The Cowshed
Page 12
Most people are in the habit of sometimes sitting with their legs crossed, but this too was forbidden in the cowshed. I remember reading somewhere that the military dictator Yuan Shikai always sat up straight, with his feet placed firmly next to each other on the ground.[3] But he was a soldier, whereas we inmates were all civilians—how could we be expected to match his military discipline?
I have already mentioned that the inmates had long since lost the ability to laugh. How can a basic human instinct be “lost,” you ask? No, laughter wasn’t forcibly stolen from us; we gave it up of our own accord. Under the constant threat of a beating, who was in the mood for laughter? Any laughter heard within the confines of the cowshed came from a guard. It sounded to me like the shrieking of owls at night and made me shiver with dread.
IN THE COWSHED (2)
THE INFORMANTS
THE GUARDS CONSOLIDATED their grip on power by operating a system of prison spies. I wondered whether they had copied this idea from the Gestapo, KGB, or the Kuomintang secret police, or if they had come up with it on their own. The spies were known as “informants,” and the guards chose one per cell. The rest of us had no clue how they had been chosen or what they were instructed to do. Informants had various privileges, one of which was being allowed to return home every Sunday and to visit for longer durations. In the cowshed, some prisoners were never allowed to go home, while others were allowed home occasionally, rarely once a week. These privileges were naturally meted out by the guards, so informants snitched constantly, reporting even the smallest infractions in order to maintain their position. Some of them went out of their way to curry favor by taking note of which prisoners had been getting on the guards’ nerves and informing on them. One day, I saw an informant lean over to whisper to a guard. As a result, a blackguard from his building was immediately dragged off to a room reserved for administering beatings. I didn’t see what happened next, but it was all too easy to imagine the consequences.
EXTERNAL INVESTIGATORS
The interrogation of prisoners conducted by a work unit from outside Beijing was known as an external investigation. Many departments spared no expense in sending their representatives to remote villages in order to collect evidence against problematic individuals from their own department, so as to prevent them from ever being rehabilitated.
Since I had had the nerve to oppose Nie, her supporters held a particularly deep grudge against me and spent a lot of energy investigating my so-called crimes. When I was finally able to visit my hometown, a childhood friend from my village told me that he had met two investigators from Peking University who wanted to accuse me of being a landowner, and that he had told them off, declaring: “If anyone has a right to speak of hardship, it is Ji Xianlin!” They backed off, tails between their legs. But it seemed they returned to the village on another occasion to try their luck again. As I mentioned before, the Red Guards had confiscated my address book in the raid on my house so that they could “investigate” all the addresses in it. Other departments and work units were doing the same thing, so the country was crawling with external investigators.
The investigators I dealt with during my time in the cowshed each possessed a different style. Some of them gave me the names of the individuals under investigation, in which case I would simply be expected to write a report and hand it in to the guards. Some never raised their voice, whereas others were boorish and abusive. I was once summoned to the interrogation room to be interviewed by two investigators from Shandong University in my home province. I realized that a certain friend of mine must be under investigation. If I weren’t a blackguard myself, I might have tried to help him, but by then I was powerless even to help myself. They pulled my hair, kicked and slapped me, treating me as though I was their own prisoner rather than an inmate of Peking University’s cowshed. I watched them slam their fists on the table with rage. Their oily Shandong country accents and vulgar facial expressions disgusted me. The profanities of choice in Shandong differ from those in Beijing, but their import was all too clear. For two hours, the visitors did their best to bully me into confessing my own alleged crimes as well as my relationship with my friend. Even as a veteran of struggle sessions, I was stunned by their brazen insistence. I was drenched in sweat; it was well past lunchtime, and the interrogators had no intention of stopping. Finally the guards thought their guests were going too far and asked them to leave. I was exhausted, but I couldn’t help thinking of my friend, who must have been having a rough time if he was up against these men.
ENDLESS STRUGGLE SESSIONS
As inmates of the cowshed, each day we would wait for guards or workers requesting labor to take us to a work site, like oxen being distributed to villagers by the head of the village commune’s production team. We allowed ourselves to be led away like cattle; unlike oxen, we could speak, but we didn’t make a sound.
Laogai, however, wasn’t the only way in which we were to be reformed. Years of experience have taught me that labor only reforms the body; it cannot reform the soul. Labor can lacerate the convict’s flesh with blisters and scars, but it cannot extinguish his anger. Labor must, as a result, be supplemented by the cruelty of struggle sessions. Those had predated the laogai camps, and the two were now being implemented in tandem.
Most prisoners probably preferred hard labor to struggle sessions, but since we had no choice in the matter, we simply had to be mentally prepared for either. Even if you had already been assigned to a work team, you could never feel perfectly safe. Prisoners were summoned to struggle sessions every day, and a department might suddenly decide to struggle against you, if only for entertainment. New Beida’s Red Guards could stride into the cowshed office at any time, proudly wearing their armbands, and obtain permission from the overseers to struggle against you. I don’t know exactly how many prisoners were sent to struggle sessions every day, but each one returned looking downcast, hair tangled, face covered with bruises.
As a former member of Jinggangshan, I was an especially frequent target of struggle sessions. Every morning at breakfast, I dreaded being told to stay behind from the day’s work. When that happened, I would have to wait nervously in my room, dreading the struggle that awaited me, while my friends toiled blithely somewhere. The Red Guards would escort me into the yard, where I would be summoned to a sliding panel that faced the cowshed. The panel was covered with words, but I don’t remember what they were. I would bow at the waist and wait for the guards to admonish me: “Ji Xianlin! Be good while you’re being struggled against!” As if they were parents talking to a young child: “Be good while I’m away!” No matter where they took place, struggle sessions always proceeded along the same lines. They would begin with deafening slogans, followed by speeches and a bit of punching and slapping if the crowd became animated. Finally a voice would cut through the shouting and slogan-chanting: “Take Ji Xianlin away!” The ceremony finished, I would return home to the cowshed, as dejected as the others, my hair tangled like hay.
THE GREAT STRUGGLE SESSION OF JUNE 18, 1968
As mentioned earlier, June 18, 1966, was designated a day for struggling against “devils.” I lay at home that day, as well as on June 18th the following year, since I had not yet been designated a devil. But by June 18, 1968, I was already a devil, and I had spent more than a month in the cowshed. I was finally eligible to participate. The guards seemed busy that morning, and it soon became clear that only a few inmates would have the honor of joining the procession. N. and I were the only two from our department. I have never forgotten the man who escorted us, Mr. Zhang, a worker in charge of educational technology. Not only did he refrain from insulting us, he was actually kind and polite. We inmates had stopped thinking of ourselves as ordinary people, and being treated humanely was a real shock.
But the rest of the audience wouldn’t be so cordial. I didn’t know who they were or where we were going, because I didn’t dare look up. But as we left the cowshed, I realized we were walking past the lake and the Russian
Building, up the slope past what is now the library, in the direction of the Philosophy Building. Eventually, after having been struggled against, we were taken back to the cowshed again. I don’t remember listening to long speeches or being forced to hold the airplane position. The entire affair was chaotic, with hordes of people and intermittent shouts of “Down with . . .” probably organized by the many departments in attendance. Like a wandering spirit in a dream, I just kept my head down, dimly aware of the crowds around me even though I could only see their shoes and trousers. On the way back to the cowshed the crowds seemed to grow even bigger, and more bricks rained down on me. I was already completely numb to their blows. Only when I got back to the cowshed did I realize that someone had drawn a huge turtle on my shirt and tied a willow branch to it, perhaps to make a dog’s tail. The cowshed suddenly seemed quiet, peaceful, almost like home.
I later reflected that the procession had only drawn such crowds because the masses had grown used to ordinary struggle sessions and no longer derived much pleasure from them. The annual struggle procession was thus a particularly festive occasion.
LIFE IN THE COWSHED
I have chosen a few anecdotes intended to offer a representative view of life in the cowshed. These anecdotes involve fellow blackguards of mine who will remain anonymous in my retelling, although anyone who was there at the time will recognize them: There will be no need for a Concordance to the Cowshed.
•
The professor of library science was an old friend of mine. He was a renowned scholar of the Dunhuang manuscripts and the former librarian of the Beijing Library.[1] Although I didn’t know what he was accused of, I could’ve guessed that a man with his gifts wouldn’t escape the cowshed. When we saw each other in the prison, neither of us said a word, as though we had both been struck dumb. But dumb though I may have been, I wasn’t blind. I saw what happened to him.
One evening, to my surprise, this elderly professor was singled out during the evening assembly. The clear sound of a slap to the face was followed by more blows and savage kicking, until he was reduced to kneeling on the floor. It turned out that he had written his daily thought report on coarse toilet paper and dared to hand it to a guard in that form. This was one of the few instances that made me smile during our time in the cowshed. Had he used the coarse paper simply because there was no other paper available, or was he deliberately mocking the guards’ self-importance? If the latter, his act of defiance is worth recording. I feared for him, but I also admired his nerve. To the rest of us prisoners, he was a hero.
•
The law school professor was an old Party cadre. All I know about him is that he joined the Party before the war. We met when he was first assigned to Peking University and asked me to translate the Manusmrti, one of the earliest texts of the Hindu Dharmaśāstra tradition. We continued to see each other at meetings on and off campus. He was down-to-earth and approachable, just as a cadre should be, and we got along very well. Of course, neither of us could have foreseen that we would eventually become fellow prisoners.
In the cowshed, blackguards avoided speaking to each other unless it was absolutely necessary. If you saw an acquaintance in the yard, you lowered your head and walked quickly by, without so much as lifting your eyes. We too never once acknowledged each other.
One Sunday, after the prisoners who had received permission to go home for the afternoon were returning to the cowshed, I saw this elderly professor holding a placard with his name on it and being forced by a guard to make the rounds of each cell. When he entered the cell, he said, “My name is ——, and I was late. I have been ordered to self-criticize. I admit I was wrong!” I don’t know what the other prisoners thought, but I stood there, utterly embarrassed by his humiliation.
•
The lecturer in Mongolian studies was an unusually decent, honest person. During the Cultural Revolution, she was falsely accused of being a member of the Kuomintang’s Three People’s Principles Youth Corps, an assertion supported by neither evidence nor eyewitnesses. Her only crime, if she had one, was that of irreverence toward the power-hungry leader of New Beida. Some time earlier, N. and I had been assigned to clear the grounds outside the east gate of pebbles and loose bricks. One day this woman turned up to join us. Bewildered, I asked her whether the department’s revolutionary committee had sent her. They hadn’t, she said.
“So what are you doing here?”
“They told me I’m guilty, so I started feeling guilty and decided to reform myself through labor.”
I was puzzled by her explanation, which seemed to be motivated by something like the Christian notion of original sin. That was the sort of person she was. But given that I was a blackguard myself and under orders “not to speak out of turn,” I didn’t dare say anything else to her.
Unsurprisingly, she wasn’t among the convicts who were transported to Taiping Village some time later. But trouble wasn’t far off. One day at dusk, a new prisoner was dragged into the cowshed. I glanced over surreptitiously and recognized her. I had thought she had escaped the cowshed, but here she was, and this time it didn’t look like she had volunteered. I pretended to look the other way. “What is your name?” a guard asked her.
She gave her full name, which ended with the character hua.
“Which hua?”
“The hua in Zhonghua Minguo,” she said, using the taboo term for Taiwan, “Republic of China.”
How dare this “active counterrevolutionary” invoke the Republic of China in a cowshed representing the full authority of the revolutionary committee? She was immediately punched and kicked to the ground. Then one guard had an idea: He took her to a tree with a crooked, low-hanging branch, and forced her to stand beneath the branch so that her head was just touching it.
“One step forward!” said the guard.
To take a step forward, she had to tilt her head back.
“Another step!”
The branch sloped down, forcing her to tip her body as well as her head backward.
“Another step!”
Here the branch became very low. She was no circus performer, so this was as far as she could fit. The commands ceased, and she stood there, bent over backward at the waist. Unable to hold this position for even a minute, she collapsed on the ground, drenched in sweat. Needless to say, this didn’t end well for her. She had just become the unlucky victim of the guards’ newest method for torturing people. The next day her face was swollen with bruises.
•
Having spent decades serving in an administrative capacity at Peking University, I had known the Party branch secretary of the Biology Department for years. He was immediately singled out as a capitalist-roader at the beginning of the revolution, and had been a target of the first June 18th struggle session, so he had ample experience of class struggle.
For some reason, the Biology Department was full of the Empress Dowager’s supporters, and there were many biology students among the guards. By the time the cowshed was built, attention had shifted away from the capitalist-roaders who had been targeted in earlier struggle sessions. Very few of them were imprisoned along with us, the counterrevolutionary academic authorities, so I was surprised to see this man in the cowshed.
The many biology students among the guards took particular pleasure in tormenting him; while I don’t know all the details of what he suffered, I myself witnessed one chilling instance of his treatment.
On a July or August day when the sun was at its hottest, I caught sight of the Party secretary staring at the noonday sun. A guard, a biology student, was sitting nearby in the shade.
At the time I was puzzled by the sight, but later I heard that the guard had devised the following punishment: Open your eyes wide, look straight at the sun, and don’t blink or you’ll get a beating. I shuddered. From ancient feudal societies built on slavery to modern capitalist societies, has anyone devised a punishment like this? Was it even humanly possible to look at the sun for longer than a split second
without going blind?
Two other blackguards from that department offended another guard who was a biology student. He ordered them to stand back to back a few steps apart in the courtyard, and lean backward so that their heads touched—the only way they could avoid falling over was to push their heads against each other. Other such incidents that I won’t list here prove that our tormentors made rapid progress in the arts of torture.
•
She was a teacher in the elementary school attached to the university. I didn’t know her personally and don’t know why she was imprisoned in the cowshed.
Over the course of several months, I noticed there was a distinct allocation of labor among the guards when it came to torturing us. This woman, for instance, was always beaten by the same guard. One morning I noticed that her arm was bandaged and in a sling. People were saying that her tormentor had broken her arm during a vicious beating in the interrogation room. She had to come to work anyway. Inquiring into anything was fatal for a blackguard, so I did my best to forget what I had seen, and that was all I ever learned about the episode.