by Ji Xianlin
•
Before the cowshed, I had never met or heard of Zhou, an older student in the Western Languages Department.
Since the first campaigns of the Anti-Rightist Movement in 1957, as an “old rightist” Zhou must have survived a decade of being persecuted in political campaigns. By the time I met him, his face was as yellow as wax and swollen, most of his hair was gone, and he looked like an elderly, sick man. He was said to have been an intelligent and promising student, but years of physical and mental torture had reduced him to little more than an idiot. Despite living in constant fear for my own life, terrified of the guards’ spears, I felt sorry for him.
The Red Guards callously treated the idiot as a two-legged plaything and loved to ridicule and humiliate him. He was assigned to a clever-looking young worker who could beat him up whenever he felt like it. Even on the way to the cafeteria, the worker was constantly abusing the idiot. At night we often heard his cries from the interrogation room. In this memoir I have generally tried to avoid calling people names, but I am going to break my own rule here: That worker was a thug, worse than a pig or dog.
One day, someone painted a large turtle in white on the back of the idiot’s shirt. He wandered about, looking lost. His clothes were filthy, since they had probably not been washed since he came to the cowshed; against the shirt, the turtle looked dazzling white and could be seen even from a distance. Other people might’ve found the sight hilarious, but we prisoners, having lost the privilege of laughter, kept our pity and revulsion to ourselves.
•
The physics lecturer was the only son of an elderly professor in the Psychology Department, and one of his legs was visibly shorter than the other. I had not met him before. One day, not long after lunch, I heard the unmistakable sound of someone being thrashed either with a cudgel or a bicycle chain wrapped in rubber. (There was no break after lunch for us in the cowshed. N. was once found dozing in his chair after lunch and tortured for an hour outside, possibly also forced to stare at the sun.) I was already numb to this sound, which could be heard several times a day. But the beating lasted longer and sounded more brutal than usual, so I glanced out the window and saw the disabled man lying at the entrance of the cowshed, while the guards continued to flog him. I couldn’t see if they were kicking him, but he was lying on the ground, his face caked with blood.
The physics lecturer joined the cowshed relatively late, and I wondered how he ended up with us. Like Hu Shi, I have an interest in historical accuracy, but I don’t have the heart to seek it. From that point on, whenever we lined up to have dinner in the cafeteria, we were joined by the new inmate with an asymmetrical gait.
•
I have many other memories, but I cannot bear to go on. The reader may be able to form a clear impression of life in the cowshed from these incidents.
IN THE COWSHED (3)
THE VIP ROOM
I KNEW THE Buddhist hell had eighteen levels, but it took a while before I discovered that hell in the cowshed might have deeper recesses than the one I lived in. To explain how I came to this realization, I must begin by introducing Zhang Guoxiang, a biology student who wasn’t one of the original guards of the cowshed but had been sent there later by Nie’s revolutionary committee. If I ever wondered why, I knew better than to ask. Zhang stood out not because he was particularly high-ranking but because he was always poking his nose into everything. The guards could take whatever they wanted from inmates’ homes; just as our lives were at their mercy, our property was now theirs. Zhang confiscated a bicycle from a convict’s home and often rode it around the yard for fun. No one else did anything for fun in the silent terror that blanketed the cowshed, so this, too, attracted attention.
After the evening assembly, or sometimes even after the regulation bedtime of ten o’clock, Zhang could be found sitting beneath the brightly lit tree in the center of the yard with his right leg planted on a chair. He’d be picking at the dirt beneath his toenails and railing at the unlucky convict who stood before him with bowed head. There was nothing special about his rants, but his unusual posture made an impression on me. One night I was surprised to find Lu Ping standing before Zhang. A principal target of the Empress Dowager’s big-character posters, Lu Ping had previously been imprisoned elsewhere and was only moved to the cowshed later on. I didn’t know what he asked Lu, how long the interrogation lasted, or what came of it. But something about the whole scene looked suspicious to me.
Little did I know that I would be standing in Lu Ping’s position only a few nights later. Not long after the curfew bell rang, I heard someone call my name from the direction of the Democracy Building. Even at night, I was always extremely alert, and I rushed to the front yard right away. There I found Zhang sitting with his leg perched as usual on his chair, cupping his ankle in his right hand.
“Why have you been corresponding with foreign spy agencies?”
“I have not.”
“Why did you say that Comrade Jiang Qing has been giving New Beida morphine shots?”
“That was just a metaphor.”
“How many wives do you have?”
I was taken by surprise. “I don’t have several wives,” I replied carefully.
We had a few more exchanges of this sort before he said, “I have been very kind to you tonight.” He was right. I hadn’t been beaten up or even yelled at, and I ought to be as relieved as though I were the subject of an imperial amnesty. But the word “tonight” should have aroused my suspicions.
The following night, after the curfew bell had rung and I was getting ready for bed, I heard a voice yell: “Ji Xianlin!” I rushed toward the yard even faster than yesterday, and ran into Zhang just around the corner of the building. He was fuming: “Where have you been? Are you deaf?”
Before I knew what was happening, a series of blows rained down on my head. I could tell that Zhang’s weapon of choice was a bicycle chain wrapped in rubber. There was a ringing sound in my ears, and I seemed to see stars, but I stood there rigidly without flinching, not daring to move. My eyes, mouth, and nose were burning with pain. I willed myself not to faint. I was so disoriented that I could barely hear Zhang screaming at me. The convicts who lived on that block later told me that the beating had lasted longer than usual, and they spoke of the incident with fear in their eyes. I was barely conscious when I finally heard the command: “Get lost!” Realizing that the wrathful god was being merciful to me again, I hurried back to my room with my tail between my legs.
As soon as I recovered slightly, I became acutely aware of the pain. I examined myself: My nose and ears were bleeding, but none of my teeth had been knocked out, and I could still open my swollen eyes. I writhed in bed all night long, my whole body aching, my open wounds sticky with blood. Without a mirror, I could only guess what I must look like. When Zhang’s victims appeared the following morning, their faces were always swollen with bruises, and I figured I must be in an even worse state. The following day, I went through the usual routine of working and learning Mao’s sayings, but my mind was blank. I didn’t even think about suicide.
Zhang wasn’t through with me yet. He barged into my hut at noon and ordered me to move to a different cell. It wasn’t as though I had to pack: I simply rolled up my bedding and brought it to a room that faced the place where I had been beaten. By day it seemed no different from my previous cell, but at night I realized that this was the VIP (Very Important Prisoners) room. The lights stayed on all night, and none of the prisoners slept as we each took turns keeping watch. Were the guards afraid we would try to escape? Surely this couldn’t be the case since intellectuals are the most timid of prisoners. This may have been a measure to prevent suicides, in case anyone wanted to hang themselves, for example. I realized that after my beating I had earned a promotion to a deeper level of hell, analogous to death row or to the Avici circle of the Buddhist hell. Lu Ping also lived here.
Zhang forced me and Professor Wang to fetch water for the entire camp. Three times
a day, we hauled a cartful of drinking water from the public water tank back to the cowshed. I don’t know how Professor Wang managed to end up in the same boat as me—he had committed no crimes and had never been a member of Jinggangshan. Fetching water was backbreaking work, and we did it together three times a day on top of our usual work and memorization. We looked on hungrily as the other inmates ate. Whenever it rained, we got soaked. But Professor Wang always found a way to enjoy himself. When we reached the tank he would secretly make himself a cup of tea and light up a cigarette.
THE SPECIAL GROUP
The guards were politically astute types. Having assembled all the cow devils and reformed us for more than half a year with memorization, lectures, and physical punishment, they decided it was time to cause divisions among us. They did so by selecting a group of convicts and designating them the Special Group.
The Special Group was housed in the Foreign Languages Building. Neither of the doors to the building could be opened, so a window was used as the entrance, and a long wooden plank served as a path into the classroom. I had no idea what the classroom was like, but I envied the convicts in this group enormously. I could endure beatings, hunger, and thirst for the time being, but it was the absence of hope that things would ever change which drove me to despondency. The future seemed to be an endless sea with no boat to board, no island in sight. Now that the Special Group was organized, it seemed like the boat that would carry me over the seas. Being selected for the group became my only ambition.
Members of the group had several enviable privileges. They were permitted to wear Chairman Mao lapel pins, and they could leave work early or arrive late. They may even have been allowed the privilege of paying Party membership fees. Whenever I overheard them singing songs in praise of the Great Leader, I imagined what it would be like to step onto that long wooden plank and find myself inside the classroom. It was unclear whether the Special Group was subject to a different set of rules, or whether the rules were just less strictly enforced. For instance, they actually crossed their legs in the cowshed, whereas I wouldn’t dare. They seemed to hold their heads a little higher when walking. But for some reason, no member of the Special Group was ever released until the cowshed was dismantled.
AN INDONESIAN LANGUAGE INSTRUCTOR IN THE EASTERN LANGUAGES DEPARTMENT
This individual had been a student in the Eastern Languages Department in Nanking University before Liberation, and when he transferred to Peking University he stayed on to teach after graduating. He was talented, hardworking, and produced excellent academic work. When he was studying in Indonesia, his family had run into financial difficulties, and I had done what I could to help him. We were on very good terms, and he always treated me with great respect.
But when Peking University split into rival factions, he joined New Beida. Overnight, he became extremely hostile toward me. He came to every struggle session that targeted me, and he glared with more ferocity and slammed his fists on the table with more vigor than anyone else, going out of his way to prove his allegiance to the Empress Dowager. Perhaps he was terrified that someone would discover he used to oppose the Communist Party and the Soviet Union. Although I had been warned about fair-weather friends, I found his betrayal particularly difficult to accept.
Class struggle eventually caught up with him. One morning I walked out of the cowshed and was about to bow my head as required, when I saw a big-character poster on the sidewalk: “Down with ——, the counterrevolutionary!”
I was stunned. Not too long ago he had been aggressive and brimming with revolutionary zeal as part of a panel that interrogated me. It turned out that someone had finally discovered the skeletons in his closet. That night, he took a capitalist overdose of sleeping pills and “alienated himself from the people.”
I took no pleasure in the news. Life is too complicated and terrible for gloating.
GIVING UP ON MYSELF
After a few months in the cowshed, I could feel my emotions growing duller and my thoughts more stupid by the day. The cowshed may not have been hell, but it felt as close to it as I could imagine; I may not have been a hungry ghost, but I certainly was as hungry as one. I felt like neither man nor devil, or perhaps like both man and devil. I began to judge myself the way I knew other people judged me. I used to consider myself a human being, and treated myself as one. But to borrow a popular philosophical term, I now felt alienated from myself.
Without wanting to sound arrogant, I should say up front that if there are two kinds of people, good guys and bad guys, as children say, I profess to be one of the good guys. I’ve never been particularly avaricious or stingy. When I was a young teenager, the pharmacist’s clerk in Jinan once gave me one silver coin too many in change. A silver coin was a small fortune to a child like me, but I gave it back to him right away. The clerk blushed, and I later realized that he might have been embarrassed because he wouldn’t have been so honest himself. In 1946, when I was about to return to China from Europe, while in Switzerland I sold a gold watch in order to send some money home, and exchanged the remaining francs for gold. The man made a mistake and gave me an extra ounce of gold; again, a single ounce was worth a significant sum of money, but I returned it right away. These are only small examples, but they mean something to an ordinary person like me.
In the cowshed, on the other hand, I gradually grew accustomed to the idea that I had become a cow devil, although I had initially resisted the transformation. I stopped distinguishing between man and devil, beauty and ugliness, right and wrong. As the proverb goes, a cracked jug may as well be smashed, and I had given up on myself as though I were a cracked jug. I was no longer tempted by suicide, nor did I think about the future. I had simply stopped caring who I was or what people thought of me.
I also had other, more pressing worries. The living allowance allotted to my family was pitiful, and even if we ate nothing but cornmeal buns with pickled vegetables, we would starve. A meager diet devoid of any meat meant that the hard labor made me constantly hungry. Sometimes I trailed the guards around, begging them for empty cartons of tofu, so that I could dip my cornmeal buns into the thin liquid at the bottom of the cartons. On one occasion, I was made to clean out Blocks 28 and 29, student dormitories that had been damaged during fighting by the rival factions. In a large room littered with debris on the south side of Block 28, I found a couple of moldy steamed buns in a bamboo cooker. Without stopping to think about hygiene or germs, I pocketed my finds and wolfed them down furtively when the guards weren’t looking.
I learned to tell lies. When I was at a work site and unbearably hungry, I would tell the team leader that I had to go to the hospital. With permission to leave, I would scurry home by back alleys no one used, gulp down a couple of steamed buns with sesame paste, and hurry back to work as though I had just been to the doctor. Of course, I risked grim consequences if I ran into a guard or one of their informants.
I was once thrilled to find some ten-cent and twenty-cent notes on the road, and quickly stuffed them into my pocket. A convict was prohibited from holding his head up when walking; from then on, I turned the rule to my advantage and kept my eyes peeled for copper coins. When I realized the latrines in the cowshed were the best place to find coins, the outhouse shunned by everyone else became one of my favorite spots.
I wouldn’t have believed I could do such unimaginably base things until I actually did them. I lost all sense of shame, as well as my sense of right and wrong. Just recalling those times makes me shudder. I used to wonder how one could morally corrupt a person, and I assumed that some people are just innately depraved. Now I know from personal experience that the truth is far more complex, but that no one can be held responsible for another’s evil.
•
There are many other things that can be said about life in the cowshed, but I will stop here. I trust that none of my readers will now doubt the validity of the Law of Maximum Torment. It is unclear what the Red Guards achieved from torturing us: They never disc
ussed their motivations, and there is no way to guess. Their official aim was to effect “reform through labor,” but although labor may have disciplined our bodies, it couldn’t reform our souls. As my own experience shows, persecution doesn’t purify its victims—it only corrupts them. That is all I have to say regarding the Law of Maximum Torment.
RELOCATING THE COWSHED
WITH THE ARRIVAL of winter, stoves were installed in the huts. Even though we were only allocated enough coal to light a few small fires, our cell felt snug in comparison to the bitter cold outside.
The number of inmates dwindled, and when there were only a few of us left, we were all moved into one large building. I didn’t dare ask why. Now that I was already in the Avici circle of hell, I decided that things could hardly get much worse.
There were so few of us that the building seemed empty. The rats grew bold and scuttled about in broad daylight. I found them gnawing on a dried steamed bun I had brought from home, and when I tried to chase them away, they glared at me with their little eyes and hid on the windowsill. Perhaps even the rats had realized that the building was inhabited not by ordinary human beings but by blackguards whom they could bully if they felt like it.
“Every wall has its cracks,” as the saying goes. Although the blackguards lacked the courage to speak freely or send each other messages, I gradually discovered that Nie’s revolutionary committee had altered its policy of housing all laogai convicts together, and that each department was to take responsibility for its own blackguards. Eventually, my department claimed its own, and we were relocated to the Foreign Languages Building.