The Cowshed
Page 20
I did survive, but by the time I left the cowshed, I had become little better than an idiot. When I walked into a shop to buy something, I didn’t know what to say. I was used to staring at the ground wherever I went and being cursed and threatened. I stuttered and hesitated whenever I saw people—I barely felt human. I belonged to the walking dead.
I did survive, but I couldn’t help wondering why I had forgotten the saying “The scholar can be killed, but he cannot be humiliated.” Since I had had the courage to speak up, why had I not had the courage to protest my indignities by ending my life? I sometimes felt that having chosen to live was shameful. Even more strangely, I never opposed or resented the Cultural Revolution itself until the Gang of Four was toppled in 1976. Until then, I had supported the state of continuous revolution that plagued the country and failed to associate my own suffering with it. As you can tell, I am not a political animal.
I spent forty years worshipping cadres, soldiers, and workers, as I mentioned above, and feeling guilty about my own vocation. Everything sacred to me was destroyed by the Cultural Revolution. It is true that I still respect these three types of people. But as for the Cultural Revolution itself, which I used to support wholeheartedly, I now consider it an unprecedentedly violent, ignorant, farcical tragedy, an unforgettable disgrace to the Chinese people.
After the Gang of Four was toppled and the Cultural Revolution ended, the authorities instituted an economic policy of reform and opening up. It has gained widespread support and become very successful within only a few years. All of China, and all the intellectuals, are hopeful about the future.
This has been my experience of the forty or so years since Liberation. During this time, my heart’s mirror reflected campaign after campaign after campaign, including the experience of political campaigns that I shared with many other intellectuals. It reflected my own journey from blindly supporting the campaigns to thinking more clearheadedly and the progress that China has made from the brink of economic and political disaster to relative prosperity.
I have lived through more than eighty years of the twentieth century, and in seven years’ time, this century and this millennium will be at an end. These have been interesting, changing times, and the reflections in my mirror have been colorful and full of variation, reflecting both narrow bridges and well-lit roads. I cannot promise that my mirror is absolutely free of error. But its reflections are accurate and reliable.
I have held this mirror for eighty years. In retrospect, how would I judge its record of the twentieth century and of my own life? As the poet wrote: “Now that I know what sorrow tastes like, I would speak of it but have no words. Instead I say: What a chilly autumn day!” I say: What a chilly winter day!
There is only one thing of which I am certain: The twenty-first century will be the century in which the culture at the heart of Eastern civilization, Chinese culture, experiences a renaissance. Today’s most pressing questions of human survival, such as the explosion in population growth, environmental pollution, habitat destruction, the holes in the ozone layer, the limits of industrial food production, and the limited freshwater supply, can only be addressed by the Chinese civilization. This is my firm and final belief.
February 17, 1993
Notes
AUTHOR’S PREFACE
1 The recurring motif of people who “eat” other people is a reference to one of the seminal texts of the May Fourth Movement, Lu Xun’s 1918 short story “A Madman’s Diary” (“Kuang ren ri ji”).
2 The Empress Dowager was a nickname for Nie Yuanzi (b. 1921), a philosophy professor and instigator of the turmoil on campus at the start of the Cultural Revolution, and an allusion to the Empress Dowager Cixi (1835–1908) who controlled the Qing dynasty’s imperial court for half a century.
3 Scar literature is the name given to a genre of Chinese literature that emerged in the late 1970s, depicting the experiences of their authors during the Cultural Revolution.
THE SOCIALIST EDUCATION MOVEMENT
1 As part of the Socialist Education Movement, conceived to persuade peasants of the benefits of collectivism and the communes, intellectuals were also sent to the countryside to help with agricultural work.
2 Wu Han was a leading historian who had earlier called on Party cadres to emulate the outspoken Ming dynasty official Hai Rui. A play he wrote for a Beijing Opera company, Hai Rui Dismissed from Office, won Mao’s approval when it was performed in 1961, but Jiang Qing argued that it was, in fact, an attack on Mao’s policies, a veiled critique of the dishonest reporting of agricultural output. Mao personally revised the junior propagandist Yao Wenyuan’s polemic against Wu Han’s play. Yao would later be known as one of the Gang of Four.
3 The Communist Revolution of 1949 is customarily referred to as Liberation.
4 “Notes from a Three-Family Village” was a weekly column commissioned by a Party-run magazine. The three ill-fated authors of the column, Wu Han, Deng Tuo, and Liao Mosha, were all persecuted in the Cultural Revolution; Deng Tuo would later commit suicide and Wu Han would die in prison.
JUNE FOURTH, 1966
1 The May 16th Notification was a classified document containing denunciations of Peng Zhen and others, and recording the politburo’s approval of the Cultural Revolution.
2 This is a poem that Ji wrote in his diary upon leaving Germany after more than a decade in Göttingen.
3 The airplane position was a stress position often used by Red Guards, in which the victim was made to bend over at the waist with arms stretched out or bent backward.
CHOOSING A LABEL THAT FIT
1 Qi Baishi (1864–1957) and Wang Xuetao (1903–1982) were both influential Chinese brush painters.
2 At criticism meetings, individuals who had committed “thought errors” would be invited to participate in public self-criticism and be open to verbal attacks.
JOINING THE FRAY
1 Hu Shi (1891–1962) was a prominent intellectual and cultural reformer influential in the May Fourth Movement.
2 “Going it alone” was the phrase used to refer to individual peasants who refused to join a village commune and preferred to farm on their own.
REFORM THROUGH LABOR BEGINS
1 Cross talk is a traditional art form consisting of a richly allusive, punning dialogue between two performers.
THE GREAT STRUGGLE SESSION
1 The Water Margin is a fourteenth-century novel recording the exploits of a band of outlaws gathered at Mount Liang.
IN THE COWSHED (1)
1 Hu Feng (1902–1985) was a prominent literary theorist who became the target of a national criticism campaign.
2 Ji refers to an incident in which Emperor Yongzheng (1678–1735) seized on a minor linguistic flourish in a memorial submitted by General Nian Gengyao (1679–1726) as an excuse to execute him.
3 Yuan Shikai (1859–1916) was a Qing dynasty general who staged a brief military coup in 1916, declaring himself president of the newly established Republic of China; the coup lasted only eighty-three days.
IN THE COWSHED (2)
1 The Dunhuang manuscripts consist of important religious and secular documents discovered in the Mogao Caves in western China and dating back as far as the fifth century.
HALF LIBERATED
1 The erhu is a two-stringed bowed musical instrument believed to have originated in central Asia.
FURTHER REFLECTIONS
1 This “old revolutionary” was Zhou Yang (1908–1989), a controversial character who took the lead in several political campaigns, including the campaign against Hu Feng that Ji mentions later. Zhou was imprisoned at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution and not released until 1978.
2 The Scholars is a 1750 novel by Wu Jingzi satirizing the civil service examination system that produced imperial China’s scholar bureaucrats.
3 The campaigns, which took place in 1951 and 1952, targeted corruption and bureaucratic wastefulness.
4 Wu Xun (1838–1896) was a late Qing dynasty figu
re who rose from poverty to become a landlord and used his money to establish schools for the very poor. Redology is the study of the eighteenth-century classic novel Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin. Hu Shi (1891–1962) was a historian and leading reformer of the May Fourth Movement.
5 This is a recasting of the first line of the poem “Climbing a Tower” (“Deng Lou”) by the Tang dynasty poet Du Fu (717–770): “The traveler climbing a tall tower to gaze at flowers is overwhelmed by grief.” (See “The Great Struggle Session.”) Du Fu’s poem condemned the weak central government during a time of political turmoil.
APPENDIX: MY HEART IS A MIRROR
1 The four pests to be exterminated were rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows.
JI XIANLIN (1911–2009) was born in the impoverished flatlands of Shandong Province, only weeks before the Qing government was overthrown, and educated in Germany in the 1930s. After the Second World War, he returned to China to co-chair the Eastern Languages Department at Peking University. A distinguished scholar of Sanskrit and Pali, Ji was best known as an influential essayist and public intellectual. The former Chinese premier Wen Jiabao paid visits to the author during his final years and made it known that he considered Ji a mentor.
ZHA JIANYING is a journalist and nonfiction writer. She is the author of two books in English, China Pop: How Soap Operas, Tabloids, and Bestsellers Are Transforming a Culture and Tide Players: The Movers and Shakers of a Rising China. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Dushu. She divides her time between Beijing and New York City.
CHENXIN JIANG was born in Singapore and grew up in Hong Kong. Recent and forthcoming translations include a novel by Xiao Bai for HarperCollins and one by Zsuzsanna Gahse for Dalkey Archive Press. She received the 2011 Susan Sontag Prize for Translation, as well as a PEN Translation Grant for her work on Ji Xianlin. Chenxin also translates from Italian and German. She studied comparative literature and creative writing at Princeton University.