“Xiaoda’s storytelling has plenty of antic vigor... fueled by an activist’s anger.” —The WashingTon PosT
! e l t i t s i h ft s l o o o k t e e e h t p h t k i a w e t u n ) . s o n y a e a l e r y e c h o s t j r e n u g E an m of yo h c n a o c t t u o o b Y r ( o p o t at the
Xiaoda Xiao
tHe Visiting sUit stories from mY prison life
“Xiaoda’s storytelling has plenty of antic vigor... fueled by an activist’s anger.” —The WashingTon PosT
Xiaoda Xiao
tHe Visiting sUit stories from mY prison life
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The Visiting Suit Xiaoda Xiao
stories from my prison life
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TWO DOLLAR RADIO is a family-run outfit founded in 2005 with the mission to reaffirm the cultural and artistic spirit of the publishing industry. We aim to do this by presenting bold works of literary merit, each book, individually and collectively, providing a sonic progression that we believe to be too loud to ignore.
Copyright © 2010 by Xiaoda Xiao All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-9820151-7-9 Library of Congress Control Number: 2010936670 All paintings by Xiaoda Xiao. These stories have appeared in the following publications: “The Spring Festival” in The Brooklyn Rail “Li Minchu – The Cost of a Dream” in Guernica Magazine “He Begins to Talk” in Confrontation “The Visiting Suit” in Antaeus “Release” in The Atlantic Monthly Typeset in Garamond No portion of this book may be copied or reproduced, with the exception of quotes used in critical essays and reviews, without the written permission of the publisher.
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AUTHOR’S NOTE When I was twenty years old, and a college student, I defaced a portrait of Chairman Mao. For this act, and without a trial, I was declared a political prisoner and sent to a forced labor prison in Taihu Lake, where I served in a labor reform brigade – in this instance, a stone quarry – for seven years: five years in the labor prison and two years as an ex-prisoner laborer. The tales in this book, transformed by memory, imagination, and time, are based on my experiences in this camp, and are not, I believe, unlike experiences suffered by millions of others who did not live to tell their tales.
CONTENTS 1. Arrest........................................................................................... 3 2. Confession................................................................................ 19 3. Everybody’s Turn.................................................................... 39 4. A Thorough Materialist Has Nothing to Fear.................... 59 5. The Frightened Birds.............................................................. 73 6. The Spring Festival................................................................ 100 7. A Hero on the Cement Yard............................................... 112 8. Love on the Construction Site............................................ 126 9. In the Women Inmates’ Farm............................................. 136 10. The Beautiful Woman and the Coal Balls.......................... 148 11. Li Minchu – The Cost of a Dream.................................... 159 12. The Devil’s Trill.....................................................................172 13. He Begins to Talk.................................................................. 194 14. In the Prison Hospital.......................................................... 219 15. The Visiting Suit....................................................................234 16. Release.....................................................................................251 COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
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He Begins to Talk by Xiaoda Xiao, 2010
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The Visiting Suit
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Arrest
At around three o’clock that afternoon, the van pulled up in front of the detention house, a three-story cement building with tiny windows reminiscent of the apertures in the ancient city walls through which soldiers had shot the Mongolians from their horse-backs with arrows. The building was encircled by high stone walls with barbed wire on top. Under the August sun the surface of the asphalt road appeared to have melted into mud, upon which tracks of vehicle tires and soles of various patterns were imprinted. There was no wind, and the air was so hot you could see purplish smoke drifting across your vision. The buildings, the trees, the cement electric wire poles with heavy greenish loudspeakers fastened to the tops, along with people walking in the street, were undulating as though a giant furnace was blasting away under the surface of the earth. The street was seething with people. Nearby was a payphone where a young woman in a white blouse was shouting at the receiver, which she held in her right hand; in her left, she held a yellow handkerchief with which she was wiping her eyes incessantly. Beyond her, in the shadow of a parasol tree, an ice bar vendor wearing only a pair of shorts had a towel over his bare shoulder. He was tapping his wooden cooler, which was tied to the back seat of his bicycle, while he yelled listlessly for customers. Across the street, people crammed in front of a movie theater, some of them wearing straw hats, some were raising their fans to protect their heads from the sun. All the loudspeakers on the cement poles were playing “The Red Sun in Our Hearts.” COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL A guard ordered me to get off the van and line up with seven other prisoners who, like myself, were all taken from the Happy Commune. The dazzling bayonets on the guards’ automatic rifles reminded me of the captured men I had seen filing into the same entrance the month before, when I was on my way to a swimming pool. Looking at the people in the street, I wondered why I was no longer one of them, why on earth I should be wearing a pair of handcuffs and following the prisoners into the iron gate. I became oblivious to the handcuffs on my wrists. I didn’t move with the other prisoners; it was as if I were still a free man who could cross the street to see what was showing in the movie theater, or go to the vendor to buy a green beanice bar to cool my burning throat, or to the swimming pool to plunge in the water with its temperature ten degrees lower than in the street… Before I stepped over the threshold and passed the big iron gate that defined freedom, I reminded myself that I should be ready to fend off the charge of “viciously attacking the Great Leader.” I didn’t know, though, how to prove my innocence. Should I tell them that I was born in New China and had been brought up under the instruction of the Party and the Great Leader? Should I also let them know that as school teachers, both my parents, although they had already divorced, didn’t have any problem of a political nature in their histories that they had held back from the Party organization? In terms of class analysis, there were no alien factors in my family background that would serve as an external cause to make me viciously attack the Great Leader. Because I had been drunk when I tore the poster of Chairman Mao, I could never explain why I did it. All I could say was that it was merely an accident. But hadn’t thousands of such accidents ended up behind the big iron gate? There were quite a few of them in my neighborhood alone. The gatekeeper of my high school, for example, was sentenced to a five-year prison COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL term simply because he was carried away one afternoon by a local opera broadcast on the radio and accidentally knocked a bust of the Great Leader off his dining table to the ground where it broke. The crippled cobbler, who lived in the basement of a red-roofed house at the entrance of our lane, grabbed a piece of old newspaper for toilet paper when he hurried to a nearby public privy one morning, without noticing there was a portrait of the Great Leader on it. He was caught by another toilet-goer, and consequently sentenced to a seven-year prison term. The assistant civil engineer who liked to have his hair carefully waxed and enjoyed spending his holidays by leaning on his door with a cup of tea in hand and smiling at the young women passing in the street, had received a five-year prison term because he accidentally dropped a badge of the Great Leader in a urinary ditch. Even Old Wang living in the neighboring lane, who was mentally ill, was arrested and sentenced to a three-year prison term for breaking a board with a poster of the Great Leader on it. *** One evening, when my mother had gone to the countryside with her students for an over-night trip, I invited friends to my home for a party, during which I got drunk and accidentally knocked over my glass. I didn’t get a paper towel to clean the mess, as they told me later on, but turned around and tore from the wall a poster of the Great Leader with which I wiped the table and my hands. At that point Aunt Wu, the chief of the residential committee, came to do her routine check of the residents’ IDs. She urged me to turn myself in or she would inform the police and have me arrested. So I went to the police station the next morning. They sent me to a political session organized by the authorities for those suspected of political crimes. After investigation, however, they believed my claim that I had been drunk when I tore the poster, so they allowed me to return to the countryside. As ordered, I reported my case to the party chief of the Happy COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL Commune, where I was working as an educated youth with my schoolmates to receive re-education from the peasants for a year and a half. The chief of the human resources department of the commune wanted me to hand him written reports concerning my thoughts every month. I had nightmares of being arrested, and through the night I felt horrible until I opened my eyes in the morning to find myself in familiar surroundings. It was said if they didn’t arrest me within the first year, they would erase my name from their list. Nothing happened for a while, although I couldn’t sleep well at night. Then Linan, a schoolmate who lived in the next village, came into my life. I had laced her fingers with mine and we had walked along a riverbank, the two of us and our long, dark shadows on a moonlit path. Linan had been selected in early summer by the performing arts propaganda team of the Happy Commune to play the role of Sister-in-law Ahchin, a female lead in the revolutionary opera The Sha River, after the harvest season. Each of the nine production brigades in the Happy Commune had its own performing arts propaganda troupe and The Sha River was to be performed by all of them. Therefore, besides Linan, there were eight other women who were also to play Sister-in-law Ahchin. But only Linan was going to represent the Happy Commune on stage in the county’s theater. She had already been released from her fieldwork for two weeks to take part in the rehearsals in the commune’s conference hall, from early in the morning till late at night, six days a week. As a result, people near the commune headquarters were familiar with her. Whenever we walked around I’d hear them calling her “Sisterin-law Ahchin.” *** Linan had recommended me to the head of the performing arts propaganda troupe to play a character in the opera. If so, it occurred to me, I’d no longer have to worry about my political blunder because to play a character in a revolutionary opera was COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL considered an honor, a dream of all the educated youths. Latching onto the hope of being drafted by the commune’s troupe, I had practiced enthusiastically with Linan in her dorm and on the riverbank, and was able to recite most of the lines of the character I auditioned for. She told me the week before that the chief of the performing arts propaganda troupe had agreed to think about my application. “But I still think it’s impossible for a man who has just been released from political sessions to be picked up by the propaganda team,” I said. “Why do you always worry about this and that?” she said. “What you need is to relax yourself.” I felt good after talking with her. A cool breeze, mixed with the distant smell of the damp hay, water-weeds, and manure from surrounding rice fields, blew in through the window beside my bed that opened eastward to The Grand Canal. Glittering in the light of a full moon, frogs, crickets, and cicadas had been singing restlessly, and I could hear the muffled drone of the diesel-engine cargo fleets passing in the river. Inside the mosquito net I lay on my back. I thought about Linan’s words, and tapped my chest with my fingers. They pulled me from my mosquito net at five thirty the next morning and brought me to the central square of the commune, where seven other prisoners, six men and a woman, had already been sitting on the ground, facing the moss-covered brick wall of an abandoned barn. Behind them were a crowd of children and three armed militia members who wore serious looks and constantly exchanged whispers. Several boys were pitching trash on the prisoners, and the other children jeered. When they saw me join the prisoners, they began to throw trash on me, too. I recognized a boy of about twelve as having been in the greeting team when I first arrived at the commune the year before. When we got off the bus that morning, I remembered, we COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL met the leaders of the commune, and the children had pinned rosettes on our chests. We came to this very square to watch the commune’s performing arts propaganda team play drums and gongs. The three militia members realized that the boys might get out of control if not stopped, and threatened to beat them if they continued. There were watermelon rinds, chicken bones, empty sugar canes, rotten tomatoes, and cast-off shoes in the trash pile. Beside the heap was a dead puppy, flies buzzing fiendishly around it. As I looked at the dead puppy, a broken toothbrush hit my forehead an inch above my right eyebrow. I rubbed my forehead with my hand and saw blood on it. “Stop, or I’ll tell your father to beat you,” a guard yelled at the boy. “Why?” the boy argued. “They are enemies. Chairman Mao tells us the enemy won’t step down on their own from the stage of history.” The boys hit the woman and me more frequently than they did the other prisoners, perhaps because we both wore white t-shirts, or perhaps because we were younger and looked more frightened than the rest. The woman was in her early twenties, pale skinned, and had round black eyes. I had heard people calling her Donying, and spoke of her being friendly with men, including a ship captain, a substitute teacher in the commune’s elementary school, an educated youth from the city, and the secretary of the party chief who had lost his position because of her. Soiled and stinking of rotten fruit, both her garment and my t-shirt looked like abstract paintings. The more onlookers gathered around, the more excited the boys grew. No one could stop them until the leaders of the commune showed up. By then, the trash heap had disappeared; all that remained on the ground was the dead puppy and a pair of torn shoes. On the makeshift wooden platform, I was arranged side by side with Donying, facing thousands of people who were sitting COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL on the ground across from us. A small blackboard, on which my name was written upside down, was hung over my neck with a length of galvanized wire. I thought it was a mass criticism, like one I had seen in my high school, when my Chinese teacher was put on the stage of the school auditorium with other teachers and the principal, all of them wearing three-foot-high paper hats like clowns in a circus. Amidst many familiar faces in the crowd was my roommate Bao Lian, and his girlfriend Chen Ron, the Big Mouth, as we called her behind her back. She was the roommate of Linan. They all looked frightened, and dared not look at me for long. Only a few nights earlier we had gathered together in our dorm and eaten a sand-badger that had been killed by a hunter in the village. But I didn’t see Linan. Was the relationship between us over or not? Or was it an irony that a woman playing a revolutionary heroine on stage had a boyfriend receiving mass criticism for counter-revolutionary actions? I scanned the crowd again, but still I didn’t see her. I only saw Chen Ron sitting in the second row and behind her, my roommate Bao Lian, the Bookworm as we called him, who was wearing a pair of thick eye-glasses. As thin as a monkey, Bao Lian couldn’t shoulder heavy loads, nor was he capable of working in the field with the rest of us. So he was assigned to work as an assistant accountant for the production brigade. In his leisure time, he would lie on his bed looking at the rafters of the thatched roof and heaving sighs in a hen-like voice. I didn’t believe it when someone claimed to have seen him and Chen Ron near the haystacks one night. Chen Ron had been a champion shot-putter in the city’s high school sports meet – her arms and legs, in sharp contrast with Bao Lian’s, were round with muscles. Chen Ron and Bao Lian hadn’t gone back to the city during the Spring Festival holidays. On the morning of the Lunar New Year’s Day, when Chen Ron went from her dormitory to the riverside a hundred yards away to wash rice and vegetables, a gang COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL of young villagers, mostly militias who could enter our dorms without being invited, entered her room unexpectedly. Mostly they were men in new wadded jackets with chest pockets unflapped so one could catch a glimpse of the expensive cigarette packs in them, cigarettes that they wouldn’t touch during the rest of the year. By the time Chen Ron returned, the men had removed the quilts from her bed and stood gaping at Bao Lian, in his underwear, shaking on the bed. Because of the regulation that educated youths were prohibited to fall in love in the first three years, the Happy Commune noted their indecent behavior in their dossiers. I heard Donying beside me gasping as though out of breath, and, from the corner of my eyes, watched her breasts rising and falling in a quick rhythm. Her eyes were tightly shut. Her face twitched. The sun grew hotter as the morning waned on. It shone on our heads, and on our backs. My eyes stung from sweat trickling down from my forehead. The smell of trash on my t-shirt was awful. In an attempt to keep my nose as far away from it as possible, I craned my neck and tilted my head like a turtle to look at the sky. Suddenly I felt a strong arm push my head from behind. At the same time a high-pitched shriek piped out from the loudspeaker. I fell forward. It was when they tugged me up from the ground that I saw Linan sitting with her friends in the corner of the third row, staring at me. I tried to rise on my own. I didn’t want her to see me under the control of the coarse hands behind me. Hardly had I managed to do so, however, when they pulled me back to the platform and pushed my head down to my knees. I heard a man’s voice announcing that I was arrested for viciously attacking the Great Leader. The crowd dispersed. Linan was no longer there. On the platform, the three militia members were consulting the party chief about whether to parade us around the streets before the van from the city’s detention house came to pick us up. The party chief ordered the guards to bring us to the headquarters instead. COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL Over the next two hours, the eight of us crouched in a courtyard, in the narrow shadow provided by a high brick wall, where relatives or friends were allowed to visit with daily necessities and clothes. I tried not to look at the other prisoners changing into their clean shirts. But I felt uneasy. I wished Linan would come to see me before I was sent away, but at the same time I didn’t want her to show up. How could I face her when I looked so woebegone, with rotten fruit all over my body? I shut my eyes and prayed for the van to come. Then I heard someone calling my name. It was Chen Ron, and behind her was Bao Lian. “Don’t worry,” Bao Lian said. “We’ll visit you when we have time.” I knew my friends wouldn’t leave me. Although we didn’t get along well back in school, in the countryside we cared about each other as if we were family. I felt tears in my eyes. I nodded at them. At that point someone shouted that the police van had arrived. Not knowing what to do, Chen Ron was wringing her hands and stamping in desperation. It was then I saw Donying, who had already finished changing her dirty garments into clean ones. She turned to me. “Take this if you don’t mind,” she said in a whisper, and took a blue garment from a woman standing beside her. There wasn’t time to think about it. All I could do was take my dirty t-shirt off and put on Donying’s garment. It was a bit too tight for me. I must have looked funny wearing it. But they said I looked fine. *** In the hallway of the detention house we lined up before a short, middle-aged man wearing blue khakis who sat beside a table. He unlocked my handcuffs and ordered me to take off my belt and my shoelaces, and hand him all the money I had with me. He counted the money, wrote something on a notebook. “Comrade, I want to talk to you,” I said. “Squat,” he muttered, without removing his eyes from his notebook. COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL “I’m innocent.” “Squat,” he roared, raising a finger to the white wall behind him, where three lines of large black painted words read: LENIENCY TO THOSE WHO CONFESS THEIR CRIMES AND SEVERITY TO THOSE WHO REFUSE! DO MERITORIOUS SERVICE TO ATONE FOR YOUR CRIMES! SOLEMN SILENCE! I felt my scalp prickle as I walked toward the second iron door, which looked more terrifying than the first because it reminded me that before passing through I was somehow still free. I soon found myself in a dark passageway. As I walked on, I saw many bare heads behind the bars on either side of me. It was all soundless, and for a moment I wondered if I was dreaming. I fancied I was in a dark cave. I was looking into it. I could see the curious wet stones far down where the wall disappeared in vague shadows. The iron bars gave me the illusion that I was wandering in a Buddhist temple I had visited a long time ago. I felt my knees shaking. I wanted to shout. If only I could turn around and run out to the street! But I had to keep trudging in the direction of the darkness. In order to have a clearer vision of the surroundings, I squinted, and slowed my pace. Keys jingled. A dark iron door on my right side clanged open. The cell was darker than the passageway and was saturated with a foul odor that made the guard jerk away immediately as though he’d been slapped in the face. I stopped, and turned to him. “Why do I have to enter this room?” “You’d better ask yourself,” the guard said, and shoved me in. The iron door shut behind me. I bumped against legs thrust out from either side. My face crashed on the inner wall and stars flashed across my eyes. When I turned around, I lowered myself and then stretched out my arms. In this manner I rubbed two bare heads on my right and two on my left. COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL “Take your dirty paw off my face, you son-of-bitch,” one said. The cell was quiet again. I looked around. Before my eyes could adjust to the darkness of the cell, I heard a boy’s voice from the iron door: “Come here, come here to the bars.” And then someone nearby whispering: “It’s Wang, the little guard.” Another voice said: “He’s unlucky.” “Hold the bars with both your hands – like this,” the boy shouted word by word. In the dimness of the passageway I saw two hands grasping the bars from outside. “Don’t you understand what I mean?” the boy bawled. “Yes, but why should I do that?” “Do as I say. I’m here every afternoon this week. If you don’t do as I say, I’ll beat you tomorrow afternoon.” “Do as he said, or he’ll get you during walk-time,” echoed a voice behind me. Turning around, I saw an elderly inmate huddling beside the door. He raised his arms as if to show me how to put my hands on the bars. The boy guard shouted again: “They all did it when they first came.” He ordered the elderly inmate to push me to the door. The elderly inmate rose, and was about to approach me, when someone kicked him from behind and he fell on his sleeping roll with a husky groan. “Who did that?” the little guard screamed. Nobody said a word. He started banging the iron door with his gun. “It’s all because of you,” someone complained in the darkness. “Better do as he said.” I walked to the bars and stretched out both hands. The little guard pulled my fingers as if he were dancing with me. But then he quickly took from his top uniform pocket a pair of shoelaces, COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL with which he tied my fingers to the bars, and then began to bash them with his rifle butt. His mouth was twisting with rage as he swore: “Don’t you know who you are? I’ll let you know who you are. I’ll let you know who I am.” I jumped. I gasped quickly. But soon I shut my mouth. I bit my lips to keep myself from screaming. Nevertheless, I could hear groans like those of a beaten dog escaping from my throat. Had the torturer been a man I would have screamed out. What humiliated me was the fact that the boy’s wrists were only the size of a twelve-year-old. And imagining that I could lift him up and snap him in two made me tremble all over. “Squad leader Wang,” an inmate implored. “That’s enough for him. He’ll remember who you are. Now let him sit back.” After one more hit, the boy hollered breathlessly: “Now you should know who you are. Go to your spot.” I stared at him, with his childish face, small, indifferent eyes and a flat, under-developed nose, he looked no different than ordinary teenagers. I had once argued with my schoolmates about how to become a successful revolutionary. The answer was right in front of me. The boy soldier was the success of the revolution. As for me, who had once dreamed of becoming a revolutionary, I was but one of the innumerable targets of his brutal career. Luckily my fingers, although they felt as if they were burning, moved well when I flexed them. I could now see the cell clearly; it was about fifteen feet long and twelve feet wide. Huddled on their rolled-up quilts and straw mats were ten inmates, five on each side of the two longest walls of the room. In the inner wall there was a high window, whose dusty windowpane transformed the sunlight into an amber square on the dark cement floor, like one of the washcloths the cellmates had laid there for drying. In one corner was a chamber bucket with a cracked wooden lid. Until I saw it I hadn’t noticed this was where the biting odor came from. It was inconceivable to spend the night in such a cramped place with the other prisoners. COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL I grasped the iron bars again with both hands. “I’m Sun Baoson,” said a man sitting in the center on the right side, a friendly smile hanging on his thin lips. I didn’t say anything. All I knew was that I didn’t belong in this place. “Young man, you’ll get used to it,” Sun Baoson went on calmly. He then announced that I should sit beside the bucket, for that spot was reserved for newcomers. When he said it, the inmates on that side moved closer, making room for me. The man who was sitting beside the bucket was so skinny the ribs on his chest protruded. There was a pool of urine around the bucket. I started pacing the floor. It only took me four full steps from the inner wall to the iron door, and then another four-and-ahalf back to the inner wall. I had to be careful not to bump the cellmates’ legs, twenty of them, stretching out from both sides. “You’ll learn how to sit like us in two days,” grumbled another man, who sat opposite Sun Baoson. He introduced himself as Shen Yao, and the head of our cell. “In two days?” I shouted. I stopped, gazing at him. “Stop walking. You’ll feel better if you sit like us,” Shen Yao said. “Let him walk if he likes to, he’ll sit when he gets tired,” Sun Baoson said mockingly. “Once they send you here they won’t let you go,” Shen Yao said. He then told me that he had been in the detention house since the summer of 1968, more than three years. “I would have finished myself off long ago if I’d been as restless as you,” he declared. I sat next to the bucket, but I rose soon, and again I paced the room. Outside, the day was fading. The loudspeakers were still singing loudly. Now and then I heard a woman yelling, bicycles ringing, men and women’s voices rising and falling. I heard an elderly inmate complain that my pacing made him unable to sleep. Soon COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL all the inmates began to scold me. Two young prisoners on either side of Sun Baoson rose from their bundles and threatened to teach me a lesson if I didn’t sit right away. At that moment the passageway became noisy. Immediately the two young inmates squatted, while all the others left their sleeping rolls and busied themselves with their enamel bowls. One of the two young men who had just threatened to beat me said that supper was coming. Everyone was pleased when I told them I didn’t want my ration: a bowl of porridge with some cabbage leaves in it. The porridge was so thin the cellmates simply slurped it over the rims of their bowls. The sucking sounds were unbearable. It was equally unpleasant to watch their Adam’s apples bobbing. I shut my eyes and tried to imagine that I was with friends outside the prison. In front of our dorm in the Happy Commune was a gravel yard shared by the surrounding peasants’ families and the animals they fed. In the center of the yard was a well. At that moment, I imagined the peasants would be squatting around the well, eating their supper and chatting; the dogs would be sniffing the ground, their tails lazily wagging; the chicken, looking for their feed. I didn’t open my eyes until the sucking sounds subsided. I sat beside the bucket. I was glad to find that I was wearing Donying’s garment, from which her scent still tarried. While sniffing the garment, both hands on my knees, I remembered that not far from my home lived a man who had been arrested the previous spring, but was released a few weeks later because he had broken down during his imprisonment. I had once seen him talking to himself. I decided to imitate him. It seemed the only possibility for getting out. I looked around. Under the dim light of a bulb hung from the center of the ceiling, all the inmates were engaged in idle conversations. I started to worry that nobody would pay attention to me, when the skinny inmate sitting beside me asked why I was arrested. I turned to him slowly so that he could see my abnormality. COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL “How are you doing? Are you all right?” he asked. He then told the other inmates that I looked like a madman. The elderly inmate bent forward to wave his palm across my eyes. When he was certain I had lost my senses, Shen Yao, the head of the cell, reported to a guard that I had gone mad. Within five minutes the chief of the detention house came. I looked at him blankly and continued mumbling to myself. The chief yelled: “Do you want to play games with me?” I didn’t look at him. “You’ll only hurt yourself like lifting a rock to drop it on your own foot. Tomorrow you’ll regret not stopping this charade. Let me ask you for the last time. What’s your name?” The chief handcuffed my forearms behind my back. He tightened them until the metal bit into the flesh on my arms. The severe pain made me wriggle, and gasp like a mad dog. I shut my eyes. My muttering transformed into groaning. My throat trembled. The chief ordered Shen Yao to watch over me through the night. In less than ten minutes both my hands had grown numb. The nauseating smell of rusty brass choked me. My eyes started tearing, my cheeks shivering. My teeth chattered and my groans sounded inhuman. I wet my pants. I could no longer think about anything. But all the same I didn’t want to give up, convincing myself they would set me free when they realized that my madness was real. It was deep in the night. All the cellmates lay down on their mats. The loudspeakers in the street had quieted long ago. I wished I could take a nap so I could forget the pain in my arms. My brain was spinning, and scenes deep in my memory rose up: I saw my parents fighting in the bedroom over the ownership of a radio that they had recently purchased; I saw my cousin and me catching crickets in a melon patch in the countryside in the summer when I was in the fourth grade; I saw myself going to Beijing in the fall of 1966 with my schoolmates to be inspected COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL by the Great Leader and his close comrades-in-arms. I saw the motorcade of the Great Leader passing by. I had been squeezed away from my schoolmates and found myself under two stout Mongolian women, and saw hundreds of thousands of shoes and plastic sandals on the ground when the cars drove away. My thoughts ran faster and faster until at length I felt my head spinning. At midnight I cried for help. I confessed to the guard who came to check what was going on in the cell that my madness was faked. He called his supervisor to unlock my handcuffs. I didn’t regret that I had given in. Oddly enough, I found that my desire to leave the detention house to see Linan had passed. What remained was the gratitude with which I looked at the guard who unlocked my handcuffs. Then I lay down on the cement floor beside the chamber bucket. I didn’t even have time to look at the jagged wounds on my arms, but savored a good sleep for the first time since I was released from the political sessions the year before.
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CONFESSION
When the first daylight shone on the high window, the electric bell sounded through the passageway. The inmates rose and, eyes half closed, rolled their mats quickly and got their toilet articles ready. No one noticed that I was rocking from side to side and that my legs were kicking. The iron door opened and the chief of the detention house was standing in the shadows. He was short and unmemorable-looking, except for the keys hanging on his hand, sparkling in a ray of morning sun. “It isn’t funny, is it?” he said. I wagged my head. “So you aren’t mad.” “No.” Having checked briefly the cuts from the handcuffs, the chief declared that my arms looked all right. He must have said something else, but I fell on the ground and passed out. When I came to, the cell was empty. All the cellmates had gone for the morning walk. My arms – from the cuts on my forearms down to my hands – were swollen to double their original size and looked like dark hams hung in the butcher shop. They were heavy and, except for the excruciating throbbing of the cuts, didn’t have any feeling. I had to raise my arms over my head in order to ease the pain. I found the wounds on both arms had already been infected, from which yellowish liquid was seeping slowly toward my elbows and from there dripping onto the cement floor. The skin around the cuts on both arms ulcerated and itched so that I couldn’t help rubbing them on my cheeks. They were as hot as charred pork slid from an oven. COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL I dozed off for a few minutes, then awoke again in pain, though I could hardly keep my eyes open. But my cheeks had ceased shivering. Leaning my head on the wall, I opened my eyes to watch the cellmates eat their morning rations. Meanwhile, I listened to the song that had just been piped out from the loudspeakers outside in the street. Since my hands were too swollen to hold the bowl, I had to give up my ration again. The cellmates were talking about a mentally ill man in the next cell, whose screams could be heard faintly. Soon their conversation took another direction, and I became their subject. They said that I was lucky that I hadn’t become a real lunatic, or had lost my arms: in either case I would remain in the cell because they had stopped exempting the mentally disturbed since the month before. In my slumber I heard the cell door clanking open and then someone calling my number. A guard stood in the passageway. I felt dizzy as I rose, so I had to lean on the wall for almost half a minute before I was able to move. “Sir,” I said, “I haven’t eaten anything since I came yesterday afternoon. Can I have a bowl of porridge?” The guard looked at my hands, his eyebrows knit. He asked the other inmates: “Why didn’t you give him his ration?” “He couldn’t hold the bowl, sir,” Shen Yao reported. “As you can see his hands.” “Shut up,” the guard shouted, and went off. When he returned, he told me there was nothing left in the prisoners’ kitchen. It meant that I had to wait until supper because no lunch was served in the detention house. “Make sure you give him a double ration, or I’ll punish you,” the guard spoke to Shen Yao. “Now,” the guard turned back to me, “come along with me.” The interrogation room was divided into two sections by a row of iron bars. In my section there was nothing but a brown wooden stool placed in the middle of the room. In the other, COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL was a huge brown wooden desk, behind which sat a harsh-faced man with bloodshot eyes as if he needed sleep. Behind him, on the white wall, was a line of black painted words, same as at the entrance of the detention house: LENIENCY TO THOSE WHO CONFESS THEIR CRIMES AND SEVERITY TO THOSE WHO REFUSE! He was smoking a cigarette when I got there. He ordered me with a gesture to sit on the stool and then lit another cigarette with the one he was about to finish. When he unfolded a file on the desk, he looked at my arms. But, instead of asking me anything, he tossed his head backward and slowly released an enormous quantity of smoke from his half-opened mouth and inhaled it through his nostrils. I wanted to tell him that the accusation against me of “viciously attacking the Great Leader” was wrong. I raised my head, but when I saw him continue smoking his cigarette with his head tossed backward, I felt the words stick in my mouth, and lowered my head again. There was nothing behind me against which I could rest my aching back. Nor could I raise my arms as I had done in the cell. They were giving me hell again. I wished I could lie on the floor so that I would be able to wait as long as the interrogator liked. I was about to nod off when I heard the man clearing his throat. “No need for me to read the Party’s policy,” he stated coldly. His voice sounded husky, so he cleared his throat again. “No.” “Will you describe how you committed your counter-revolutionary action?” “On that night, I invited a few friends home to have a party. I tore a poster of Chairman Mao when I got drunk. It was an accident,” I started. I was content with my voice. It sounded sincere and innocent. “I have been a good student since first grade,” I continued. COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL “I’ve been praised as an outstanding educated youth in the commune as well.” “Anything else?” he said, tapping the table with his pen. “I hope I can return to the Happy Commune…” “Here I have your written confession you submitted to the political session last summer and your friends’ circumstantial evidence. It is clear enough, except one thing,” he paused, raising his eyes from the file. “Can you explain the motive of your crime? In other words, tell me what you were thinking when you tore the Treasured Portrait?” “It was an accident, sir, a sheer accident. I was drunk when I tore the Treasured Portrait.” “I believe you were. But even so I think your brain was still working normally, only your behavior was a little bit out of control under the influence of alcohol. A tipsy man may do things that he wouldn’t do normally: he’d shout curses at those he hates, or he’d sob over unpleasant memories. In your case you attacked the Great Leader’s Image because you have ill feelings against him. What did you think at that moment?” he asked, without looking at me. “I swear I wasn’t thinking.” “I must tell you that because of your passable records, as you’ve already mentioned, and your young age, we are considering giving you a light judgment. But don’t think you deserve it. We’ll add more years on your sentence if you refuse to root out your sinful thoughts. I don’t have time for you today,” the interrogator said impatiently, and then pressed a button on the table. The guard came in. “Sir, I have already condemned myself many times for my misdeed,” I pleaded. “In the political sessions, I handed in thought reports every day, and I have turned in my self-criticism to a commune leader every month since I was released from the sessions. They reassured me that I wouldn’t be arrested…” He asked about my cell number, and then said: “Do you COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL know other prisoners in your cell who have committed similar political crimes to yours?” “I don’t.” “You’ll learn that they all came here because of a single slip, like you.” Returning to the cell, I felt the room was spinning again. I was so hungry I heard my guts growl, and failed to answer my cellmates’ questions about my interrogation. At that moment the cell door opened and the same guard appeared again. “Number 127, come out,” he said. He brought me to see the prisoner-physician. The prison clinic was located on the second floor of the building, a cell with a red cross painted on its gray iron door. A prisoner-surgeon had two fingers on the wrist of a woman inmate who appeared pale and weak, whose hair was trimmed to her ears. She was attended by a woman guard. “Is she all right?” the woman guard asked the prisoner-surgeon. “She’s too weak,” he said, taking a paper bag from his drawer. “She’ll feel better after taking the herb medicine. It’s for three days. Tell the kitchen to boil it, and give her a bowl of the herb soup, twice a day, with her ration.” Rising from the stool, she turned her tiny back to us. Behind her walked the woman guard. Through the semi-transparency of her gray summer uniform one could see her bra cutting tightly into her round back. “Little brother,” the prisoner-surgeon said unhurriedly when he finished checking the wounds on my arms, “you’re lucky enough to have given up before it was too late. Remember not to work against the proletarian dictatorship ever again, or just look at the rings on your arms. They’ll stay with you for the rest of your life.” “Be careful with your arms. I’ll order them to change your spot to the door,” said the guard as we left the clinic. In the yard, I joined the other newcomers who lined up beCOPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL fore two prisoner-barbers, waiting for a haircut. I followed them to the sink to wet my hair – it is easier for the barber to shave and causes less pain with wet hair. I had an odd feeling when I listened to the crisp sounds caused by his razor and saw my long black hair falling to the ground. In a minute or two, the barber tapped on my scalp and told me that the haircut was done. Rising from the stool, I followed the other newcomers to get my straw mat and washcloth at a window. Until I saw the cuts on their newly-shaved heads, I didn’t realize that I also had two cuts on my own, one above each ear where the barber shouldn’t have run his razor as fast as he did on the rest of the head. At the time, I hadn’t felt anything. But as I waited in the line to collect my things, these two cuts on my head made me gnaw. I was given a washcloth, a toothbrush, a straw mat, and a gray prison shirt with my number, 127, painted on the front. These cost me four yuan, which they would take from the money I had handed to the chief the day before. My hands couldn’t grasp anything, so I asked an inmate behind me to help put my washcloth and toothbrush into the chest pocket of my shirt and tuck the straw mat under my armpit. When I returned to the cell, my bucket-side spot had already been occupied by a newcomer. The guard ordered an elderly man, as he had promised, to move to the inner corner and let me sit in his spot. I felt my hunger had been replaced with a desire to talk. I was anxious to know those who had committed similar counter-revolutionary activities to mine. But except for the newcomer who was looking blankly at the wall opposite him, all the cellmates were huddling on their bundles with their heads leaning against the walls and their eyes shut. I tried to think about my next interrogation. I didn’t know if I should confess my sinful thoughts as the interrogator urged me to, or continue to defend my innocence. I thought about the light sentence. I remembered having read from judgment bulCOPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL letins pinned in front of the commune headquarters that many counter-revolutionary convicts were lightly sentenced to a seven-year, or even a five-year prison term. It was still too long, even if I got a five-year term. A horrible scream interrupted the chain of my thoughts. It was from a handsome young man of about twenty-five and of medium build, who was sitting against the opposite wall. Seeing me look at him, he apologized for his screaming and, pointing at the number on his shirt, he introduced himself courteously. “Number 103, He Zhen.” “Number 127,” I said, showing him the number on mine. He checked the cuts on my arms, and said they looked better than in the morning. “How do you feel?” he asked. “A little better.” “Nothing to do but confess to whatever they charged you with. Why did they arrest you?” “I tore a portrait of Chairman Mao when I got drunk. What about you?” With a sad smile, he murmured, “I accidentally knocked a sculpture of the Great Leader to the floor.” “All because of a single slip,” I said. He Zhen burst into laughter, which he suppressed immediately with a shrug. The interrogator had said the same to him. “I bet he says this five times every day at least. Look, in our cell alone there are four ‘single slips,’” He Zhen said. That was why, I thought, the interrogator looked bored and impatient when he asked me questions, as if dealing with so many “single slips” rather than complicated criminal cases had profaned his profession as an interrogator. He Zhen cleared his throat. “Before the mishap befell me,” he said slowly, with a light air, as if he were chatting with friends in a tea house, “I was an assistant civil engineer in No. 2 Construction Company. I went to Nanjing Institute of Technology the year before the Cultural Revolution broke out. When hundreds of thouCOPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL sands of college students were sent to the countryside to receive re-education from the peasants, I was assigned this job. I was only twenty-three then. “Then I got to know my girlfriend. In the following year I saved money to buy her a ring, and twenty feet of navy wool material which I planned to have a tailor on our street make into two overcoats for our wedding, arranged for the coming New Year’s Day. “One afternoon, when I came home from work I found my dorm being ransacked by the squad of mass dictatorship of the bureau. I didn’t know my roommate, Yu, had been arrested the night before and they had stopped by twice to search the room for his diary. I found my overcoat material was missing, so I ran to their headquarters. I explained to them that it was for my wedding. And I told them that in order to buy it I had borrowed money from my friends. They denied taking the wool and threatened to beat me if I didn’t leave right away. You can imagine how frustrated and furious I was. I slammed my office desk the next day and accidentally knocked a sculpture of Chairman Mao to the floor, where it broke to pieces. That’s why they accused me of ‘viciously attacking the Bright Image of the Great Leader.’” “Is your fiancé going to wait for you?” “Wait for me?” he echoed with a bitter grimace. “She already sent me a letter saying that she wants to renounce our engagement. She’s not to blame, of course. She hasn’t seen her own father who has been in a prison camp in the Gobi Desert since she was very little. As the eldest child in the family, she began to learn things earlier than other children her age. She told me that she remembered discovering her mother weeping by herself at night, after she and her two younger brothers went to bed. Do you think she’ll follow her mother’s example and wait for me for the rest of her life?” “But if she really loves you…” COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL “It only happens in books,” He Zhen murmured, and closed his eyes. “In real life, you aren’t even allowed to kiss your lover,” an inmate sitting beside He Zhen joined in. He introduced himself as Wang Hen, a former painter who had painted the Great Leader’s portrait on the street walls. “Since last year,” Wang Hen continued effusively, “they started to assign members of mass dictatorship to work overtime patrolling the streets at night, looking for men and women doing indecent things behind electric wire poles, in movie theaters, or in the park. As a painter of the Great Leader on the street walls, I always worked downtown, so, you know, I was well informed with all kinds of street news. “At the beginning, I always heard men and women were caught in pairs in those places. Then, I was surprised to learn that they’d started searching the public lavatories because they were informed that it was only in those places that young couples still felt they were safe…” “That’s right,” a hoarse voice said. It was the newcomer, a big man in his early thirties who was sitting beside the bucket. Marks of dried blood and bruises on his bearded face bore the evidence of a brutal torture before he arrived at our cell. “Number 135, Gao,” the newcomer introduced himself. He was from Huang Tai, a veterinarian by trade, specializing in castrating pigs. Several days before, Gao went to a woman’s house to castrate her pigs. She invited him to have lunch with her at her home. When they ate together, he found himself attracted to her, despite the fact that she was already married. He had her pigs castrated in the afternoon, and then left for town, which was two miles away from the village. Later on that day, when Gao ate his supper in a restaurant there, he heard people talking about a movie show on the town common that night, and decided to wait and watch the movie. It would have been another ordinary COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL day for him, like the rest of the year, had he not met that woman again at the town’s common. “Usually I am timid before young women,” Gao remarked, “but Heaven knows why that night I seemed to have changed into another man. It was under the influence of the wine I had with my supper, I reckoned, I talked to her as though I were her husband, and asked her to walk with me when the show was over. When she said there were many invisible eyes around us, I told her not to worry, and followed her along a dirt road leading to her village. She told me not to go with her because, although her husband had been out on business, her parents-in-law were home. At that instant I heard people whispering. I wanted her to run in one direction and I the other. But it was too late. The flashlights were on, and four men stood before us as though they’d been waiting for us for two hours already. So we were brought to the town hall, where they interrogated us separately. She was released the next morning, and I was sent here. They charged me for attempted rape…” The former vet’s voice grew louder and more upset as he went on with his story until He Zhen reminded him that he’d better control himself. After he finished his story, the cell became quiet again. Wang Hen and He Zhen shut their eyes, and returned to sleep. With my feet, I measured the slow movement of the amber square of sunshine on the cement floor. It was suppertime when I awoke. The cell came alive. I heard the elderly inmate speaking to the newcomer didactically, that the first thing he should learn in the cell was how to slow down his metabolism. Shen Yao turned to me and said that if I wanted to survive, I had to be as patient as a Buddhist monk who could sit on his cushion for a whole day without moving. “I’ve been here for three years,” he said. He patted his chest with his palm. “Three years. That is one thousand and ninety-five days. I remember I had thought about COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL committing suicide when I first came. Now, I’ve already grown used to the condition.” Looking at Wang Hen and He Zhen, I wanted to continue our conversation. “Why did they arrest you?” I asked Wang Hen. “They said I intentionally destroyed a portrait of Chairman Mao. There are so many things nowadays you can’t explain with common knowledge. Anyway, that’s why I’m here,” he said. He had been interrogated only once. And yet he had already confessed to everything they charged him with. “But I think,” he added, “they’ll probably let you go because you were drunk.” “I don’t think so,” said a man sitting in the opposite corner of the cell. It was Number 113, Li Minchu, the former director of the Local Opera Theater in Kunshan County. “It goes without saying that once you are arrested,” Li Minchu went on thoughtfully, “you’ll be sentenced. But it takes a lot of learning to guess how many years they’ll give you. As for the counter-revolutionary convicts like you and me, I think the lightest judgment will be a five-year prison term. I’ve never heard of anyone who committed a counter-revolutionary activity receiving a shorter term.” “If your wife, as you said the other day, can get the hospital report about her history of mental illness, your charges will be dropped,” Wang Hen spoke to him. Li Minchu, had been turned in by his own wife who had been suspicious of his having an affair with an actress in the theater. One day she warned him that if he didn’t stop his relations with the actress, she’d write to the party chief that he had listened to foreign radio broadcasts and made counter-revolutionary speeches. She did what she said, not expecting that they would arrest him because of her note. Before they took him, she grabbed his sleeves and swore that she would get him out. She told the party chief of the county’s culture and propaganda COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL bureau that her words were unaccountable because she had a history of mental illness. Li Minchu stopped talking because at that moment the passageway became noisy. Everyone straightened up. All the eyes turned to the iron door as keys were heard clanging outside. The chief opened the door, letting in two prisoner-cooks who unloaded from their handcart a wooden bucket with our cell number painted on it. All the eyes moved with the bucket that was carried in. Like the ideal comedy pair on stage, one of the two was short and fat and the other, tall and lanky. Both men looked as healthy as civilians. The tall cook complained to his friend that it was the heaviest bucket they had ever carried; the short one said that that was because there were twelve inmates in the cell. They were about to leave when Shen Yao reported to the chief that the guard had ordered him to give me a double ration. The chief looked at me, and then at the bucket. “Give him a little more than the others, that’s all,” he said. Now everyone’s eyes were on Shen Yao’s bare arm, with which he picked up the ladle submerged halfway down the sloppy glue, and started stirring the porridge slowly. Then, one scoop for each bowl, he filled the twelve of them in less than thirty seconds. There was still some left in the bottom of the bucket. To clear it, he tilted the bucket with his free hand. Raising his eyes, he loudly ordered me to push my bowl forward. Immediately the cell was drowned in the vigorous sounds of swilling. With both hands I grasped my bowl, careful not to let my fingertips touch it, for they were more sensitive than other parts of my hands, which were still swollen and hurt, and began to slurp my porridge the way the other inmates slurped theirs. Soon, I forgot the pain in my arms completely. I felt the porridge running through my throat and my esophagus, all the way down into my stomach. Like rain drops, the sweat trickled from my forehead into my eyes. But I didn’t stop eating until I COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL couldn’t keep my eyes open. I put down my bowl and grabbed my washcloth to rub my shaved head. When a man has hair he doesn’t have to worry about such a thing, since his hair will help absorb most of the sweat generated on his head. But sweat couldn’t keep me from relishing my porridge. I ate faster and faster, only stopping once more when I felt in my mouth a tiny piece of wood that Shen Yao had scraped from the bottom of the bucket with his ladle. Soon, I emptied my bowl. Unable to take a deep breath under the pressure of my bulging belly, I turned to sit on my side. I looked at the empty bowl and remembered the taste of the porridge. I nodded when Wang Hen uttered that he liked the rice mixed with pumpkin, for it tasted sweet as if they had put sugar in it. “There is sugar in pumpkin,” the elderly man remarked emphatically after he licked his bowl clean. But Sun Baoson clamored that in a prisoner’s stomach the rice and pumpkin porridge didn’t last as long as the rice porridge did. And they started to argue until the cell door opened again and we went out to the yard, where about a hundred prisoners, empty bowls in their hands, had already queued before the sink, waiting for their turns to wash their bowls. Outside the concrete wall the setting sun glowed on the roof of a watchtower, glancing off the bayonet of a rifle slung over the shoulder of a guard who was pacing on the tower. I felt someone nudging my rib, and saw a bony face which I failed to recognize until he said in a whisper, “Chen Huimin, Chen Huizhu’s big brother. I saw you off at the bus station last year.” Chen Huizhu was my schoolmate and we were both on the ping pong team. In my memory, her brother was a round-faced man with his hair styled so it looked like fried noodles. “Why?” Chen Huimin asked in a subdued voice. “For tearing a poster of Chairman Mao, an absolutely groundless accusation,” I said. Hardly had I said anything else when an inmate warned that COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL the boy guard was coming. Indeed, the little guard, his teeth bared like a fighting dog, dashed toward a newcomer who, with his back to him, was conversing with another inmate. Letting forth a pitiful cry when the boy guard hit him on the back with his automatic rifle butt, the newcomer crouched, protecting himself with both arms. When that didn’t work he lay on the cement yard and started rolling like a log. As the little guard bent over the victim, a bunch of shoelaces along with a silk handkerchief dropped from his top uniform pocket. Some prisoners recognized them as their shoelaces, others whispered that the silk handkerchief had belonged to a woman inmate. The boy guard snarled and turned his rifle butt to the onlookers. “He is not a squad leader, none of the guards here are squad leaders,” Sun Baoson said when we returned to the cell. “I was once a platoon leader in the Navy. “In the spring of 1964 I was conscripted, and later that year I was selected to serve in the guard’s regiment of the East Sea Fleet Headquarters. A year later I was promoted to the leader of the security guards’ platoon of the commander’s office,” Sun Baoson said. “That’s how I got to know so many high-ranking officers there. When my service was over, I returned to Suzhou and was assigned to work in a soy sauce company. I didn’t like to waste my youthful years in that sauce and pickle shop, where most of the employees were elderly folks with whom I had nothing to share. So I resolved to put on my Navy uniform again, and I started an adventurous career. My experience with the army troops, my acquaintance with high officials in the Navy, along with my eloquence, brought me money and filled my life with many romantic stories. Like in a novel.” Xu Yingen and Hui Ning, two nineteen-year-old thieves sitting on either side of Sun Baoson, claimed that they would have served as his orderlies had they known him outside the prison. “You’re the smartest man we’ve ever met. I wouldn’t have regretted getting a ten-year or even a fifteen-year sentence, had COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL I experienced what you had,” Xu Yingen said. “The counterrevolutionary action is the most stupid crime of all. Look at them,” he said, nodding toward all the counter-revolutionary prisoners. “They haven’t experienced anything similar to what you described.” Never had I heard of people being proud of their crimes, and I was enraged at their malicious attitude toward life. I would have jumped from my bundle to teach them a lesson, had my arms not been so swollen. It was quiet for a while. In the silence Shen Yao began to do his daily push-ups. When he finished, he told me that he had graduated from Beijing Railway Normal College, where he had joined the communist party. When he graduated from the college, he was assigned to Suzhou Railway Professional School as a math teacher. In the summer of 1967, when the Cultural Revolution turned violent, the two organizations, namely, the Red Headquarters and the Rebel Army, began to fight for the power of the city government. The Red Headquarters supported the city’s original leaders while the Rebel Army wanted to snatch the power from them. One of its leaders, Shen Yao, and his Rebel Army stationed themselves inside the city, while the force of the Red Headquarters quartered outside in the suburbs. In one of the battles, he shot a man who had been the mayor’s assistant. Shen Yao took off his t-shirt, exposing his well-shaped body, on which the lines of his ribs were nevertheless unmistakable, under the dim light of the bulb hanging from the center of the ceiling. While wiping his sweating body with his washcloth, he looked at the muscles moving in his chest and murmured: “Had I not stuck to doing exercise like this, I’d have been finished long ago.” “But,” Lu Segou, the elderly inmate, said mockingly, “I have heard them say that your friend was released on bail yesterday for medical treatment.” It was true, the other suspect in his shooting case, who was COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL paralyzed after three years of imprisonment, was taken home by his relatives the previous afternoon. “What’s the use in abusing yourself like that?” Xu Yingen grinned at Shen Yao. “Look at your friend, I bet he’s now lying at home, chatting with his family.” Shen Yao stared at him, but he controlled himself and turned back to me: “I don’t want to argue with them. Everybody has his own standard.” “I don’t know what standard means, tell me what it is. Is it something that can give you pleasure like a woman, or can fill your belly like rice?” Hui Ning mocked at him. “Say it again and I’ll knock your teeth off.” Shen Yao rose. He waved his fist before the thief ’s face. “Hey guys, why so serious? Don’t forget you’re killing time,” Sun Baoson said. A long silence followed, during which came a smell that attracted everyone’s eyes to the corner where Li Minchu sat. He had just broken open a long soap his wife had sent him earlier in the afternoon. The soap had been hollowed out, and inside was a small loaf of bread. Looking right and left, Li Minchu said: “I didn’t expect… My wife didn’t know food is not allowed…” “She knows that, or why would she hide it inside the soap?” Lu Segou said. “But don’t worry, nobody’s going to report this to the chief.” They talked about his bread, and soon the deal was made. Reluctantly Li Minchu broke the bread in half and handed one part to Sun Baoson as the price for keeping the secret among us. Sun Baoson thanked him. He broke the halved bread further into eleven pieces; each was about the size of a thumbnail. When I picked up my ration from the floor and weighed it in my palm, it broke into crumbs. Without missing a bit, I threw them into my mouth. They could hardly fill the gaps between my teeth. I didn’t know when I fell asleep. In my dream I saw my schoolmates. I awoke several times, but the dream continued COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL until the strident ringing of the morning bell echoed through the dark corridor. “It’s your turn to carry the bucket out with Xu Yingen,” Shen Yao reminded me. The swelling in my arms had gone down to almost normal. I rose and held the ring on my side of the bucket as Xu Yingen held the other. He urged me to run. “If we walk,” he said while running, “we’ll miss the opportunity to meet the women inmates at the sewage pool in the backyard. The women officers open their cells before Chief Wu opens the men’s.” Sure enough, we saw four women around the sink washing their buckets when we got there: two women were young and two were middle-aged. I was pleased to see one of the two young women was Donying, who gave me a slight nod. I was about to say hello to her when Xu Yingen nudged my side. He pointed to the other young woman and whispered in my ear that she was the gang leader, whom he had admired for a long time. The gang leader looked at us briefly, and winked – there, on the watchtower, she meant, a guard was observing us. She didn’t say a word until we emptied our bucket and went to the sink to wash it. “Are you newcomers?” she asked. “He is, but I’ve been here for a month and a half already,” Xu Yingen replied. “Where do you come from?” she turned to ask me. “From Happy Commune,” I said. “For what?” “Thought problem.” “Ha,” she grinned and, in a subdued voice, said, “you’re stupid enough, just like her.” She turned to one of the middle-aged women who was washing her bucket at the sink. “He pretended to be insane when he first came, so Chief Wu punished him,” Xu Yingen said. “Look at the cuts the handcuffs left on his arms.” COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL But she had completely lost her interest in me, and walked to the other side of the sink to help her cellmate wash the bucket. Donying, when she finished washing her hands, came to us. She looked at my arms, and asked how I felt. “Much better,” I said. I was about to thank her for giving me her garment the other day when a muffled voice shouted from the watchtower: “What are you doing?” *** I dozed off after breakfast, but the street loudspeakers shrilled, then issued six beeps. “The last sound was Beijing time seven o’clock,” announced the anchorman. “Good morning, revolutionary comrades, it is August the 30th. Most of the region in the middle and lower reaches of Yangze River is cloudless. East to southeast wind, wind force two to three. Today’s highest temperature will be around 36 degrees centigrade. The lowest temperature tomorrow morning will be 26 degrees centigrade… “Now please listen to ‘A Battle Of Wits,’ a section from the Revolutionary Beijing Opera The Sha River.” That was Linan’s favorite section. We had recited the lines many times. Sister-in-law Archin sang: “I have built a stove with seven-starry burners, My brass kettle boils water taken from three rivers. I set my eight-gods square table in the house and serve people coming from sixteen areas. All who come here are my guests, I welcome them with a broad smile when they arrive, But I don’t miss them when they leave. As soon as one walks out of my house, his tea immediately turns cold – cold – cold.” For some reason the loudspeakers got stuck. I waited, but nothing else came. The temperature rose. “I wish afternoon would come soon,” someone growled. “I wish it was already afternoon,” another voice sounded, “so we could walk and eat the porridge.” “Afternoon,” a voice whined. COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL But in the afternoon, Chief Wu gathered all the men prisoners in the cement yard to watch him punish Number 189, the mentally ill man in the next cell who was said to have told the militia men that he wanted to see if they would arrest him or not when he tore a poster of the Great Leader in front of them, because, as it had occurred to him, nobody seemed to have noticed his existence. Having tasted the bitterness of imprisonment, however, the mentally ill man regretted it. He cried out at night. He begged the guards to let go of him. He called the chief his father, and told him that he would eat feces. He was tall and strong, but from his eyes one could easily tell that he was different from the rest of us. “Sir, I want to go home – ” Number 189 implored. “Did you say you wanted to eat feces?” the chief asked. “I want to go home, my grandma can’t wait to see me. She is eighty-two. She can’t sleep at night if I’m not home.” “Shut up,” the chief shouted. He took out a pair of handcuffs from his pocket with which he handcuffed the prisoner’s arms to his back. I felt a terrible groan sound in my own throat as the chief tightened the handcuffs on him. But I could hardly turn my eyes away from the mentally ill man’s arms which immediately swelled and turned dark. Number 189 screamed for help as the chief ordered two prisoners to drag him to the corner where the sun was beating on the wall. In about five minutes, he collapsed on the cement ground like a sack of sand. “Get up!” Chief Wu roared. Seeing Shin didn’t respond, he ordered the two prisoners to pull him up. “Stand straight,” Chief Wu ordered. “I’ll unlock your handcuffs in half an hour if you keep standing like that.” Hearing this, the mentally ill man clicked his heels. “Yes, sir,” he said, though soon he fell to the ground again, beads of sweat as big as soybeans running down his big square face… Returning to the cell, I fell on my sleeping roll. Somewhere COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL between awake and asleep, I dreamed that Chief Wu handcuffed me again. I screamed out. When I opened my eyes I saw my cellmates staring at me. Then, the cell door opened soundlessly and a guard ordered me to follow him to the interrogation room. The interrogator asked me as soon as I sat on the stool: “What do you think you are here for?” “For answering the questions I failed to answer yesterday,” I said. “Are you ready?” he said, and then took from the top pocket of his Mao-style uniform a cigarette pack, from which he snatched one cigarette with his fingertips and put it to his mouth. He then searched with both hands in all his uniform pockets for the lighter, and finally found it in the same top pocket in which he put his cigarette pack. He struck the lighter several times, but it didn’t ignite. So he shook it madly and then tried again. Eventually he lit his cigarette with the lighter. I thought about He Zhen, Wang Hen, Li Minchu, and other cellmates who had all given confessions, whatever they were charged for. It seemed, from the way he lit his cigarette, that it would be at my own risk if I continued to defend myself. I cleared my throat, and replied: “I’m ready.” “Tell me then, what you thought when you tore the Great Leader’s Treasured Portrait.” “I seemed to have an ill feeling about the Great Leader’s strategy of calling on the students to go to the countryside to receive re-education from the peasants,” I said mechanically. “I believe you did,” he said, which sounded a little awkward, as if he hadn’t expected that I would make a confession so easily. He frowned at his cigarette and ordered me to describe my sinful thoughts in detail. “The root of my reactionary thoughts,” I said, “is that I hate to be controlled like a prisoner. Therefore, I hate proletarian dictatorship and in consequence…” COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
wHen Xiaoda Xiao was twentY Years old
He tore a poster of mao.
witHoUt a trial He was sentenced
to fiVe Years in a labor prison.
The VisiTing suiT is a poignant and incredibly moving memoir-in-stories that chronicles the hardships facing the prisoners in one of Mao’s forced labor camps. Much more than simply an account of senseless oppression and brutality in Mao’s China, this is a skillfully crafted and moving tale of man’s will to survive with compassion, humor, grace, and humanity intact.
“like kafka, Xiao memorablY conjUres a mad, sUrreal world, along witH its potential botH for crUeltY and for kindness.“ —Jay Neugeboren, Bookforum
TWO DOLLAR RADIO Books too loud to ignore Cover art: The Barter Market by Xiaoda Xiao A Trade Paperback Original. NON-FICTION
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