The Cowshed

by Ji Xianlin

  I was barely conscious when someone said: “Take them all away!” The ceremony was over. But as before, the worst was yet to come. My arms were twisted behind my back and at least three people gripped my shoulders; I could barely lift my head or stand up straight. I was marched out of No. 3 Student Cafeteria onto the streets full of jostling crowds. The bystanders made a racket that sounded like a chorus of cicadas on a summer night. This parade went much faster than the previous march. Having just spent hours holding the airplane position and wearing a wooden board, I could barely walk. Instead of helping me along, the young men on either side of me dragged me like a dead dog through the streets. I quickly wore through my battered shoes and socks, which meant that my exposed feet trailed along the ground. I was insensible to the pain. I knew that I was being pelted with small rocks, but I was only dimly aware of the journey to the main cafeteria and back. Then I was flung on the ground. When I recovered my senses, I realized I was lying outside the coal plant.

  This was the most draining struggle session I had experienced. I was lying on the ground—my ears ringing, heart beating rapidly— too faint to get up. I became aware of blood trickling from my toes. The crowds had gone to dinner, and I looked up to see two of the other victims, Zhang Xueshu and Wang Enyong. Being younger and stronger than me, they helped me up and brought me home. I will never forget their kindness.

  TAIPING VILLAGE

  AFTER THAT DEBILITATING struggle session, I longed for a few days’ rest—I simply couldn’t endure it anymore. But the Red Guards knew that iron must be hammered into shape while still hot, and they had already planned our next ordeal. The following day, more than a hundred of us received the order to pack our belongings and report to the coal plant. I despaired at the thought of new torments. As I was lugging my trunk along a lakeside path, I ran into an economics professor named Hu. Having earlier been labeled a capitalist-roader, he had not been rehabilitated and was looking despondent. I envied him enormously for not having been summoned to the coal plant.

  The following day, I hurried nervously into the plant. The place itself struck fear into all the blackguards. With the previous day’s events fresh in my mind, I was terrified. I was made to stand outside beneath a wooden board, bent at the waist. I was mentally prepared to be punched or slapped. But I waited, and nothing happened. I began to worry about what new tricks the guards had up their sleeves. I would’ve preferred if they slapped and kicked us as usual.

  We were told to line up two by two, and someone who looked like a New Beida student began to lecture us, brandishing a spear. “You turtles, listen up. None of you will ever be rehabilitated!” We could actually hear him, since we didn’t have to focus on holding the airplane position. “My spear is not a vegetarian spear!” he said. I believed him, especially since deaths at the time went unprosecuted, and New Beida had already been responsible for a few deaths. Killing a blackguard was like squashing a fly; no one paid any notice. As he spoke, his companions hustled a handful of blackguards at random out of the group, beat them savagely on the sidelines, and then forced them to return to their original places. Their tactic was to make an example of a few people in order to terrorize us all. To my relief, I was spared.

  We were rounded up onto a couple of pickup trucks. It was about an hour’s drive to the Peking University campus, known as “No. 200” because the original blueprint for the building project had supposedly been coded #60-200. The campus was not far from the Ming dynasty imperial tombs outside the city, and from there it was a five-kilometer walk to our eventual destination, Taiping Village. Unexpectedly, although everyone else had to walk, the guards had been thoughtful and kind enough to arrange for me and a few other older prisoners to be taken there by car.

  We would be living in a row of derelict huts, four convicts to a hut. The doors and windows were nearly all broken, everything was coated in a thick layer of dust, and the beds were covered with mud. As blackguards, we had no right to demand any better. I was assigned to share a hut with N., the elderly professor of Eastern languages, as well as Professor Zhao from the Politics Department whom I knew well. He had progressed from being labeled a capitalist-roader in the earliest stage of the movement to being a counterrevolutionary academic authority. Even though we were old acquaintances, we sat there stiffly, none of us daring to speak or smile. To use a Marxist term, we had been “alienated” from our own humanity.

  We had traveled all day in hot weather, and I had not had a drop to drink since that morning. My thirst was overwhelming.

  Water water water. . .

  I would have drunk anything: river water, lake water, sea water, ditch water. . . There seemed no greater happiness known to man than that of quenching one’s thirst. I vowed that the moment I was freed, the first thing I would do was drink a tall glass of water, or better yet, an ice-cold beer. Water water water, I thought. I was suddenly reminded of a line from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: “Water, water, everywhere, and not a drop to drink.” But there wasn’t a drop of water to be seen anywhere in the desert surrounding us.

  The huts lay at the foot of Yan Mountain, with the peak to our north and the fields stretching out to our south. Even Taiping Village itself was some distance away. Although we were completely isolated, the guards insisted on carrying their spears at all times, as if they were truly afraid that we would plan an uprising—we, a group of aging intellectuals who probably couldn’t kill a chicken if we tried. Of course, we had neither the strength nor the courage to revolt. We would have counted ourselves lucky merely to survive. Nonetheless, I was amused that the guards saw the need to take such precautions. The rules were especially strict at night. You couldn’t even use the outhouse without requesting permission or you risked being speared to death. We had all been duly warned. One night, wanting to relieve myself, I tiptoed out into the moonlit night and cried “Reporting!” into the nighttime silence. Then I waited until an invisible spear-wielding voice replied, “Go!”

  The educational component of laogai consisted entirely of hard labor, and on this occasion, our job was to plant sweet potato seedlings, which would have been light work if I wasn’t in pain from the previous day’s beating. I knelt stiffly on the ground and began to work steadily. Before long, someone thumped me on the head with a cudgel, and I looked up to see a guard with a spear in one hand and a cudgel in the other. “Ji Xianlin! Be careful or you’ll get it!” he shouted. I didn’t want to get it, so I bent over and worked so hard that my fingertips began to bleed.

  It was the beginning of summer, the peach and apricot blossoms had already wilted, the woods were green, and thousands of tiny flowers carpeted the plains beneath the mountains. I was working furiously and had no time to admire the view. But as I glanced at the woods, these words came into my mind:

  While planting seedlings beneath Yan Mountain,

  Disaffectedly, I catch sight of the green forest.

  They were an echo of two lines by the fourth-century poet Tao Yuanming:

  While picking chrysanthemums by the eastern fence,

  Tranquilly, I catch sight of South Mountain.

  Nature may be indifferent to “class struggle” and the squandering of human talent described by the poet Qu Yuan as “golden bells being smashed, while clay pots clang loudly,” but human beings cannot remain indifferent to our own circumstances.

  After only a few days of work, my body collapsed under the physical and mental strain, exacerbated by injuries from the struggle sessions. My testicles became so swollen that I couldn’t even stand up or close my legs, let alone walk anywhere. Planting seedlings was out of the question. I was unable to drag myself out of the hut for lunch, so the guards took pity on me and ordered N. to bring me food. But work was mandatory, so they ordered me to pick up stones and bricks in the yard and toss them over the fence. I spread my legs, crawled toward the bricks, made a heap of them, and crawled toward the fence to hurl them over. The other blackguards had gone to work in the fields, and only a few watchmen remaine
d at the huts. The huts and yard, field and forest were blanketed by a silence that city dwellers cannot imagine. As I crawled about wordlessly, I couldn’t help weeping.

  Two days later, seeing that my condition showed no signs of improvement, the guards ordered me to report to the military clinic on campus at No. 200, and warned me to declare that I was a blackguard. I spread my legs gingerly and crawled out onto the road like a snail. On the way, I met a fellow blackguard Ma Shiyi. He was pushing a cart to Changping to buy vegetables. He offered to take me to No. 200 on his cart, but I didn’t dare accept. To this day I have not forgotten his generosity.

  It took me two hours to crawl to the military clinic at No. 200. There was a doctor in military uniform on duty, and his bright red badge awakened a glimmer of hope. When he saw me, he immediately rose to help. “Doctor, I am a blackguard,” I declared, following orders. The doctor’s face darkened instantly, and he refused to touch me, as if I had the plague. “Get out of here!” he said quickly. I was hoping he would at least examine my swollen testicles and give me some painkillers. The brightness of his red badge appeared to fade suddenly. But there was nothing I could do except crawl back to the hut.

  Human beings have a remarkable capacity for enduring pain. A few days later, without any medication, the swelling subsided and I could return to work on the hillside. All the potato seedlings had been planted, so the Red Guards ordered N. and me to fill in the potholes beneath the peach trees. We were a small team overseen by a single man, a lecturer in Arabic studies from our department. He used to be our student, but now that he was in charge, he lorded over us fiercely with his spear, like one of the Four Great Buddhist Kings. The peach grove was even quieter and more beautiful than the farm, but I was not in the mood to enjoy it.

  Our living conditions were primitive. We ate on the beach of a dry lake at the foot of the mountains, near a cluster of houses that were cleaner than our huts, each containing a kitchen. The Red Guards ate separately at a table indoors, while we ate our coarse rice and cornmeal buns in the yard or under the trees. Even boiled vegetables or deep-fried bread were luxuries beyond our reach.

  Although we did nothing but eat, work, and sleep, there was one great reprieve: We were safe from the constant threat of struggle sessions, the dreaded airplane position, and the interminable nonsense of political speeches. I think all of us would have been happy to stay in the village.

  BUILDING OUR OWN PRISON

  BUT IT WASN’T to be.

  If we had been better acquainted with the Red Guards’ whims, we would have known more was coming.

  I never discovered why we were sent to Taiping Village. Whatever the reason, after only a few weeks we were ordered to return to campus. The car dropped us off at the coal plant, and the same New Beida student who had previously given us a long lecture, lectured us again. I had no idea what to expect next, but the following day, we were summoned to the single-story buildings between the Foreign Languages Building and the Democracy Building and told to construct the cowsheds in which we would eventually be imprisoned. We were literally to make our beds and then sleep in them.

  I knew these small buildings well. I walked past them every day on my way to work and had taught classes in them. The sun burned down through the thin roofs in the summer, and the broken windows offered no protection against the wind. The brick-tiled floors were damp and moldy. Even the installation of stoves wouldn’t keep these buildings warm. They were slowly falling apart.

  But New Beida’s leaders had evidently decided that this would be our prison. The Democracy Building would be the eastern boundary of the cowsheds, the Foreign Languages Building would be the southern boundary, and we were to erect reed mats as temporary walls on the northern and western sides. Reed mats stretching across the gap between the two buildings served as “doors.” Twenty blackguards were allocated to each building, with separate ones for men and women, giving us all barely enough space to lie on the floor. Because the buildings had long since fallen into disuse, the floors were unbearably dank. Eventually it was announced that the Empress Dowager had arranged for us to receive a truckload of wooden planks to be laid on the floors. Of course the Red Guards couldn’t be expected to live in the buildings. They established their headquarters in the Democracy Building, arranging offices and some living quarters. They continued to take extensive precautions against us. During the day, the back doors of the Democracy Building that faced the cowshed were left open, with defensive measures that included plenty of barbed wire and spears. At night, the doors were locked to prevent prisoner break-ins. A shed built of reed mats was built next to the women’s quarters. It was originally called the transfer room, and was later renamed the interrogation room to make it sound more revolutionary. Many prisoners were questioned there and severely beaten. A larger area was converted into an open-air cafeteria for the blackguards.

  The yard was full of potholes and overgrown with weeds. It hadn’t been used in a long time, and would now have to be cleaned up so we could move in. The men were divided into cleaning teams, while the women and elderly were assigned a variety of other jobs. Although the yard was bustling with activity, all the prisoners worked in complete silence—an entire army of forced laborers.

  I was assigned to a team responsible for constructing a barrier around the cowshed. We dug a large trench to the east of what is now the Archaeology Building, planted wooden stakes in it, and built a makeshift frame by hammering long planks across the tops of the stakes. Finally, we nailed reed mats onto the planks, creating a wall that was more than ten feet high. Only days ago, this had been a passageway, and now it was completely sealed off and impassable.

  After the barrier had been built, I was reassigned to work in the interrogation room, where my task was to level the ground with spades and wooden rods. We were all terrified of being punished. No one protested and everyone worked hard. Here the guards carried cudgels instead of the spears they had brandished in Taiping Village, perhaps because they felt safer now that they were back at New Beida’s home base. But we were acutely aware that their spears lay within immediate reach inside the Democracy Building, and that they were, as we had been warned, “not vegetarian.”

  There was a professor from the Western Languages Department, probably in his seventies, who often walked around with a dazed look in his eyes. He hadn’t been sent to Taiping Village, nor had he been targeted in a struggle session, so he didn’t retain the same terror of the guards that we felt. But his misfortune revealed that our own fears were not misplaced. One day, he rested for a moment while working and allowed his spade to stop moving. Little did he know that a guard was standing right behind him with a cudgel. The guard struck him heavily on the back, and only then did he come to attention and begin swinging his spade again. After this interlude, a symphony of spades hitting the ground could be heard throughout the interrogation room.

  Finally, when the cowshed was ready, the words “Down with all cow devils!” were painted in large white characters on a south-facing wall as a finishing touch. The slogan was more terrifying than a hundred lectures by students wielding spears. Each character was taller than a person, and I privately noted that the brush calligraphy was some of the best I had ever seen. Indeed, writing big-character posters gave our students a chance to practice their calligraphy, beating people up allowed them to build their muscles, giving speeches in struggle sessions made them better liars, and getting into fights made them bolder. No effort expended during the Cultural Revolution was entirely wasted.

  Lu Xun was right when he said that China is a country of the written word. Centuries ago, during the Han dynasty, people wrote sayings like “Ill dreams at night, safe in daylight” over their doorways to guard against bad luck triggered by a nightmare. Proverbs like this are everywhere in China. Ghosts are said to fear certain sayings, such as “Stones from Mount Tai ward off evil.” Socialist China likewise has not evolved beyond the power of the written word. We plaster the slogan “Serve the people!” e
verywhere, as if merely saying so means that the people have already been served. Similarly, the words “Down with all cow devils!” above our heads proved that we cow devils had already been struggled against and defeated. This was a simple, elegant, and eminently Chinese solution.

  From then on, we inmates lived in the shadow of those words.

  IN THE COWSHED (1)

  WE WERE ABOUT to be herded into the prison we had built with our own hands. As the novelist Hu Feng said, “There is life to be lived everywhere”—even in the cowshed.[1] But finding a way to talk about living life in the cowshed is not so easy. I finally decided on the technique, much beloved by Chinese historians, of coming up with a theory as an organizing principle for my story. My theory has no basis in the academic literature, and it wouldn’t stand up to professional scrutiny. It is based purely on fieldwork, but I am nonetheless convinced of its truth.