by Ji Xianlin
My mind wandered during these sessions, and I often thought back to my childhood in the countryside. Had I stayed there, I would still be half illiterate and working in the fields every day. My family only had about half an acre of land. Eventually I would have been classified as a peasant and qualified to reeducate intellectuals. It would have been a hard life but a carefree one. As the poet Su Shi wrote, “A man’s troubles begin when he learns to read.” As a university professor, I had enjoyed numerous honors, but now I was classified as a counterrevolutionary academic authority and struggled against every day. I regretted ever having left the village. The heavens had played a nasty trick on me.
But what’s past is past, so I decided to find a concrete way of improving my lot. The most urgent of the various problems I faced at the time was the difficulty of maintaining the airplane position for several continuous hours. I concluded that what I needed most was physical exercise, or more specifically, an endurance training plan for my legs. If you collapsed during a struggle session, the organizers assumed that you were trying to cause trouble, which would automatically earn you a beating. But holding the position wasn’t easy. After half an hour in the airplane position, I was often sore all over and drenched in sweat; before long, I would grow light-headed and sway slightly, my ears ringing. To keep myself going, I sometimes repeated a Mao saying to myself: “Make up your mind to fight without counting the costs, overcome all obstacles, and strive for victory!” Or in my case: “Make up your mind to ignore the pain, overcome all obstacles, and strive not to collapse!” This generally worked. As I persevered, the slogans and speeches began to sound faint and faraway, like thunder on distant hilltops.
I had survived many struggle sessions this way, but often to the point of nearly collapsing. I consequently decided to devote time each day to voluntarily holding an airplane position on the balcony, counting inwardly to measure the passing minutes, until my head reeled and I was drenched in sweat. This exercise regimen might seem ludicrous, but I can testify that it actually took place.
Standing on the balcony also allowed me to keep an eye on the road and see if any Red Guards were coming to harass me. I have always been an impatient person and consequently very punctual. Although I couldn’t guarantee that a struggle session would finish on time, I didn’t want one delayed on my account.
One winter day, while I was standing in my usual position on the balcony, I saw a few sparrows sitting motionless on a bamboo fence in the yard. All the trees were bare except for a couple of green pines. It was a scene worthy of a Chinese brush painting, and my eyes lit up to observe this gift of beauty from the gods. I immediately reflected on my incorrigible capitalist revisionist tendency to take bourgeois delight in things around me, even in such absurd circumstances.
When the Red Guards dragged me along the lake to the Foreign Languages Building or elsewhere to be struggled against, I often fantasized about running away. I thought of the turtles sunning themselves on floating logs in the lake. Despite being slow creatures, at the slightest sound they flipped themselves with startling agility into the water and disappeared in a ripple. I saw the ants beneath my feet and wished I could disappear into the grass like an ant or fly away like a bird. Human bodies were simply too big, too much of a hindrance to escape.
And even if I did escape, where would I go? Returning home to my village was a foolish idea. That had been tried before, and New Beida would simply send people to arrest the runaway and punish him more savagely. But where else could I go? Some suggested that I could stay with friends or with relatives, and at one point I collected ration coupons used for different parts in the country, so that I wouldn’t starve while on the run. But I realized that all my fantasies of running away were far more dangerous than simply staying put, as unpleasant as it might be to live in daily fear of the Red Guards and struggle sessions.
One day, a New Beida leader in my department gave the order that we were all to report to laogai, which consisted of performing daily labor. I was tired of being trapped at home all day and welcomed anything that would break the tedium. From then on, N. and I reported for work every day. Only a year before, when N. was being struggled against, I was in the audience—now, unexpectedly, we had become comrades, both prisoners of the department we had jointly founded.
We began work every morning at eight, supervised by a worker. We went home at twelve and returned to work from two to six. There were innumerable tasks and different work sites. For a stretch we’d be given a different job each day. We worked silently, like a pair of oxen under the overseer’s whip. The workers of Peking University had become white-collar overseers who did no work themselves. Since they were the vanguard of the proletariat, and I their prisoner, I kept my opinions to myself. But I realized that the Cultural Revolution was merely an elaborate excuse for workers to persecute intellectuals. Before Liberation, professors at the university were much better paid than the workers, and some of them must have been arrogant types who treated the workers badly. But after Liberation, the tide turned, and the revolution allowed a whole store of pent-up resentment to be released. During a struggle session, you could hear the palms of certain workers slapping the cheeks of professors. I understand that some workers may refute this depiction of them, but I am only being honest, in the spirit of seeking truth from facts.
I was supervised by one of these workers, and had to obey his orders while he stood and watched. I didn’t mind hard work, although it meant I had less time for my endurance training regimen; plus I lived in constant fear that any department or unit could find out where I was working and drag me off to a struggle session if they pleased. Sometimes if I was sent back to work after a session, I would experience a rush of relief at not having to hold the airplane position—working was pleasant in comparison. I was an incorrigible bourgeois capitalist, constantly finding something to enjoy.
On the way to work and back, I stayed away from the main roads so as to avoid running into the gangs of Red Guards that roamed the streets with their spears and red armbands. Someone like me was obviously a blackguard: gloomy-looking, dressed in patched, tattered clothes, and covered in dust. We blackguards were like birds at which anyone was free to take potshots. In fact, punching or slapping us was a legitimate revolutionary act. Even children knew that we were bad guys they were allowed to spit at or pelt with small stones. A few of them would even toss white lime in the blackguards’ eyes, which was extremely dangerous and could cause blindness. Since we couldn’t retaliate, all we could do was run away. Once, an eight-year-old with a brick in his hand called to me: “Come here! Let me hit you!” I hurried away—not too quickly, so as not to give the child a fright. I had no desire to risk going blind. As if being stepped on and struggled against was not miserable enough, blindness would be the last straw.
Steering clear of the main roads, I used the narrow back lanes instead. At the time, there were many more back lanes, running behind old houses or along ditches, littered with piles of garbage and smelling of sewage. No one else used those lanes, and they became my favorite haunts. They were peaceful except for the occasional company of a stray cat or dog unacquainted with class struggle. Cats knew only that I was a human, and they feared all humans equally. Whereas on the streets I would hurry along, eyes turned to the ground, here I could look up at the sky and enjoy my stroll, loitering as long as I pleased. These lanes were made for blackguards like me.
One day, at a work site where we were tasked with tearing down a bamboo stand, I stepped on a loose nail lying on the floor. The one-inch nail pierced through my thin shoe into the center of my foot. I felt a searing pain, and my foot wouldn’t stop bleeding. “You people are such useless idiots!” the overseer said. I knew that by “you people” he meant “you professors,” and braced myself for being slapped, but all he said was “Get lost!” I hurried away. Barely able to walk, I somehow made my way home, dragging my wounded leg behind my healthy one. I couldn’t go to the hospital, which was controlled by the very me
mbers of New Beida I was trying to avoid. My aunt and wife were shocked to see me, but they disinfected my wound with hot water, put some antiseptic on it, and bandaged it. I had to go back to work in the afternoon, for not only would I be in trouble but the worker overseeing me might get in trouble himself. Whereas the Communists had insisted on treating captured Kuomintang soldiers in a “revolutionary humanitarian” way, the same standards didn’t apply to us subhuman blackguards.
By this point, the two factions were getting into armed skirmishes. They had each started manufacturing weapons and assembling a small army. The ruling faction could afford to buy expensive steel rods and turn them into spears. Jinggangshan was less well funded, but they did their best too.
Each of the two factions took over several blocks on campus, guarding them like castles, and skirmishes broke out regularly. I never witnessed a battle, but I was once ordered to clear a field that had been the site of a fight. All the glass in the nearby building had been broken, and there were stones and bricks lying everywhere— these, too, had been used by both sides as weapons. But when I looked up, I couldn’t help smiling at the sight of a string of tattered shoes hanging from one of the windows, another reference to one of Nie’s nicknames. These grown-up children had turned the armed struggle between the two factions into a joke. It was the first time I had smiled in a long time.
Since both groups considered me their common enemy, I made sure to stay away from the actual fighting. No one who saw me would hesitate to attack me—and since I had escaped with my life thus far, I meant to stay alive. I wanted neither to kill myself nor to be killed. I wanted to live.
THE GREAT STRUGGLE SESSION
AS THE DAYS passed, I continued to live in constant dread. Wherever I was, whether at home or at work, I could be dragged off to a struggle session in a flash. No matter how remote my work site, if I saw people wearing red armbands coming toward us from a distance, I knew what that meant. I would have to follow them as unquestioningly as if I were an ox. I had perfected the airplane position, and there was no need for the guards to correct my posture with blows. My endurance training had paid off, which meant that struggle sessions were still a little uncomfortable but didn’t make my legs too sore. I had never paid much attention to the habitual political slogans and outright lies in all those so-called speeches, and now I simply ignored them. In any case, struggle sessions were a temporary reprieve from having to work. With the practical experience I had accumulated, I could have earned a certificate in surviving struggle sessions.
Sometimes the Red Guards didn’t bring me to a struggle session but to an interrogation. These also took place in the Foreign Languages Building, though for reasons I never discovered, the location changed constantly. When we entered the room, the various New Beida leaders in my department would be sitting unsmiling in a row, like judges in court. I was expecting to be made to hold the airplane position, but they permitted me to stand in front of them. Like the servile eunuch Jia Gui, who refused to sit in the emperor’s presence, I felt uneasy about being allowed to meet my interrogators’ gaze. Although being uncooperative had once saved my life, I was now more cooperative, since I could tell that being stubborn served no purpose. The interrogations were usually about phrases culled from the millions of words in my diaries. They were always taken out of context and deliberately misread, which meant that the accusations were absurd. I had to suppress my anger, since I was compelled to respond. The feeling of having to bite my tongue constantly was maddening. Sometimes I thought I would prefer holding the airplane position and getting slapped in the face to having to listen to such nonsense—from the mountain you’re standing on, the next mountain always seems taller.
All my interrogators were either students in my department or lecturers I had hired. I didn’t subscribe to the old-fashioned notion that they were indebted to me and owed me respect, and I knew they were blinded by factionalism. But there were a few individuals who were especially vicious toward me. One of them, a Korean language instructor, appeared to be currying favor with the Empress Dowager by being spiteful toward me; another, an Indonesian language instructor who used to be very polite to me, was in fact hiding the skeletons in his own closet. He had taken part in anti-Soviet demonstrations before 1949, and now he was trying to make up for his past by persecuting me. His past was uncovered, and he committed suicide the capitalist way.
I felt especially bad for a certain Arabic language instructor. He was an honest man who bore no grudge against me. New Beida gave him the lowly assignment of reading my diaries. I knew better than anyone what a mind-numbing and thankless task that was. Taken out of context, nearly any phrase could serve as an excuse to struggle against me, but actually reading through that mountain of papers and diaries would require real patience. Even I had no desire to reread my own diaries. But this man—I dare not classify myself as his comrade—actually stayed up all night going through my jottings and provided the New Beida leaders with much fodder for their interrogations. If Ji Xianlin were a worthwhile subject of study, “Ji-ology” might have been a profitable use of time. As it was, he had only wasted his efforts, which could have been put to better use reading Arabic literature or writing a master’s thesis. I felt sorry for him, but there was nothing I could do about it.
The interrogations sometimes grew heated, but no one raised a finger against me during these gatherings, for which I was grateful. Nonetheless, I was growing tired of the constant cycle of hard labor, struggle sessions, and interrogations. Everyone around me treated me as an enemy, and one woman in our building tried persuading my wife and aunt to disown me, to which my wife replied, “We’d starve without him!” I started dreaming of a savior who would take pity on me and come to the rescue of an innocent man. Never having put my trust in any god, buddha, or bodhisattva, I turned instead to the Great Leader. At night, after long days of work and struggle sessions, I would sit up writing letters to Chairman Mao, hoping against hope for a miracle. People were saying that “the Cultural Revolution will take place once every eight years and last eight years each time,” but I dreamed that the revolution would come to an end and that I would eventually be rehabilitated. As Du Fu’s famous poem goes, “The traveler climbing a tall tower to gaze at flowers is overwhelmed by grief.” My hopes were in vain: The cycle went on as before.
There was more trouble at home. The woman who had urged my family to disown me was pressing me to remove some furniture we had stored in her rooms, including a large sofa and an antique redwood table said to be the only one of its kind in Beijing. We only had two rooms left: a larger room we used for storage and a small room we lived in. The furniture wouldn’t fit in the bike storage room, which had been wrecked by the Red Guards. I still didn’t have the heart to clear up what was left of my books there, until a lecturer who lived downstairs put up a notice demanding that I remove the books and store them elsewhere. All my friends avoided me like the plague. To whom could I go for help? I felt like Xiang Yu on the banks of the Wu River, surrounded by enemy troops on all sides. I had already decided not to kill myself, but I didn’t know how to go on living.
Things would only get worse. I labored all that spring. The flowers on campus bloomed heedless of the revolution taking place around them, but I might as well have been color-blind—they all looked gray to me. Chinese tradition holds that plans for the year ahead are best made in the spring, and the leaders of New Beida accordingly hatched a new plan for tormenting their victims. They may not all have been genuine revolutionaries, but many were genuine sadists who were finally able to give their cruelty full rein. During the Cultural Revolution, their sadistic instincts were, as it were, “liberated.” I should point out that only a fraction of Peking University’s several thousand workers and tens of thousands of students took part in persecuting the intellectuals. All of the factional members were good-for-nothings and lazy rascals who had found a perfect excuse to cause trouble.
On May 4, 1968, the anniversary of the May Fourth Movemen
t, we convicts were marched from our homes to the coal plant. Everyone knew that the coal plant was run by a gang of workers who supported the Empress Dowager. They were brawny men who could easily lift whole sacks of coal, and we intellectual types were no match for them. They looked like the legendary outlaws in The Water Margin and had the strength to match, as anyone who had been beaten by them could attest.[1] The blackguards who had spent time working at the coal plant spoke of it with fear in their eyes, as if it were Zhazidong Prison, the coal mine that was turned into a Kuomintang camp for political prisoners.
Once we arrived at the plant, I noticed that only a subset of the blackguards had been selected for this honorable session. Among us were Lu Ping and Peng Peiyun, both mentioned by name in the first Marxist-Leninist poster. Wooden boards bearing our names and weighing at least a dozen pounds each were hung around our necks. We were ordered to sit on the floor and did so silently. Anticipating a long struggle session, I asked for permission to go to the outhouse, which was some distance away. I stumbled there and back as fast as I could with the wooden board hanging around my neck and joined the other counterrevolutionaries sitting on the floor, my heart pounding as if I were waiting to be executed.
Finally someone cried out that we were to be taken away and a crowd of men engulfed us. Each prisoner was held by two men who twisted our arms behind our backs and gripped us by the shoulders. They led us to a place I vaguely recognized as the No. 3 Student Cafeteria. We entered from the door on the left, and were lined up and forced into the airplane position. Since there was no podium, the speakers stood in a row behind a long table. I glanced to my right and saw Peng Peiyun, but I couldn’t make out any of the other counterrevolutionaries. As usual, there were deafening cries of “Down with So-and-so!,” followed by Mao’s sayings and interminable speeches. I had become so numb to these proceedings that I could barely hear a word they said. I was desperate for the session to end. I couldn’t see my wrist and probably wasn’t wearing a watch anyway, so I counted silently: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, and reached several thousand. The shouting continued, but my legs turned to lead and I started to see stars. I stopped counting. To my right, I could see a small puddle of sweat dripping from Peng’s brow onto the ground. I couldn’t see the ground beneath my own feet, but the wooden board seemed to be growing heavier, and the steel wire was cutting into my flesh.