That first night, I was unable to sleep. I thought about the cockroaches. I was sure they were going to crawl into my ears and puncture my eardrums. The girl next to me, Ouyan, was also a pianist. Each time she shifted, I woke up. We finally decided to lie head to foot, so we could get some rest.
The next morning at six, we were awoken by a soldier, and soon we were assembled on the square in front of our barracks. A fifty-year-old man with compassionate eyes approached us. He was Tian, the camp commander. He observed us at length, then addressed us in a serious voice:
“Among you there are tigers and dragons (a Chinese expression meaning “remarkable individuals”), but your minds remain bourgeois. This is why you must be re-educated.”
After Tian’s short speech, other soldiers explained our schedule and informed us about the rules of the camp. Everything was regulated, down to the smallest detail: only black, blue, and gray clothing was allowed; hair must be short; everyone was to wear the same cap; for the women, no skirts were allowed.
In a very short time, my hope of learning and transforming myself into a real revolutionary collapsed. The goal of camp life was not to educate us—it was to break us. Every day was the same, structured around the same hard labor. I didn’t know it at the time, but it would last five years.
Every morning, we were awoken at six.
“On your feet!” shouted the soldier in charge of our room, switching on the light.
The day began with running and marching exercises. Then we studied Mao’s Little Red Book for an hour, and always the same passages. We focused on two fundamental essays, “On Practice” and “On Contradiction,” and on two texts: “Serve the People,” a speech given in memory of Chang Se-di, a soldier who had given his life for the people, and “The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains,” the story of an old man who decided to use a hoe to remove two high mountains that were blocking the way to his house. His neighbor made fun of him, but not Heaven, who finally sent down two angels to carry the mountains away on their backs. For Mao, the two mountains were imperialism and feudalism.
At eight o’clock, having finished our study of The Little Red Book, we left for the fields. Our mission was to cultivate rice, in an area of China that was highly unsuitable for rice growing. Dry, sterile stretches of land lay battered by glacial winds and hemmed in by ominous yellow and black hills. Our first task was to dig irrigation ditches, using shovels that were for the most part broken. After that, we brought excrement from the camp latrines to spread on the fields. Then we carried water, which we poured into the ditches.
After a few minutes standing in freezing water, I no longer had any sensation in my feet. I often ran a fever, which caused me to sweat. My periods stopped, and I suffered from stomach pains, but there was neither a doctor nor a nurse in the camp. A few workmates knew the basics of acupuncture, which somewhat lessened my pain. In the summer, we were covered in insect bites, and leeches clung to our legs. I tried hard to reason with myself, but my courage failed me.
To spur us on, our jiji fenzi—with the help of the soldiers—organized competitions among us. How quickly could we dig this ditch? Who could fetch water the fastest? Who could haul back the largest amount of excrement from the latrines? Our jiji fenzi set an example by working faster than we did. I tried my best, anxious about criticism that might await me during that evening’s public denunciation session. Given my small build, however, I never had the slightest hope of winning.
We ate our midday meal right there in the fields. One of us was given the task of fetching hot water and food, generally potatoes, which we cut up each day in a different manner—in little cubes, in strips, in slices—or mixed with a bit of cabbage and carrots, just for a change. Occasionally we were allowed to have pork.
The afternoons were endless, even worse than the mornings, and I looked at my watch every five minutes. We worked until sundown. Then we returned to the camp. After sweating all day while standing in water, we were unimaginably filthy. Before we were allowed to wash, however, we had to go immediately to a self-criticism and denunciation session. This was not an arbitrary rule, and it played a role in our “re-education”: not allowing us to wash was just one way among many to deprive us of our dignity.
In small groups of ten, we were put under the authority of a soldier who had been trained in the art of pitting us against one another. I was well acquainted with self-criticism sessions, but this godforsaken place gave them a very particular cast. We quickly understood what was at stake, although it was never explicitly stated: those who demonstrated the best behavior would be allowed to leave first. The battle had begun, and the prize was our freedom.
When existence is reduced to a series of deadening tasks, when no higher consciousness, either cultural or religious, is there to guide one’s instincts, the only way to defend oneself is to attack. “Zhang didn’t work enough,” a comrade would exclaim. “He spent twenty minutes in the latrine!” Zhang would then respond in kind: “I heard Li complaining twice about camp conditions!” We left these sessions exhausted. Conversation was impossible. We couldn’t even look each other in the eye. And yet, we had to continue to live together.
We returned to the dormitory, where we ate dinner seated on our straw mats: potatoes with cabbage, accompanied by small yellow rice. It wasn’t until dinner was over that we finally had the right to clean ourselves up. Bent over a hole dug in the corner of the room, we splashed ourselves with a bit of water. In front of the others. Here, there was no room for any sort of privacy. The very notion implied a bourgeois attitude.
After washing, we finally had the courage to look at each other and exchange a few words. But the only place that we could speak freely was a little adjoining room where we went to get hot water.
Guo Baochang, an exceptional individual, held forth there. One day, he would become one of China’s greatest filmmakers. He was older than the rest of us, and the minute he arrived in camp he was considered to be a serious opponent to the Revolution. For this reason, he was given the task of heating water for the camp. Every day he carried large amounts of water and coal, going from the freezing cold outside to the sweaty heat of the boiler. Despite this, he was always in a good mood.
He had recently fallen in love with one of us, a very pretty singer from the Conservatory. In order to declare his undying affection in the traditional Chinese manner, he asked someone to deliver a love letter. His choice of messenger was, he thought, a cautious one: a young student from the Beijing Opera with so little schooling that he had trouble writing his own self-criticisms. Guo Baochang believed he was safe. Unfortunately, the young artist was not only uneducated, he was also nosy. He opened the letter, and discovered a text so difficult that he couldn’t even decipher it with a dictionary. So he asked a few of his comrades for help, and before the message had even reached the beloved, the whole camp knew about it!
And so the day ended. But our trials weren’t over yet. Often, we were awoken in the middle of the night, and had to carry out emergency drills in preparation for a Soviet invasion. We would hear the wail of the siren and then an order for us to assemble.
“Alert! Alert!”
We had to quickly leave camp wearing our packs. The first challenge—gathering up our things in the pitch-black room—was so daunting that, for safety’s sake, I began sleeping fully dressed. Then we had to run for hours in the mountains in the middle of the night. We would return to camp at dawn, not having been allowed to sleep.
Sometimes, it was not an alert that woke us in the night, but a voice. A mysterious voice, arising it seemed from nowhere, singing the praises of the Revolution. Our jiji fenzi talked in her sleep. At first, we were impressed: such faithfulness, such devotion, even when asleep! How admirable! Little by little, however, we became suspicious. Every night—wasn’t that a bit much? And each morning she worried that she had disturbed us: wasn’t that a way of making sure we had heard her confession of loyalty? We decided on a strategy: each time she apologized,
we assured her:
“Oh no, you didn’t disturb us. We didn’t hear a thing.”
Sunday was laundry day. As we washed our sheets, we looked to the sky, hoping for just a little sun to help them dry. Quite often, not even an hour later, a sandstorm would roll in, and our sheets would be gray and yellow, just like the landscape, and dirtier than before.
Sometimes on Sundays we were shown films, usually Albanian ones. Their artistic merit was questionable, but we never missed one—the few kisses they portrayed would have been inconceivable in a Chinese film from that period. Each time a torrid love scene approached, the soldier in charge of the evening would race to the screen to try and hide the unthinkable. Often though, to our very great pleasure, he would get there too late. Need I add that we were all between eighteen and thirty years old?
In the midst of this daily deprivation, the arrival of the mail provided a ray of sunshine—that is, when the letter hadn’t been censured, or the recipient was not obliged to read it aloud. This happened to a friend in another camp: she was forced to read the contents of her fiancé’s letters to her assembled comrades.
I corresponded regularly with my mother, who was still living in Beijing with Xiaoyen. Shortly afterwards, my youngest sister, who was by then fifteen years old, was sent to Beidahuang Anlun, in the rugged northern region of Manchuria, where she continued to write to me.
Her first letters were horrifying. During the harvest, she had to work from two in the morning until eleven at night. At lunchtime, one had to sprint to the end of the field, where the food had been set out. The first to arrive ate as much as they could. Since she was the youngest in the camp, she couldn’t run as fast as the others, and often there was nothing left.
Among other tasks, she was responsible for a deer farm—in China, deer are raised for their horns, which are used to make medicine. One day, chasing after an animal that had escaped, she nearly drowned in a swamp. Another time, while she was using a scythe, she saw her best friend electrocuted after the girl touched a cable that had fallen to the ground. Xiaoyen was ordered to stand guard over the body until the girl’s parents arrived. One night, however, she nodded off and awoke to the sight of her friend’s body being eaten by rats. The young girl’s father went mad and died shortly thereafter.
What answer could I give to Xiaoyen’s letters? The only thing to do was to try and keep her spirits up. Later, as a gesture of support, I sent her a copy of Marx’s The Communist Manifesto.
One day I received a letter from my mother. She was also now in a camp.
11
A Piglet and Five Kittens
The night is well along,
Give me a match…
(Lu Yuan, Melancholy)
After a few months, the camp regimen had taken a toll on my health. I became very weak and suffered from endless bouts of diarrhea, which meant I had to drag myself to the latrines ten times a day. They were at the far end of the camp, and I almost didn’t have the strength to return. On the way back from the fields, I would collapse, get to my feet, and stagger on towards the dormitory.
When I had lost over twenty pounds, a decision was made to move me to Zhangjiakou Hospital. There, I was reunited with a friend, Like, a wonderful cellist. I had known Like since we had attended the Children’s Music School together, where he had studied piano. For a long time, we shared the same music stand at the Beijing Conservatory. He had a keen, direct look in his eyes, generous and very human. He was tall with a solid constitution, which hadn’t kept him from contracting acute septicemia. Not surprisingly, I had been diagnosed with the same thing. The water we drank was cloudy, and by the time we walked several hundred yards to get to our midday meal—which had been deposited in a corner of the field—the wind had covered it with a film of dirty sand.
As I lay on my hospital bed, I felt completely alone. What was I doing here, I wondered. How had I ended up in this sad, filthy room? I was going to die, I felt it, far from my parents and abandoned by everyone. My death would be meaningless, as my life had been. I thought about my family and the memories we had shared. It was all over. I would never see them again, and I would never know freedom. In my troubled dreams, my father appeared, working in the fields. Suddenly, he fell to the ground, crushed beneath a load that his weak back couldn’t support. Was he dead?
For several days, I was delirious, hovering between life and death. The doctors never uttered a single word to me. But my time had not yet come. One day, I felt better. The fever broke. Little by little, I began to recover. I was sent back to camp to convalesce.
One afternoon shortly after my return, as I lay on my mattress, I heard the far-off sound of music. I listened attentively. Who could be playing music in camp in the middle of the day? I held my breath so as to hear better: it was the sound of an accordion. I went outside to see what was happening. Tian, the camp commander, stood in a corner of the courtyard, surrounded by musicians.
“Everything is ready. Until tonight, then—” he told them.
One would have thought he was Hamlet, welcoming the players to Elsinore with the line: “You are welcome, masters; welcome, all.”
Tian had once been a teacher, and he was an intellectual at heart. He had decided to take advantage of the presence of the Beijing art students to organize concerts in camps near Zhangjiakou. For this, he had chosen a handful of singers, dancers, and musicians. He would pay dearly for this later on: he was denounced by certain people, myself included, for not being enough of a revolutionary, and was forced to leave his post.
The next day, while everyone was in the fields, I wandered around the camp. From afar, I spotted the accordion that had been played at the concert the night before, lying on a table. I went up to it: it was old, its keys were dirty, and its strap was worn. But this instrument, left here in these grim surroundings, was a sign from on high: I had to heed it.
I looked around me. I was alone. I snatched up the instrument and tried to produce a few notes. Nothing came out. What would happen if I tried to play a real piece of music? After my sickness, after all the frustrations, I was overcome with desire. But which piece? It would have to be one written mainly for the right hand. I ran through the scores I knew, and thought of one: Chopin’s Etude Op. 10, No. 2. It is an etude for the right hand, and fairly easy for the left: thus it was perfect for the accordion, even though the octaves were missing. I played it endlessly most of the afternoon and in the days that followed, until the artists left. I had forgotten the power of music: but it hadn’t forgotten me.
We left the camp in early autumn. We were transferred to Qingshuihe, about thirty miles from Yaozhanpu. The official reason was that the buildings we were occupying had to be turned back over to the military. It was true that Yaozhanpu, situated high in the hills, was an excellent observation post, while Qingshuihe, located on the plains by a river, was not of equal strategic importance. The real reason was no doubt that the soldiers didn’t want to keep us too long in the same place for fear that we would develop relationships with the local population.
Life at Qingshuihe was even harder than it had been at Yaozhanpu. There were only two dormitories, one for men and the other for women. Cui, the camp commander, was strict, rigid, and ill at ease: for him, rule following was serious business, and he never once smiled.
Soon after our arrival, we were asked to contemplate the example of a professor at a nearby camp who had shown exceptional loyalty to Mao. Two successive telegrams arrived stating that her young son was gravely ill and that she should return immediately to Beijing. Both times, she answered that she had to look after a piglet that was also sick, and for which she was responsible. A third telegram arrived informing her of her son’s death. She didn’t shed a tear. A few days later, the piglet died. She broke down and wept.
We were confused. Was it really necessary to go that far to be loyal to the thought of Chairman Mao? But once our initial astonishment had passed, we got used to the idea. Soon, most of us considered this woman laudable: a
pig feeds the collective while one’s attachment to a child is an individualist and bourgeois sentiment. The young mothers among us voiced a few reservations, but ended up agreeing. Were they really convinced? It would take me five more years until I was capable of asking myself this question with any clarity. Five long years in camp before I could make a space for doubt, before I could allow something that resembled lucidity to arise in me.
Winter arrived. The landscape was covered in snow, and the temperature dropped to freezing. As we could no longer work in the fields, we were assigned to huge barns and given the task of extracting corn kernels from stalks. The year 1970 began. And then spring returned. We lived our lives in rhythm with the seasons. The months went by, and nothing changed. The hard physical labor of the fieldwork, the inhospitableness of the surrounding landscape, living in close quarters with the same group of people…Add to this the boredom, the monotony of our days counted out in minutes—and the absence of any future prospects. I progressively lost sense of the meaning of my captivity; I asked myself why I was there.
The time came when some of us were given permission to leave. People returned home, while others remained. For the first time since I had arrived in the camps, I experienced a feeling of rebellion. The injustice was too glaring. I couldn’t forget that accordion, and how a selection had been made among us as to who would go and play music for the soldiers. Why had some been granted this privilege and others not? I was aware that I was harboring a grudge that wouldn’t go away.
Then something happened that changed everything. One of my companions, a newlywed, decided to escape—he wanted to see his wife at all costs. He was quickly recaptured and subjected to a lengthy public self-criticism session. In the end, however, this didn’t clear him of his misdeed. Later, at the moment of his Fenpai—his “posting” after leaving camp—he paid dearly for it.
The Secret Piano: From Mao's Labor Camps to Bach's Goldberg Variations Page 9