Mr. Gao was labeled a “rightist” and sent to a re-education camp, Jiabiangou Farm, in the Gobi Desert. Added to the physical deprivations such as heat, cold, dust storms, diarrhea, lice, torture, and hunger were the psychological torments. Later, even his wife died after being sent to a labor camp.
The power of prison memoirs lies in their recounting of the unimaginable things people are willing to do to other people and, no less important, the ability of human beings to endure the worst kind of treatment and survive. These books inevitably recall Shakespeare: “The worst is not/So long as we can say ‘This is the worst.’ ”
We are all familiar with personal accounts of the Holocaust and the Gulag, less so with descriptions of the torture chamber that was Mao’s China. That is why Er Tai Gao’s spare, stoical remembrance, “In Search of My Homeland: A Memoir of a Chinese Labor Camp,” is a valuable contribution to the literature of the horrific 20th century.
As a naïve art instructor in the provincial city of Lanzhou in north-central China, Mr. Gao made the mistake of writing an essay titled “On Beauty.” The piece is included in this book and, reading it, one is amazed that it was allowed to be published in a totalitarian Communist state. It is an attack on materialist aesthetics and an argument for the centrality of subjectivity — that is, freedom — to the creation of art.
But in 1957, when Mr. Gao was 21, China happened to be going through an ideological thaw, and his meditation appeared in a Beijing magazine, attracting wide attention and comment. The thaw, however, soon ended. Mr. Gao was labeled a “rightist” and sent to a re-education camp, Jiabiangou Farm, in the Gobi Desert. “One moment of fame,” he writes, “turned into 20 years of misfortune.”
The prisoners at the farm were put to work digging and draining ditches. It was essentially meaningless toil, and when Mr. Gao returned to the camp many years later, he saw that the unforgiving desert had reclaimed the land. The work went on all day, every day, despite heat, cold, dust storms, diarrhea, lice, torture, hunger.
Added to these physical deprivations were psychological torments. The days didn’t end when the sun went down. In the evenings prisoners had to attend meetings at which they confessed their errors and informed on others. To show the effectiveness of their re-education, they were forced to smile all the time, which required sustained concentration and effort. “Because the smile bore evidence of this strenuous effort,” Mr. Gao says, “it also sometimes resembled crying.”
The cruelty of this regimen was designed to produce intense personal isolation and a kind of mental nullity, “absolute zero,” as Mr. Gao calls it. “Countless days came and went, and all the days put together seemed the very same day.”
“Nobody can help you ... it’s all up to you,” an older prisoner tells Mr. Gao. “Remember, it’s not just a matter of staying alive; it’s a matter of finding a purpose in staying alive.” This man, who had been a historian before he was sent for re-education, found his purpose in collecting documents from the camp as material for future scholars.
Another, a former army officer who had been on the Long March with Mao, was punctilious about his appearance, taking particular pride in his military uniform. A third turned himself into a workhorse. He was the first one up in the morning and the first to get back to the ditches after a rest period. Naturally, he was hated by the other men, but, apart from that, his was probably not the best survival strategy: one day he simply dropped dead from overwork.
Mr. Gao’s strategy was to write, producing tiny characters on whatever scraps of paper he could find. “While I wrote,” he says, “I was alive.” This was a dangerous, potentially fatal, undertaking, but he managed to hide his precious, life-threatening bundle of thoughts and impressions wherever he was sent. The result is this book. Its background explains why “In Search of My Homeland” is so fragmentary, repetitious and disjointed, and while it may seem mean-spirited to complain, careful editing and supplemental material would have produced a more coherent and rounded work.
When the conditions of his life improved, Mr. Gao married and had a daughter. Frustratingly, his wife and daughter are mentioned only in passing, even though his wife later died after being sent to a labor camp.
In 1959 Mr. Gao was transferred to Lanzhou to work on some public paintings, then to a second camp until his release in 1962. Penniless, he found work doing research at the Mogao Caves, a site of ancient temples with relics dating back to the fourth century. But in the mid-’60s, as the Cultural Revolution took hold, he was denounced again, demoted to physical labor, humiliated, imprisoned and beaten. His patron and supervisor at the caves fared worse: beatings left him with no teeth and a spine so badly injured that he could no longer stand.
Mr. Gao left the caves in 1972, but his life since then is only sketchily presented. He was officially rehabilitated at the end of the ’70s and taught philosophy at Lanzhou University in the ’80s. On the last page of the memoir we learn that he fled China for Los Angeles in 1993.
It’s tempting to try to read Mr. Gao’s story optimistically, as a lesson about the strength and resilience of the human spirit, with this book as the happy ending. The publisher, for example, sees proof of “the power of hope.” Something similar is often said about Holocaust survivors (as if the millions who didn’t make it were somehow inadequate).
Mr. Gao is less sentimental; he understands how little his own choices had to do with his survival. If he hadn’t been a painter at a time when the government needed painters, he probably would have died at Jiabiangou like most of the prisoners there. At many steps along the way he had the good fortune to find mentors who taught him, patrons who protected him. We don’t hear the stories of those people who didn’t happen to find patrons because they aren’t here to tell their tales.
As Mr. Gao says, “Whether I lived or died was capricious.” The hard, inescapable truth is that at Jiabiangou — just as at Auschwitz and Kolyma — no matter what you did, no matter what your strategy was, your survival basically depended on blind, stupid luck.
To read the original New York Times article, please click here.