The Cowshed

by Ji Xianlin

  Block 35 was a four-story building. The women lived on the third and fourth floors, and the men lived on the first and second floors. A few rooms had been set aside on the second floor as the Party office for the department. I was assigned to the guardroom, a tiny cubicle on the first floor with a large window facing onto a walking path. As the security guard, my tasks were to guard the building, to man the telephone, and to distribute all correspondence. The job appeared straightforward, but it was easier said than done. In guarding the building, for instance, I knew all the lecturers and older students but none of the newer students, which meant I simply had to let everyone in. As for the telephone, I answered calls when they came in and sat idle otherwise. Most of the calls seemed to be for the women, which meant making multiple trips to the third and fourth floors to alert the recipient. Climbing stairs is said to be an excellent way of getting exercise, but after trying a few times, I decided that making dozens of trips a day was not for me. I gave up and decided to simply shout up toward the windows from the ground floor. This worked, even though it meant that some of the women in north-facing rooms couldn’t hear me, which sometimes caused trouble. I ignored it, having decided that I was already doing the best I could. Finally, I brought all newspapers to the office and collected any letters that came in the post, leaving the mail on the windowsill to be picked up by the recipients.

  These three tasks made the days pass quickly. Every day at eight I walked from Block 13 in the staff quarters to Block 35 in the dorms, and went home at noon. Then I returned to work at two in the afternoon, and got home at six. I was in excellent health, since I had few worries and got plenty of exercise from walking several miles a day. At some point, my original salary was reinstated. I had no teaching or research responsibilities, and no one dared write to me or come to see me. I was beginning to enjoy my life as an “untouchable.”

  TRANSLATING THE RAMAYANA

  I was used to writing all the time, and I gradually grew tired of my mindless existence. When no phone calls or letters came, I sat alone behind my big glass window watching people come in and out. This became very dull. “How can a lifetime be frittered away save by finding something unprofitable to do?” I thought of these ancient words of wisdom. Why shouldn’t I find something to do? Some unprofitable pursuit—mahjong, for instance—was out of the question, and I couldn’t bring myself to start writing. Finally I hit upon the idea of beginning a translation. Since it seemed as if I might spend the rest of my working life as the security guard of Block 35, I decided to translate the longest and most difficult text I could think of. It would certainly be unprofitable, if nothing else, since no publisher would dare to publish a translation by someone like me. I finally settled on the Ramayana, one of the two great Indian epics. It consists of some twenty thousand verses, mostly of four lines each. I figured it would keep me busy for several years.

  I requested that the department librarian order an authoritative new edition of the Ramayana in Sanskrit from India via the International Bookstore, expecting nothing to come of it as it was extremely difficult to obtain foreign books at the time. But I was in luck: Within weeks, all eight volumes of the Sanskrit original were sitting on my desk. This was the best thing that had happened to me since the Cultural Revolution began. The sight of the books refreshed me and brought a long-forgotten smile to my face.

  I didn’t want to risk bringing the books with me to work. I was, after all, a security guard, and I was keenly aware of the shadow cast by my political labels. Eventually I devised a routine: The Ramayana is a verse epic, and I was determined that my translation should be in modern rhyming verse. But composing even trivial rhymes can often prove difficult. So each night, I would read the Sanskrit original carefully and translate it into Chinese prose. The next day, on my way to work, and in between all the phone calls and letters, I would turn the prose into verse. I often wrote out the prose in an illegible cursive and carried it in my pocket so that I could take it out in spare moments and mull over the rhymes. As I stared into space, no one could have known what I was thinking. Outside the window, I could see the Asiatic apple trees and flowers in bloom.

  A MINOR EPISODE

  The beautiful weather brought with it no change in my political status. I had resigned myself to living out my days quietly as a security guard, with no further political turmoil, but this was not to be.

  One day, I noticed new big-character posters written on yellow paper, pasted onto the temporary bamboo stands outside my door. The posters were signed by several dozen lecturers in the department, and they denounced members of the May 16th Group. I ignored them at first, since there was always someone denouncing something. But then my curiosity got the better of me, and I was shocked to find that they were denouncing me: I was in fact suspected of having been part of the May 16th Group. This was absurd. Everyone knew that the ultra-leftist May 16th Group consisted of young people from good class backgrounds. I was neither young nor from a good class background, being neither a worker, farmer, nor a revolutionary cadre— in fact, I was just about as unlikely a candidate for the May 16th Group as could be. I should have just laughed and put the matter out of my mind, but I found myself unable to laugh or even snort in response, as I had when reading the poster attacking my essay “Springtime in Yanyuan.” I don’t know how the army thought propaganda team and revolutionary committee could have come up with such an improbable idea. Nor was that the only ludicrous thing about the whole affair: After the entire country had shouted its voice hoarse about May 16th, and a Jinggangshan leader had even publicly admitted that he belonged to the group, the mania evaporated quietly—it turned out that the May 16th Group didn’t even exist. This was only one of the many absurd instances of chasing windmills that took place during the Cultural Revolution.

  A FARCE

  Before long, it seemed that the Cultural Revolution had passed its peak, and the movement was drawing to a close. Although our motto was “Chaos confuses the enemy,” our chaos had confused no one but ourselves. Now that things were slowly returning to normal, the most pressing task was to restore order within the Party ranks and iron out the irregularities, like the fact that a non-Party member from the workers’ thought propaganda team worked for the Party branch.

  Many ordinary Party members would have to reclaim their Party membership. Apart from the Gang of Four and their cronies, nearly all former members had been ousted at some point during the Cultural Revolution. There would be no Party that needed order restored if there were no Party members, so it was decreed that all former members would have to be officially reinstated via a process involving peer discussion and approval from Party superiors. This would be a huge project. After discussing the matter with the army-and-workers’ thought propaganda team, the department leaders—including the worker who was not a Party member—decided to select one exemplary Party member whose reinstatement would serve as a model for all others. That person would have to be perfect in all respects, possess a high degree of political consciousness, and come from a faultless class background. Eventually they chose a man called Ma, the student I had chosen and mentored with an eye to his becoming my teaching assistant and eventual successor. Now that I was a capitalist counterrevolutionary academic authority, I would serve as a useful test of his Party loyalties. Ma came from a peasant family and was the son of a revolutionary martyr. His class background and our relationship made him the ideal choice.

  One afternoon, those Party members of the department still on campus were summoned to the student cafeteria and told to bring a small wooden stool to sit on. When we arrived, we discovered that the long tables in the cafeteria had been pushed aside to make space for the wooden stools. On a large table at the front of the room lay some woolen pants among other clothing, a radio, which was still a luxury back then, and a few other odds and ends. I was too far back in the crowd to get a closer look at the things on the table. The bizarre assortment of objects reminded me of a flea market or yard sale. There was also a stac
k of printed and bound lecture notes. Puzzled, I sat there, unable to tell what the lecture notes and pants had to do with each other, or indeed what any of the items had to do with this man’s readmission to the Party.

  People filtered in, and it was time to start. The chairman said a few words about the purpose of these proceedings before inviting the candidate for reinstatement to step forward and say a few words. The model Party member rose and began to speak confidently. The subject of his talk was “I Will Not Be the Golden Paper Doll of the Capitalist Academic Authority.” Golden paper dolls were buried with the dead in traditional Chinese funeral rites; as for the “academic authority,” everyone in the audience knew he was referring to me. By then I was used to being the target of various meetings, though I hadn’t expected to be featured in this one. I listened to this former student of mine denounce the sugar-coated bombs of the academic authority, and tell the story of how he had been poisoned by capitalist ideas into desiring bourgeois comforts and so on. When he described how close he had come to betraying his proletariat background, he nearly broke down and cried. He gestured at the things laid out on the table as though they were evidence of his narrow escape. Then he grew angry, picked up the bound lecture notes— which turned out to be lectures on Sanskrit—and tore them down the middle. Scraps of paper fluttered to the ground like butterfly wings. “He’ll go for the beautiful woolen pants or the radio next,” I thought. But he only drew his hand back. Saved from destruction, the pants and radio glittered unscathed on the table. I was bewildered, as was the rest of the audience. The destruction of these capitalist trinkets was meant to be the climax of today’s show; instead of generous applause, the man’s performance earned a stunned silence.

  Needless to say, the farce was a failure.

  As we trudged back to Block 35, people were chattering: Why had Ma destroyed the Sanskrit lecture notes, which arguably had nothing to do with capitalism, rather than the fancy woolen pants, which were a perfect symbol of bourgeois pleasures? I, too, gave some thought to the story of this man, who had spent the past dozen years at Peking University. He was a consummate hypocrite: As a student, he had been extremely respectful, but another side of him came to light during the Cultural Revolution. For instance, it was extremely inappropriate to sign political banners with your own name, and only two people in the whole university insisted on doing it. Both, Ma included, happened to be in our department. That made him an object of ridicule for some time. When I first took part in a political study group at the university, I told him frankly that his behavior wasn’t appropriate for the son of a revolutionary martyr or a member of the proletariat. Presumably, he never forgave me for saying that, which may explain his later behavior. I never found out how the rest of the department regained entry into the Party.

  REGAINING PARTY MEMBERSHIP

  Eventually, the university’s project to reinstate all Party members was nearing completion, and only a few outsiders remained. I was one of them; my name must have been at the very bottom of the list.

  One day, the department’s Party branch officials summoned me to a meeting, and I knew that it was finally my turn. I had long been reassigned from my job as a security guard to the Hindi research center. The Party branch secretary and the army officer attached to our department told me that the authorities had decided not only to reinstate my salary but to repay the amount that had been docked from my salary. I was very touched. I decided then and there that I would donate the extra money to the national coffers, in lieu of unpaid Party membership fees. A colleague I respected gave me one thousand five hundred yuan, and told me that I could expect to receive another four or five thousand yuan. I gave the envelope containing my salary to the Party branch, unopened.

  I don’t remember whether there was a Party branch meeting on the question of reinstating my membership. But one day the head of the army thought propaganda team and the secretary of the department Party branch came to ask me: “Have you reflected on your errors?” I was at a loss for words. I certainly suffered from all kinds of personal faults, but I had never been involved in the Kuomintang or other counterrevolutionary organizations—I had no political errors worth speaking of. I stood there silently, until the officer finally changed the subject. Soon another cadre from the branch propaganda committee or the organization committee came to tell me that the branch had decided to restore my Party membership with two years’ probation. I was livid. I had practically paid for my opposition to Nie Yuanzi with my life. I had been persecuted, imprisoned, and struggled against, and after surviving all of this I was now to receive two years’ probation? Where was the justice in this? I was bitterly disappointed in the Party. The cadre saw the expression on my face and said that the branch could call a meeting to reopen my case for discussion. Enough, I thought. I couldn’t bring myself to sign the notification letter with the word “agree,” and I knew that writing “do not agree” would only be asking for trouble. I thought about it for a moment. “There’s no need to call another meeting,” I said to the cadre, and signed the letter with the words “basically agree.” “You know what the word ‘basically’ means,” I told him. Then I thought: Is a Party member on probation worthy of donating his salary to the national coffers? So I kept the four or five thousand yuan I had been planning to donate.

  Now that my Party membership was restored, was I truly, fully liberated? There is nothing more to say, the chapter must come to an end. My experience of the Cultural Revolution was over and my story draws to a close.

  FURTHER REFLECTIONS

  BUT WITH FURTHER thought I must continue—I must not stop here.

  During the sixteen or so years since the Cultural Revolution ended, I’ve been thinking constantly about what it all meant. While writing this memoir, I’ve been able to think long and hard about this, and I offer here some of my reflections.

  First, have we learned from history?

  The Cultural Revolution was neither cultural nor revolutionary: Everyone agrees that it was nothing but a ten-year-long disaster. The country suffered incalculable losses, both intellectually and economically. But now that we’ve paid sizable sums in tuition fees, what do we have to show for it? We haven’t yet learned our money’s worth.

  I believe that the Cultural Revolution can serve as an excellent example of what not to do; reflecting on it will show us, by extension, how to act in the future. This is of crucial importance in helping our country to move forward. If we don’t learn from it, we will have missed an unprecedented opportunity.

  Some people say that what’s past is past, and there’s no need to waste time rehashing it. This leads to my next question: Is the Cultural Revolution a thing of the past?

  We are materialists, and seeking truth from facts lies at the heart of materialism. If we are serious about seeking truth, we must admit that the Cultural Revolution is not merely a thing of the past. Look carefully. Ask anyone who was implicated, especially any of the older generation of intellectuals who were persecuted then, and you will learn, if they are forthright with you, of much lingering resentment. Young people, on the other hand, hardly know anything about the Cultural Revolution, which is little more than a fairy tale to them. This troubles me: If they barely know what happened, who can guarantee that they won’t make the same mistakes themselves? I cannot speak for all intellectuals, but of the older generation I can guarantee that the very mention of the Cultural Revolution is enough to awaken a simmering bitterness.

  The older Party cadres who were persecuted may not harbor bitterness to the same degree, being the unselfish, politically conscious citizens that they are. Despite their devotion to establishing the new China, many of them were also struggled against in the Cultural Revolution, but I know few cadres personally, so I cannot judge how they feel. Yet I am reminded of a brief but telling encounter that I would like to share here. In 1978, when the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference started up again, I ran into an elderly Party cadre at the Beijing Friendship Hotel. He wa
s a long-standing Communist who was very well known in literary and artistic circles. Before the Cultural Revolution, we had both been members of the social science working group at the conference, but we hadn’t seen each other in more than a decade. His first words to me were: “It used to be said that ‘the scholar can be killed, but he cannot be humiliated.’ The Cultural Revolution proved that not only can the scholar be killed but he can also be humiliated.” He began to roar with laughter, but there were tears in his eyes. I couldn’t even smile with him. Surely this man must have suffered untold anguish.[1]

  He was not alone; I, for one, also felt humiliated, and I imagine that many others must have as well. We Chinese intellectuals are descended from a tradition of scholars who would rather be killed than humiliated, a tradition that makes us overly sensitive, perhaps more so than our counterparts in other countries.

  This encounter led me to consider the history and present status of intellectuals in China. In Chinese feudal society, intellectuals didn’t constitute a social class, but scholars would have ranked ahead of farmers, artisans, and merchants, being at neither the very top nor the very bottom of the feudal system. They commanded respect. I was born too late to have known intellectuals like those in the Qing dynasty novel The Scholars.[2] But I did know a few university professors of the warlord and Kuomintang era. They were well respected and well paid, and as social status often determines an individual’s consciousness, many of them were self-assured, cocky types. By the time I became a professor, Kuomintang influence was waning, and soaring inflation left professors with a pitiful income. Yet many of them still wore the long scholars’ gowns that indicated their social status.

  I, like many other professors, greeted the Communist Liberation of 1949 enthusiastically. For once, we were proud to be Chinese, and as excited and naïve as young children. We saw “blue skies in the liberated areas,” as a popular song of the time went. Everything seemed to glow with promise.