The Cowshed Read online

  I had the good fortune not only to have seen a cowshed—or rather, to have been forced to see it—but to have lived in one for about nine months. It was no life of luxury, but I did gain a rare opportunity to witness the Cultural Revolution from the inside. The heavens were kind to me: Another such opportunity would be harder to find than the proverbial needle in a haystack. Not only was I born in interesting times but I ended up in the most interesting of places, the cowshed, in the thick of the action. Would anyone these days build a prison for me and ensure its security by guarding it day and night?

  I study Buddhist history and precepts, but I’ve always been most intrigued by Buddhist superstitions, especially those concerning hell. These folk beliefs occasionally surface in canonical texts, but they truly come alive in oral tradition, in which centuries of torture inflicted upon ordinary folk by ancient Chinese and Indian regimes have been refined into a masterpiece of sadism guaranteed to make the listener’s hair stand on end.

  Decades of studying an assortment of Eastern and Western hells have led me to the conclusion that the Western hell is far too simple, naïve, tame. Take Dante’s Inferno: His poetry may be sublime, but the hell he describes is superficial, unimaginative, comical. It has none of the depths of India’s hells, which, amplified by wicked Chinese embellishments, are a veritable pagoda of horrors. Books like the Jade Record—a Chinese tract about hell illustrated with lakes of fire and mountains of knives, saws, vats of oil, bull- and horse-headed devils, villains, and props—dazzle the beholder and can only inspire awe. They prove the folk wisdom of the East to be superior to the erudition of Western civilization.

  I thought the imaginative powers of these anonymous storytellers unsurpassable until my time in the cowshed forced me to concede that the Red Guards’ inventions far outstripped those of all their predecessors. The administration of the actual cowshed outdid that of the storied hell of ancient India. Dante himself would’ve learned a lot from these literary masterpieces.

  My guess is that some of the students who became Red Guards used to attend my lectures on Buddhism. They may not have learned all that much about Buddhist history or beliefs, but they must have paid close attention to the Buddhist hell, because they managed to put theory into practice by building a cowshed in Beijing that was the envy of the land and widely emulated. Their success underscores how the student can indeed surpass the teacher, proving that the decades I spent teaching at Peking University were not in vain. As one of their victims, I have nothing but admiration for all of them.

  In fact, my students improvised ingeniously on what they had gleaned from their studies. Without having to build mountains of knives or fill vats with boiling oil, without any demonic aid, the Red Guards created an atmosphere of terror that far outstripped that of Buddhist creations. In the Narakas (the Buddhist hell), devils follow the orders of Yanluo, the ruler and judge of the underworld, and spear their victims, hurling them into the oil. But such physical torment cannot compare with the psychological cruelty practiced by the Red Guards in the name of combating revisionism. For instance, at Peking University, the Red Guards forced their charges to learn quotations from Chairman Mao by heart. Buddhist devils don’t force their prisoners to memorize sutras and chant them, punishing every mistake with a slap to the face. Their victims don’t suffer through the daily lectures I remember so well: inmates assembled in rows each evening at dusk, the barking of guards, the sounds of beatings echoing in the clear night sky. Shadows flickered in the thin darkness by a hill outside the compound. To my dismay, I could sometimes make out—from the corner of my eye—the few free citizens who had stopped by to admire the spectacle.

  Indeed, the cowshed was a hub of new inventions, which made life for its inmates both exciting and terrifying. Our senses were sharpened to the point of paranoia. Never before had I experienced such a state of constant anxiety, and no outsider could possibly understand what it was like. Even though tens of thousands of people were incarcerated in the cowshed—no one knows exactly how many there were —they represented only a tiny fraction of China’s vast population. As I have said, this was a rare opportunity. Aren’t writers always advised to live life before writing about it? Of course, hardly anyone would volunteer to be imprisoned in the cowshed, and a willing victim wouldn’t necessarily have met the strict entrance criteria.

  As one of the happy few inmates of the cowshed, I almost paid for my good fortune with my life. Since then, I have felt that someone should write about what it was like. I suppose I could have done so myself: I am no writer, but I am a bit of a scribbler. Although I was unwilling to dredge up painful memories of that time, I hoped that another writer who had done time in the cowshed would record that terrible history. It would be a tremendous service to readers in China and beyond.

  But I waited and waited. I devoured all the books and articles I could find on the subject, but never found what I was hoping for. Gifted writers among the survivors of the cowshed must number in the thousands. Why this silence? There is no time to lose: As each generation of survivors ages, these fleeting memories will be lost for good. That would be an immeasurable loss.

  In 1992, not twenty years after the Cultural Revolution, people have already begun to forget what happened. When I tell young people about what happened to me, they stare back at me, their faces clouded with disbelief. (Sometimes even middle-aged people stare too.) He must be exaggerating, they think, he must have some ulterior motive—that can’t really have happened. Although they are too polite to contradict me, I can read the incredulity in their eyes, and it distresses me.

  I mourn, because although I escaped with my life, no one understands my experience. Even to family or close friends, I’ve only revealed bits and pieces of what happened, most I’ve kept to myself to this day. I anticipate that my listeners will sympathize, and I mourn because they do not. The older I grow, the more alone I become. My elders grow frail like leaves in late autumn; young people are alien to me. Will my secrets die with me? The mere thought reminds me how alone I am. I fear that if society learns nothing from the collective experience of tens of thousands like me, we will have suffered in vain. And yet, setting these fears aside, I am convinced that an honest account of this period would be useful to all nations, if only as an example of what not to do and what to do. No ill can come of it.

  After thinking long and hard, I’ve decided to take up the task myself. My account will contain no shade of untruth or exaggeration. I will not stoop to sensationalism. Rather, I will record events just as they happened, without adding or subtracting anything. I’ve never paid heed to idle criticism. The talent of lying to win favor is one that I neither possess nor desire. I am confident that my memory holds true. Now that I’ve been baptized by the fires of the Cultural Revolution hell, I fear nothing, as running water cannot intimidate one who has crossed oceans. If any of my readers wish to read themselves into portraits of certain individuals, to treat the scars pointed to in these accounts as their own, I can only say: Be my guest. My account may not be literary, but it has been traded for blood and tears. I think my readers will understand that this book is not a novel.

  THE SOCIALIST EDUCATION MOVEMENT

  IN THE EARLY sixties, a socialist education campaign that emphasized class struggle swept through China, throwing Peking University into chaos. The rules of political infighting were the same as they’d always been: If you get me this time, I’ll make sure to get you back next time. Eventually, the crossfire died down, and we were all sent to the villages to be reeducated by peasants.

  Not long after the International Hotel Conference in the autumn of 1965, I was posted to Nankou Village just outside Beijing to help lead a team of students working there as part of the Socialist Education Movement.[1] As the assistant leader of the group, I was responsible for Party discipline in the Peking University contingent. Nankou was a small village by the mountain pass, and before the railways were built, it had been a bustling market town. The elderly people in the village t
old me that the streets used to be full of shops, the hotels rowdy with men playing dice all night, hundreds of camels lying in the streets each night. There was nothing left of that time but crumbling edifices and old people’s memories.

  The impetus for the Cultural Revolution came from the very top. In November 1965, the literary critic Yao Wenyuan wrote an essay called “On the New Historical Play Hai Rui Dismissed from Office.”[2] It was a tendentious reading of Wu Han’s play that had no basis in fact, but Yao was a mere puppet saying exactly what the Party leaders wanted him to say. At the time, I was still in Nankou. I remember reading the essay and dismissing it as an incompetent piece of work. I didn’t have a political cell in my brain, so although we had been learning about class struggle and talking politics every day since Liberation, I couldn’t see that the essay was actually all about class struggle and would set off a violent political storm.[3] One of my faults is that I have never been able to keep my opinions to myself, so I told anyone who would listen what I thought of the piece. I pointed out that the play had nothing to do with Peng Dehuai. I even said openly that I knew all three co-authors of the controversial column “Notes from a Three-Family Village,” and that one of them was a good friend.[4] Wu Han, the historian and deputy major of Beijing, had been a classmate of mine at Tsinghua in the 1930s. When I returned to Beijing in 1946, he had asked me to speak to his students at Tsinghua University, and invited me to his home. It never occurred to me that some of my listeners would later seize on my words to attack me. One of the students at Nankou was a young man from a good class background, the son of a revolutionary martyr, who was always very respectful to me. I had mentally designated him my successor, the student who would take over my work. Instead, it turned out that this man with a smile on his face was taking note of everything I said, and would later dredge up all my comments to label me a “hanger-on of the Three-Family Village.” Incidentally, he has since abandoned his rightful place in the vanguard of the proletariat and slipped away to live in a small European country.

  Yao’s warped use of so-called evidence to accuse his victims of nameless crimes set a dangerous precedent, and would be copied by countless others in the Cultural Revolution. He may only have been mimicking a technique practiced by Party leaders, but his influence corrupted the thinking of a generation of young people, and its aftereffects continue to this day.

  One incident made a deep impression on me. Our work unit in Nankou Village included teams from the Central Broadcasting Station as well as the police, or Public Security Bureau. There were no uniforms, and we were under orders never to discuss our work. Our motley crew got on extraordinarily well. I befriended a young police officer called Chen, who had spent ten years serving on the police force. He was extremely easygoing, and we could talk about anything. I noticed that he always burned his letters after reading them, whereas I was in the habit of keeping all correspondence and receipts, regardless of whether they served an obvious purpose. Chen would destroy everything, even something as trivial as one of the official greeting cards the Public Security Bureau sent to every policeman. One day, I couldn’t resist asking him, “Why do you burn all your letters?”

  “To make sure there’s no trace left of them.”

  “Couldn’t you just tear them up and toss them in the latrines?”

  “They might still be recoverable.”

  “You’re being too paranoid.”

  “In our line of work, we can never forget that if you get in trouble once you’ll never hear the end of it.”

  I was stunned. I had never thought that way. I certainly knew I possessed enough flaws for someone to criticize if they wanted to denounce me. But as I hadn’t opposed the Party, or socialism, or joined a counterrevolutionary organization, I figured I couldn’t be labeled a counterrevolutionary. Later events proved Chen right. Before long, I would get in serious trouble for opposing the influential Nie Yuanzi. “In twenty years of teaching, I earned myself / Nothing but a counterrevolutionary label,” I once wrote. But that is another story.

  JUNE FOURTH, 1966

  NANKOU MAY HAVE been in the middle of nowhere, but it wasn’t completely isolated from the world of politics—after all, we had been sent there in the name of class struggle. And although I disagreed with the leftists who ate and breathed and talked of nothing but class struggle, even I could see that in a place like Nankou, some changes were needed. But I had no idea of the bigger storm brewing. At the center of the storm was Beijing, and at the center of Beijing was Peking University.

  From Nankou, this all seemed very far away. At first it appeared to have nothing to do with us. We felt closer to the rhythm of the seasons than we did to events in the capital. Spring often comes late to mountain villages. But the almond and peach and pear trees eventually bloomed, carpeting the mountainsides in pink and white blossoms. The news that filtered through to the village suggested that another political movement was looming. Even from our peaceful village, far from campus, we could sense the turmoil on the horizon.

  With May came more troubling news from Beijing. The politburo released a flurry of documents, including the May 16th Notification that officially launched the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution.[1] Politics didn’t interest me in the least, and I was living my life in Nankou, oblivious to how these developments might affect me. In the meantime, the mood on campus had shifted. Colleagues who had been back to Beijing told us that the constant squabbling between factions had escalated into violence. A high-ranking government official spent several evenings meeting with university students, hoping to calm things down, but the effects of this attempt were short-lived. On May 25, Nie Yuanzi and her followers in the Philosophy Department put up a big-character poster attacking key members of the Peking University Party Committee and Beijing Municipal Party Committee. It was entitled: “What Are Song Shuo, Lu Ping, and Peng Peiyun Really Doing in the Cultural Revolution?” Big-character posters, the handwritten posters put up in public places to denounce “counterrevolutionary” people and institutions, were going to become extremely popular, and this one touched off a huge debate right away. Students from both factions huddled in large groups outside the cafeteria and argued late into the night. In fact, no one could keep track of how many factions there were and how many students were involved. Now that the crowds had been stirred up, there was no stopping them.

  None of us in Nankou knew what the big-character poster said. But we could tell that this would only intensify the Socialist Education Movement. The International Hotel Conference had been a setback for the camp opposing Lu Ping, the erstwhile president of the university and Party Committee secretary, and it was their turn to take revenge.

  On June 1st, the Central Broadcasting Station unexpectedly broadcast the text of the big-character poster and quoted Mao commending it as a “Marxist-Leninist poster.” I didn’t know what a Marxist-Leninist poster was back then and still don’t. In Nankou, we talked about the broadcast, but it wasn’t a heated discussion, and our disagreements didn’t divide us into factions. The campus news we occasionally received was like distant thunder on a cloudless day. Since we had no real sense of what was happening, we seldom gave it any thought. We were happy to go on being educated by the peasants.

  In Nankou were about eight of us from the Eastern Languages Department. This included both the Party secretary and myself, the department head. According to the new rules, both of us were, by definition, “in power,” and hence to be punished as capitalist-roaders. In Nankou, the capitalist-roaders got on well with all the other teachers and students. We trundled on happily without realizing how dangerously close we were to the cliff’s edge, while those ready to shove us over wagged their tails respectfully like so many pet pugs.

  On June fourth, the Party secretary and I received a sudden order to return to campus to join the revolution. The order was unanticipated, though perhaps if we had been more politically aware we would’ve expected it. Having brought no books nor any other possessions save a few bl
ankets and washbasins, we packed our bags immediately and piled into the van the university had sent to pick us up. Of course we were a little nostalgic to be leaving Nankou, which had been our home for the past seven or eight months. I was reminded of a poem: “When the traveler looks back at the trees of where he once lodged, the place begins to look like home.”[2] There was revolution in the air. The Party branch secretary said nothing. He had more of a nose for politics and more experience of class struggle than I did, so perhaps he could anticipate the welcome that awaited us. Neither of us knew his fate. Even I was a little unsettled at having to leave so abruptly. I used to eagerly anticipate visits to Beijing, but this time returning to Yanyuan—“the garden of Yan,” the familiar Peking University campus—felt like a step into the unknown.

  Less than two hours later, we were back in Beijing. I had been expecting the department to welcome us warmly, given that we were the Party branch secretary and department head, but no one came to greet us. Our first glimpse of the campus shocked us. There were cars parked everywhere, to say nothing of the sea of bicycles outside buildings and on lawns, taking up every available inch of space. The grounds swarmed with students and visitors, and just past the campus gates, our car slowed to a halt because of the crowds. Needless to say, there was no special homecoming for us.

  We were told that the university had been in this state of chaos since June 1st, thronging with people who had come to see the first Marxist-Leninist big-character poster. To them, Peking University was a Jerusalem, Leiyin Temple, or Mecca, a holy ground that cleansed pilgrims from all evil. Tens of thousands of students arrived each day, initially from all over Beijing and then from schools across the country. Beijingers naturally wanted a share of the action. They swarmed onto the campus and melted into the crowds of students who were raising havoc. There were big-character posters everywhere, pinned on walls, pasted on trees or on sidewalks, all declaring their full support of the first Marxist-Leninist poster.