her own classroom. She met her husband, an ex-soldier, there and they had four children.
When I first visited the Tibetan Plateau in 1981, my route took me close to the north-western province of Xinjiang. It was there I first heard a rumour that for thirty years the Chinese government had been building the world's largest prison. According to local hearsay, nearly 200,000 Guomindang prisoners of war and over 300,000 "Reform through Labour" convicts had been moved there from the east. Guarded by 50,000 People's Liberation Army (PLA) soldiers under the leadership of General Wang Zhen, they were put to reclaiming the Gobi Desert where it met the Taklimakan Desert and the Gurbantunggut Desert.
This plan was said to be Mao Zedong's way of killing five birds with one stone. First, by relocating people who might form part of a counterattack on the mainland for Chiang Kai-shek, it was nipping in the bud the problem of what to do with prisoners of war from the Guomindang Army. Second, as guarding labour reform convicts was taking up a lot of manpower and resources, moving them westwards could relieve pressure on supplies in the densely populated eastern regions. Third, Mao Zedong had already foreseen the inevitability of a rift with Stalin and the Soviet Union, and the Silk Road that led through Xinjiang was a strategically important link between East and Central Asia; troops stationed there to open up the wasteland and garrison the frontier could form a barrier against the Soviet Union. Fourth, many of Xinjiang's forty-seven ethnic groups had always been Muslims, who had never been greatly influenced by the Han Chinese culture or political system. By stationing troops there to open up the wasteland and garrison the frontier, large numbers of Han people could be brought into the local society, where they would inhibit and dilute Muslim inclinations towards independence. Fifth, by accelerating Xinjiang's economic development, the abundant resources of the region could be sent quickly to supply the needs of the interior.
Ever since my first trip, I had been trying to find some confirmation for this rumour. Nobody close to me had heard anything about it, and Han people who came from Xinjiang were equally vague. All they knew was that after 1950 thousands of people had gone there to open up the wastelan
d and garrison the border; they rarely discussed their family history prior to 1950. Even if they had, it was quite simply impossible for me to get any kind of permission to go reporting in Xinjiang; even friends in the public security system who would normally have helped said: That place is an independent kingdom without a gate! Although I came across Xinjiang Muslims from time to time, they either didn't speak my language or just answered, "I don't know," to all my questions.
Finally, in 2005 I saw a piece of news in the Chinese media:
On 16 October this year, a group of Chinese and foreign journalists took their first steps into the "mysterious" Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps… reporting on an exceptional "army unit" on China's western border. This visit was organised by the News Department of the Chinese Foreign Office and the Xinjiang Autonomous Region Foreign Affairs Office.
And so I began a new round of investigations into the Xinjiang Construction Corps. Compared to the primitive investigation methods of a decade earlier, everything was now much more accessible; stories to do with Shihezi had begun to appear in some small local newspapers and hand-copied literature and novels that were outside the scope of government control, and people from Shihezi were starting to talk about their past on the Internet. But these were all just personal anecdotes. It still proved impossible for me to find a properly authoritative historical summary. Later I discovered that the "authoritative historical summary" I was searching for didn't exist.
According to the introduction on a Chinese government website:
Xinjiang occupies a sixth of China's area, and is inhabited by forty-seven different ethnic groups. The ancient Silk Route passes through here, and it is an important strategic area rich in energy resources. Historically, its economy was based around agriculture and herding, with factories and mines remaining at the handicraft and workshop level. There was not an inch of railway, and industry was practically zero – the nearest thing was blacksmiths making horseshoes. The peaceful liberation of Xinjiang was completed by 25 September 1949, and later that same year, General Wang Zhen received orders to lead the First Corps of the People's Liberation First Field Army into Xinjiang and reorganise the units involved in uprisings against the Guomindang and the armies of the Three Districts Revolution. [2] Following this, the People's Liberation Army began to open up the wasteland while continuing to guard the border, concentrating their efforts mainly on production, construction, and acceleration of Xinjiang's economic development. In August 1954, before the foundation of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region on 1 October 1955, 175,000 of these soldiers were transferred to civilian work by the authority of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the Central Military Committee, and the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps was founded.