The Cowshed

by Ji Xianlin

  Overnight I had ceased to be one of the masses and had been branded a counterrevolutionary element. New Beida leaders in my department told me to wait at home and be ready to report at any time. I waited at home for days, but nothing happened. Years later I was told that New Beida had wanted to arrest me but lacked the necessary evidence, so they had raided my rooms preemptively in hopes of finding what they needed among my confiscated possessions. The strategy worked. A few days later, their Red Guards came triumphantly to my rooms and took me away to be interrogated at the Foreign Languages Building. All my decades working in that very building and serving as department head had come to this.

  I was permitted to sit down during that first interrogation. I was furious and refused to cooperate, reasoning that I had done nothing wrong. As the proverb says, “Catching a tiger is easy, setting it free is difficult,” and I figured that my captors would eventually realize they had to set me free. I even raised my voice, and my interrogators— some of whom were my own students—looked embarrassed. But their tone eventually grew harsher, perhaps because they had discovered more “proof” of my crimes. I have often wanted to ask my interrogators: Surely you couldn’t have believed all the accusations you made against me?

  The first piece of evidence they presented was a basket with half-burned letters, which was said to prove that I had attempted to destroy top secret documents. The truth was that after the Cultural Revolution began, I realized that I would be hard-pressed to justify occupying four rooms in the building where we lived, so I gave one of the two larger rooms to a friend of mine who lived downstairs and another to a woman in New Beida from a good class background. With less storage space, I decided to burn some of my old letters. I did so openly, but a Red Guard stopped me and convinced me to put the remaining letters in a bamboo basket. I explained this to my interrogators but was only told to stop being uncooperative. The second piece of evidence was a kitchen knife they had found under my aunt’s pillow. Since the revolution began, the crime rate had spiked, and it was said that burglars would go straight to the kitchen and find a kitchen knife they could use to threaten their victims. My elderly aunt was terrified of burglars, so she always kept the kitchen knife under her pillow at night. My interrogators said that the knife had been found under my pillow and that I was planning to murder the Red Guards. Again, I told them the truth, but they simply said I was being uncooperative. The third piece of evidence was a photograph of Chiang Kai-shek and Soong Mei-ling, given to me by a Chinese student called Zhang when we were both studying in Göttingen. He may have been a member of the Kuomintang’s Three People’s Principles Youth Corps or Blue Shirts Society. I had opposed Chiang ever since the student demonstrations of 1932 in Nanjing. I had no illusions that he would successfully retake the mainland: History suggests that a corrupt ruler can never regain power once he has been ousted. But unlike Comrade Chen, the policeman who burned all his correspondence, as I mentioned earlier, I kept every single bit of paper I had ever been given. Sure enough, this photograph got me in trouble. The interrogators said that I had kept it so that if the Kuomintang ever did retake mainland China, I would be able to use it to prove my loyalty to them. They hadn’t gone so far as to call me a Kuomintang spy, but if I tried to explain, they would only point out that I was being uncooperative. There was nothing I could say in my defense.

  ON THE BRINK OF SUICIDE

  I WAS GETTING nervous. I had assumed I was politically clean, but the Red Guards had proven to be experts at uncovering the so-called evidence of my supposed errors. I had not lost confidence in myself, but I also knew that my opponents were blinded by factionalism, and I would not be able to convince them of my innocence.

  In other words, there was no way out.

  I lay sleepless for nights. All day long I waited apprehensively to be interrogated, and at night, I lay awake waiting for morning. I had no appetite. The future seemed dark to me, and I had no confidence that the darkness would pass. Days went by as if in a dream. At night, I would dream of someone charging at me with my own kitchen knife and awake with a start. Dreaming that the basket of half-burned letters was ablaze and rushing toward me, I broke out in a cold sweat. I dreamed of the photo of Chiang and Soong Mei-ling. Chiang’s mouth was open, dripping blood, and he bared his teeth at me, while Soong had turned into a snake woman. I nearly jumped out of bed.

  Not only was I miserable; I was crippled by anxiety about the future. I could see that I was trapped and that I would pay for my opposition to the Empress Dowager. Most of my opponents were good people at heart, but I knew that partisanship would drive them to persecute me. I had served as the department chair for more than twenty years and either directly or indirectly hired all the lecturers and teachers in the department. I always strove to be fair and treat people well. I couldn’t understand how a factional divide could turn us instantly into enemies. Even my own faction had turned against me. Once New Beida had struck me down, Jinggangshan sent its own Red Guards to haul me off to its secret locations to be interrogated. I had thought we were on the same side, but now that it was too late, I knew better.

  I was especially wounded by the betrayal of the two students I had mentored. One of them was from a peasant family and the son of a revolutionary martyr—he was as proletariat as it gets. Although his work was mediocre, I offered him a position as my teaching assistant out of a sense of “class awareness.” There was another student from an impeccable class background who never fully grasped Sanskrit. Again, so as not to allow a single “proletariat brother” to fall behind, I always paid special attention to him, calling on him more frequently in class. But now that I was an object of class struggle, these two men, both members of Jinggangshan, interrogated me, insulted me, and even pulled and twisted my ears. I knew I had brought this on myself, but I was still shocked. Even though I don’t subscribe to the Confucian precept that “a teacher and student will always remain father and son,” I couldn’t help thinking that kindness deserves a little respect in turn.

  I could see no way out of my emotional distress and political quagmire. For more than a year, I had watched as capitalist-roaders were struggled against, beaten up, insulted, and literally kicked off the podium. The victim often ended up lying on the floor, unable to move. Confucius had said that “the scholar can be killed, but he cannot be humiliated,” and yet intellectuals were being humiliated to a degree unprecedented in Chinese civilization. Now that I was no longer an observer but a target of class struggle, I was about to be subjected to the same humiliation. In fact, no one else had baskets full of half-burned letters, telltale kitchen knives, or photos of Chiang Kai-shek. I could neither defend myself nor stoop to a false confession. I knew that a worse fate awaited me than that of the capitalist-roaders I saw onstage.

  There were only two choices open to me. I could either bear my fate or escape it. The former I didn’t think I could do, and yet I could barely imagine the latter: Even crickets have a survival instinct, never mind human beings. No one would choose to kill himself if there was even the slightest chance of another way out; as things were, I resolved to use the little strength I had left to take my own life. People would call me cowardly for “alienating myself from the people” by committing suicide, but I reflected that there was no point in caring what people said about you after you were dead.

  Once I had decided to commit suicide, I became clearheaded and calm. I carefully considered how to go about implementing this plan.

  Scores of professors and cadres had committed suicide in the months since the Cultural Revolution had begun. One of the first was Professor Wang in the History Department. At the beginning of the revolution, the Red Guards had barged into his home and questioned him. Maybe they also beat him up, though this seems unlikely to me, because the guards were gentler and not quite as revolutionary back then. But Professor Wang was too thin-skinned to withstand even this moderate assault, too staunch a believer in the principle that “the scholar cannot be humiliated.” He overdosed on sle
eping pills and was immediately criticized for having committed suicide. “Down with the counterrevolutionary Wang!” screamed a controversial poster pasted on the eastern wall of the main cafeteria after his death. I knew Professor Wang to be a good man and excellent scholar, one who had risked his life joining the underground Communist movement before Liberation. I could not understand how he could possibly be a counterrevolutionary. I had sympathy for his predicament.

  Then there was Cheng, the Party branch secretary of the Chinese Department. I knew him well too. He had been a student leader in the underground Communist movement in his time, and later became a leader of the Peking University student union. Despite his youth, he was already a long-serving Party member. Yet he too killed himself. He had probably been denounced as a capitalist-roader since he was not senior enough to qualify as an academic authority. He had also been struggled against as a counterrevolutionary “devil” on June 18th and made to wear a wooden placard while laboring on campus. That was too much for him. He was said to have taken a bottle of distilled alcohol and a bottle of pesticide to the woods in the Western Hills just outside Beijing where he must have numbed himself with the alcohol before drinking the pesticide. I shuddered at the thought of him rolling on the ground in pain, the pesticide burning his stomach.

  I knew of people who leaped off tall buildings and smashed themselves to pieces, or people whose bodies were ripped apart on train tracks. Although I had never seen anyone commit suicide, I had heard of countless instances and could barely imagine the inward struggle that each of these individuals must have experienced.

  There were two professors who had thrown themselves into the Unnamed Lake on campus in the 1950s. The lake is so shallow that I couldn’t work out how they had managed to drown themselves. Did they simply wade in waist-deep and hold their heads underwater? Professor Fang of the Philosophy Department had cut his wrists with a razor blade. The bleeding could not be stanched, and bystanders watched helplessly as he died a slow and painful death.

  I thought back to ancient times and the suicide of Qu Yuan, the poet and court adviser who threw himself into the Miluo River in 278 BC. Less than a century later, the warlord Xiang Yu slit his throat when his army was surrounded on the banks of the Wu River. The idea of cutting off my own head terrified me. Surely I’d have to be very strong. It seemed far more primitive than shooting myself, which I’m sure Xiang Yu would have preferred had he had access to a handgun back then. The Germans would later apply their world-class chemical engineering to the problem of suicide; it was said that Nazi leaders all carried cyanide capsules so they could end their lives at any moment by biting into one. The Japanese, of course, are famous for hara-kiri, but since no one dies immediately of cutting their belly open, the warrior needs a second, the kaishakunin, who is responsible for swiping his head off. That was not an option for me. Japanese lovers have apparently been known to leap together into the mouth of a volcano. Of course this will only work if you have a local volcano.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about suicide. Sometimes I imagined these people so vividly that I thought I could see their corpses in front of me—a terrifying and yet alluring sight. Dying wouldn’t make me happy, but there seemed to be no way to go on living.

  Having never considered suicide before, I realized that if I were really going to kill myself I would need to do some serious research into suicidology. Every new branch of study requires a theoretical foundation, so I produced the following observations for my comparative study of suicide methodology:

  There was no need to collect every known case of suicide. I could draw my preliminary conclusions from the few examples listed above. A historical materialist reading these cases observes that hanging oneself and jumping into a well may be the oldest methods of committing suicide, and both are still popular; as primitive societies progressed toward feudalism and capitalism, these early methods didn’t die out. Cyanide is available only to fascists in industrialized countries. Hara-kiri and leaping into a volcano are unique to ancient and modern Japan and difficult to put into practice. Cutting your wrists only seems to work if you are an educated person with a basic grasp of biology—most people don’t succeed. Overdosing on sleeping pills, the classic capitalist method of suicide, is in fact employed by both capitalists and socialists, or perhaps only by nervous insomniac intellectuals; peasants who spend their days in the fields don’t need sleeping pills. Since Chinese medicines for insomnia are too mild to have anything beyond a soporific effect, only Western sleeping pills can be repurposed for suicide, which is why this is a “capitalist” method. Trust the capitalists to invent a safe, painless, convenient form of suicide.

  So much for theory. Now for the practical application: As you may have guessed, I had settled on the capitalist method of killing myself. Given that I had already been branded a counterrevolutionary, I had no reason to avoid being further associated with capitalism. Having chosen a method, I had to decide when and where to put my plan into practice. When was easy: As soon as possible. But as for where, I had two options—at home or elsewhere. Of course, committing suicide at home would be more convenient. But my family only had two rooms, a bigger and a smaller one. I was afraid that if I lay in bed and swallowed the sleeping pills at night, my aunt and wife would be terrified when they discovered my lifeless body the following morning. I have always been too considerate, and even in planning to commit suicide I couldn’t stop worrying about my family. Would they be afraid to live in the rooms where I had died? If they were, they would have nowhere to go—surely they would be helpless and friendless if I died in disgrace. Not only had I been branded a counterrevolutionary; I would be vilified for having “alienated myself from the people.” No, killing myself at home was not an option.

  The deed would have to be done elsewhere, which opened up a range of choices. Cheng, the Chinese Department’s Party branch secretary, inspired me to consider the thick woods of the Western Hills. Lying there under the wide sky on a bed of pine needles with a stream warbling in the background might have been a poetic way to end one’s life. But it was some distance from home, and I would get in trouble if any Red Guards caught me on the way. I considered finding a spot in Beijing’s imperial Summer Palace, where the early twentieth-century scholar Wang Guowei had famously drowned himself in a lake. Not that I wanted to drown; I would prefer to find a cave, swallow a bottle of sleeping pills, and slip away quietly. But upon reflecting that I might startle the Summer Palace’s many visitors, I decided that the Old Summer Palace, just across the road from home, was a better option. There were large beds of rushes in the park, and at the beginning of winter, they would be in full bloom. I would only have to lie down among the rushes and take my sleeping pills. It would be a quick, clean way to die. I was pleased with this plan. Ingenious, I thought to myself.

  I was surprised that I felt so calm. I knew nothing of the psychology of suicide—after all, Qu Yuan had written about walking along the river where he was eventually to drown himself, but not about the actual drowning itself. I had thought that someone on the brink of suicide would be weeping hysterically, pacing up and down, plunged into inner turmoil. The fifth-century poet Jiang Yan wrote that “anyone who dies does so with bitterness and weeps inwardly.” I could not fathom why I was still so serene.

  To be sure, I was unsettled by the thought that I would be lying in the rushes in the Old Summer Palace the following day. Hardly anyone went there at this time of year, and it would take days for someone to discover my body, already decaying or perhaps torn apart by scavenging animals. Right now I was still in one piece, but I trembled to think what my dead body would look like when discovered. I imagined the announcements that New Beida would broadcast over and over again: “The counterrevolutionary Ji Xianlin has alienated himself from the people by committing suicide instead of facing his guilt! Ji Xianlin has committed suicide!” I knew all too well that the Jinggangshan broadcasts wouldn’t hesitate to compete with New Beida in denouncing me.

  But
despite all this, I was determined to go ahead with my plan. I had made my decision and there was no going back. In what were to be the last few hours of my fifty-odd years, I thought of my elderly aunt, who had suffered through so much with me, my wife of four decades, my children, family, and few loyal friends. There were many people whose forgiveness I would have to ask for taking this step, and all I could say was: “See you on the other side!” I took my few bank deposit certificates and handed them to my wife and aunt without a word. “This is all you’ll have to live on from now on, you poor things,” I was thinking. “Please don’t blame me for being selfish. I have no other choice.” They seemed to understand me and didn’t weep or become emotional. I gave no thought to making a will or disposing of my treasured books since these were my last moments with my family. Again, I was surprised by my calm.

  I had suffered from insomnia for decades, and since I always lived frugally, I had a stash of Chinese and Western medicines in both pill and liquid form. I put them all in a small cloth bag, planning to swallow the pills first then wash them down with the syrups. If I climbed over the back wall, crossed a stream, then a road, I would be in the Old Summer Palace. Everything was ready, and I was about to step out of the door. . .

  AT THE ELEVENTH HOUR

  BUT BEFORE I opened the door, someone rapped on it harshly; I knew immediately that it must be the Red Guards. Sure enough, three students barged in, their armbands glittering, ready to march me off to a struggle session like a lamb to the slaughter.

  I knew I had no right to say anything. I stowed my pouch of sleeping pills away and followed the guards out meekly. My wife and aunt watched wordlessly as I was led away, aware that the violence of the struggle session could be fatal. Two Red Guards escorted me on either side, and one brought up the rear. “We won’t tolerate your insolence any longer,” they barked. “We’ll get even with you today!” I was silent. I realized that the cruelty I had previously witnessed in struggle sessions was about to befall me. I wasn’t a bystander any longer—I was about to become the star of the show. My thoughts were a blur, and yet it was no use being afraid. I wondered whether this was how being led to execution would feel. I would almost rather be beheaded or shot—at least the worst would be over in a single blow, a round of bullets, whereas now I didn’t know how my persecutors planned to torment me or how long it would last.