The Cowshed

by Ji Xianlin

  Not long ago, when the Special Group was housed there, I had set my heart on being moved to the Foreign Languages Building too. But now that I was moved in, I was still an ordinary blackguard, my status unchanged. We blackguards were assigned to the Burmese language classroom on the north side of the second floor where we slept on mats on the floor. Our guard slept on a large table near the window, surveying us from above. He was a young student called Lu, nicknamed Lujiang, or “Tinker.” To my surprise, there were new arrivals among us, and I wondered whether they were laogai convicts too. Because we were all in the same boat, we got along well.

  Life became less dramatic. I was no longer constantly on edge as I had been in the cowshed. Since Tinker slept in our room, I stopped straining to make sure I wouldn’t miss hearing a guard’s orders and get in trouble.

  But I couldn’t forget that I was still a blackguard. Many of the offices on this floor belonged to the department that I had headed for twenty years before being struggled against, and I knew the rooms inside out. This used to be my turf, and I had felt at home here. Now times had changed, and I was a blackguard rather than a professor. The tenth-century poet Li Yu wrote: “Spring passes, as a flower falls to the ground or water flows in a stream, and the past seems as distant as the heavens are from the earth.” The past seemed distant to me now that I had spent more than a year labeled as a counterrevolutionary. I felt no desire to regain my former position. I had already been struggled against and excluded, and my only aim was to survive.

  There were three places in the building I was allowed to enter: my cell, the toilet, and the interrogation room, the location of which shifted constantly. The second was shared by both counterrevolutionaries and revolutionaries, since the cow devils weren’t really devils and we needed to relieve ourselves as well. It remains to be seen whether real devils share this need.

  For the blackguards to be living in close quarters with ordinary civilians was a little uncomfortable—we often ran into each other. The Chinese are a courteous people, and failing to greet someone you know is unthinkable. There are fewer variations of greetings in Chinese than in English with “hello,” “good morning,” “how do you do,” and so on. (The Chinese sometimes say “good morning,” but that is a recently imported phrase.) The universal greeting across China regardless of the time of day is, “Have you already eaten?” In the Foreign Languages Building, when I ran into someone I had known for years, I couldn’t bring myself to use greetings of either the imported or nationally common variation. Instead, I would look down and slink away. I don’t know how my acquaintances felt, but we blackguards constantly felt rather awkward. Sometimes in the corridors we could hear ordinary people talking and laughing in a room, their voices full of a proletariat gaiety inaccessible to us. Laozi wrote of small, bordering kingdoms where the people could hear the other kingdom’s dogs barking, and yet each kingdom was completely self-sufficient. We, too, seemed to live in a kingdom separate from that of ordinary people. Despite being able to hear their voices, we ourselves were voiceless, like so many shadows.

  No one was brave enough to pass me any news, and so I found out what was happening by eavesdropping on the chatter in the corridors. The first newsworthy incident concerned the lecturer in Mongolian studies mentioned earlier, the only female inmate from the department. In the Foreign Languages Building, there was no designated cell for women as there had been in the cowshed, and housing her with the men was out of the question, so she had to be put in a separate room. The female wardens in charge of her were a student of Korean and Ye, the department librarian. Ye was a minx, a troublemaker, a gossiping, brutal type. Our department used the library as a common room, and rumors always started there. During the Cultural Revolution, Ye joined New Beida and became a rabid sup porter of the Empress Dowager. Once she even came to my home, snapping and snarling, to haul me off to a struggle session, even though it was almost unheard of for a female Red Guard to escort a male prisoner. So when she was put in charge of the only female convict in the department, she wasn’t going to let her get off so easily. That night, she and a few others decided to interrogate the woman and beat her up severely. I found out that this had happened, but I had grown so used to incidents like this that I was totally numb.

  Little did I know that the next newsworthy incident would involve me.

  No one had lifted a finger against me since we moved to the Foreign Languages Building. I had not learned my lesson; I was still very stubborn, and despite having gone through the hell that was the cowshed, I refused to make false confessions. One day, Zhao Liangshan (it is said that he is no longer alive), an army major who had been sent to support the leftists at the university, summoned me to his office to question me. I was disappointed and thought that a soldier of the People’s Liberation Army would be more reasonable. “All my diaries were confiscated and are being held somewhere in this building,” I snapped. “It would only take you five minutes to check them and find out what I did that day.” This angered him. His face darkened, and he told me off for being uncooperative. He was the boss here—how dare I answer back?

  When we returned to our cell after dinner, a lecturer who used to oppose the Empress Dowager brought a team of people to the cell. They plastered the walls with political banners, giving our blank walls a dash of color. The slogans were entirely predictable. “Ji Xianlin has been uncooperative, down with Ji Xianlin!” “Resistance will be punished!” “No speaking out of line!” I was so used to being struggled against that I slept soundly anyway.

  Sure enough, Red Guards from my department—probably representing both factions—came for me the following day. Unable to lift my head as I was marched away, I only gradually realized that they were taking me to the student dorm Block 40. I could make out posters with slogans, and though I couldn’t read them, it wasn’t hard to guess that they’d be full of insults and slander. I had become the poster child for uncooperative blackguards.

  I was dragged by the scruff of my neck into the building, down the narrow corridors crammed full of students. Slogans rang in my ears and fists rained down on me. Unable to make out a single face, I walked (or, rather, was made to walk) from one end of the corridor to another on the first floor, and did the same on the second and third floors. Eventually, just as I was getting bored of the whole exercise, I was taken back to the Foreign Languages Building. I later heard that this was called an “indoor struggle procession.” It may even have been invented by the students in my department—if so, it deserves to be recorded in any future History of the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution. Given that I had already survived much worse, I was mostly just amused.

  Major Zhao must have been up all night planning the next installment of struggle sessions. Immediately after breakfast, a student came to take me to another one. When I was allowed to look up, I realized I was in a staff room with its usual occupants and a few other students. I was preparing myself to hold the airplane position, so I was startled to be given a chair and permitted to sit down. What could come of a struggle session conducted with its victim sitting? Again, I grew bored and shut my ears to the commotion until I heard the order: “Take Ji Xianlin out!” The show was over.

  As I was getting ready to go back to my cell, however, I was dragged to another staff room where the process started all over again. Then there was a third room and a fourth—I lost track of the number of struggle sessions, but there were more than a dozen staff rooms in the department, so I must have been struggled at least as many times. Next it was the students’ turn. Each one of the twenty classes had to struggle me once, which should have added up to more than thirty hours altogether, though it probably didn’t take quite that long since some classes skimped, and the quality of the struggle sessions was variable. For the next few days I was busier than an itinerant actor: We did eight or nine sessions a day, one after another, stopping only for meals. It was a little tiring, but I grew to enjoy this sort of struggle, in which I could let other people shout themselves h
oarse while I sat quietly, letting my mind wander.

  Remaining uncooperative from beginning to end saved me from committing suicide in the early days of the revolution, while toward the end it gave me a chance to enjoy a milder variant of struggle sessions. This certainly wasn’t what the revolutionaries had anticipated.

  HALF LIBERATED

  I WAS TO be half released or “liberated” from prison. As there was no official definition of what being half released meant, I will relate my experience here.

  By the time the many struggle sessions had ended, the new year was upon us. Shortly before Chinese New Year in 1969, the department’s revolutionary committee suddenly notified me that I was now permitted to return home. Tinker escorted me to my place, though now that I was no longer a prisoner he was technically not acting as a guard. The larger of our two rooms was locked, and my aunt and wife had been living in a tiny room of a hundred square feet. They told me that for some time, a student repeatedly returned with the confiscated key to our big room, bringing a woman with him. They would sleep on my bed and cook with our gas. They threatened my aunt and wife not to tell anyone. Now Tinker opened the door to my room with that same key. By then, I had not slept in my own bed for eight or nine months.

  I was immensely relieved but also apprehensive. I was still labeled a counterrevolutionary, and the future seemed bleak. My meager allowance barely fed our family. Eventually it was increased, though I don’t remember when this happened or how much more I received. But I continued to be persecuted. Once I overheard the head of the Family and Dependents Committee in our building, an old man said to be a former Kuomintang soldier, announce loudly to the whole building: “Ji Xianlin is back! Watch him carefully.” It seemed likely that he was acting under orders from his superiors. Even though I was used to that kind of rhetoric, I couldn’t help feeling a little uneasy at having been sentenced to “surveillance by the people.” I had become an untouchable, like an HIV carrier or plague victim.

  Even if my neighbors hadn’t reminded me that I was to be shunned, I would still have to adjust to acting normally around other people again. I still stared at the ground wherever I walked. In shops, I didn’t dare greet the shop assistants as “comrade”—how dare I see myself as their comrade? But then what should I call them? Addressing them as “sir” or “miss” was inappropriate in the revolutionary era; not greeting them at all would be even worse. I found myself stuttering with embarrassment as though I was already losing my mind in old age.

  Before long, I was ordered to begin studying in Block 40. It was about two miles from my home and the roads were icy; the walk would take half an hour even if I hurried. I decided not to take the main road and instead to cross the frozen lake. It suddenly occurred to me that I was both literally and metaphorically walking on thin ice. I had no idea what the future held or how to behave now that I had been released. When I saw the guard outside Block 40, should I still cringe and address him deferentially like a prisoner would? When I saw a Red Guard, should I cry “Reporting” and hang my head? Realizing that I had no answers for any of these questions, I began to linger and drag my feet.

  When I finally reached Block 40, I couldn’t help thinking of being paraded through these corridors just yesterday. Now that I was neither professor nor prisoner, what was my new identity? Apprehensively, I reported to the department headquarters and was relieved to be greeted with indifference. No one was going to beat me up or shout slogans at me. I was assigned to a group of students studying Hindi and began to help with their lessons and activities. I soon found that all the blackguards in my department were here, and that we had each been allocated different jobs. I was ordered to sweep the corridors with a few other lecturers, while a lecturer of Hindi who had been unjustly labeled a landowner was assigned to scrub the toilets. I had come prepared to be assigned the dirtiest jobs, and I was surprised when that didn’t happen.

  I wasn’t used to mixing among the masses, and I felt uneasy about being neither man nor devil. The students were young and full of energy. During recess they would take out their musical instruments and sing or play music. I was moved by one student’s playing on the erhu, but I couldn’t allow myself to enjoy it too much.[1] I sat stiffly like a wooden statue in the thick of their laughter and chatter, acutely aware of not fitting in.

  Things improved, but a few complications still loomed. To begin with, there was the question of my Party dues. As I have mentioned, prisoners in the cowshed didn’t pay dues. Since I couldn’t draw my own salary, my elderly aunt did so for me. Each month she would go to the Foreign Languages Building to collect the forty-odd yuan on which our family of three survived. People would whisper behind her back or even insult her because I was a blackguard and a Jinggangshan man to boot. She simply put up with the humiliation. But even under these circumstances, she was still worried that her nephew might lose his Party membership, so she kept paying dues on my behalf. Surprisingly, she found a member of the department’s revolutionary committee who was willing to accept my dues without reporting me, or I could’ve expected a beating. I don’t know who that person was, but I remain grateful to him or her to this day. My aunt also said that one Comrade Yuan never insulted her and was always kind to her, telling her to take care of herself and make sure she kept her cash safe. His kindness was like a glimmer of warmth on a winter night, and she always spoke of him with gratitude.

  Now that I had been transferred to Block 40, I ought to be responsible for paying my Party dues. But what with my own ambiguous status and the state of confusion within the Party itself, I barely even knew whom to give my dues to. After some time, a senior member of the department summoned me to ask why I hadn’t paid my membership dues. “Once I am formally expelled from the Party, I will repay every cent I owe,” I told him candidly, thinking there was no chance I would be allowed to retain my membership.

  I was also troubled about returning to Block 40, a place I knew extremely well. By 1966, I had chaired the Eastern Languages Department for twenty years; the department’s male students also lived in this block, so I had come here often. I had memories of being warmly welcomed to Block 40, as well as memories of being mercilessly humiliated. I don’t want to make trite remarks about the fragility of interpersonal relationships—this has always been part of the human condition, the norm rather than the exception. But my own feelings were fragile. I was no hero and had no desire to become one; heroes are made of sterner stuff. I was an ordinary human being, with run-of-the-mill hopes and fears, trying to recover from my experience in the cowshed. Things had certainly improved since I had been transferred to Block 40, but my future was very much uncertain, and Block 40 was the locus of many memories.

  To speak only of the few years following the start of the Cultural Revolution, much had taken place in Block 40. In 1966, after returning from Nankou, I was standing outside the compound when I saw the poster criticizing me and couldn’t help sniffing audibly with disapproval. I was later told to hand over three thousand yuan and hurried to Block 40 to give it to the students, who then refused to accept the cash. When I watched the struggle sessions targeting capitalist-roaders at the very beginning of the revolution, it was Block 40 that shook with their slogans. When I offended an army captain, I was subjected to an indoor struggle procession here in Block 40.

  And now I was in Block 40 again, living and working as one of the masses once more.

  IN YANQING XINHUA CAMP

  This time around, I spent less than a year in Block 40, from the winter of 1969 through part of autumn the following year. During this period, the famed 8341 Special Regiment, the same regiment responsible for the personal security of Central Government leaders, sent troops to Peking University to help support the leftists. Because they were known to have a long-standing revolutionary tradition, many teachers and students, myself included, hoped they would put things right at Peking University. Yanyuan was still overrun by factional fighting, and we looked to the regiment to bring order to the campus.
>
  Instead, most of the professors at the university were shipped off to Liyuzhou in Jiangxi to be reformed through labor under the leadership of the 8341 Special Regiment. Liyuzhou is known to be blistering hot and inundated with parasitic blood flukes. One of the army officers dubbed this new plan for tormenting the intellectuals the “heat treatment.” I steeled myself for yet another ordeal and made preparations for the trip. Unexpectedly, I was sent with the students of Hindi and Thai to be reeducated by peasants at the Yanqing Xinhua Camp in the suburbs of Beijing.

  I soon discovered that I had a special role to fulfill. It had apparently been decided that criticism meetings were incomplete without a live target to criticize, and I was the designated target. My role reminded me of the sheep tied on top of cars driving in the countryside of Xinjiang. When a good spot is found by the picnickers, they slaughter the sheep on the spot, cook a lamb pilaf, and return home satiated. At Xinhua Camp, I mostly worked in the vegetable cellar; I was criticized at one meeting. I knew that I was fulfilling my role. By Chinese New Year of 1970, we were summoned back to Beijing.

  FULLY LIBERATED

  THIS CHAPTER DESCRIBES “complete liberation” while the previous one describes “half liberation.” These are general concepts rather than technically precise terms. A rigorous discussion of the difference between the two is best left to legal scholars or philosophers.

  Being back on campus lifted my spirits. At around this time, the department moved its offices into Block 35; like nearly every other department, we were moving into the student dorms in order to be close to the students and facilitate the “student-led management and reform” of the university. According to this new policy, lecturers were to be managed by students, beginners were to devise the curriculum of more advanced students, and so on.