11 THE GRAND SESSION OF TORTURE

Thus days passed uneventfully.

But my mind never eased up. Each day I was on twenty-four-hour alert. No matter whether at home or at work, I was ready to be taken away by the Red Guards, exactly as in the period before the forced physical labor. Consequently, even when working in a less busy place, I could spot a "Red Guard" armband in the distance as it sprang toward me and I knew my disaster was coming. I became an animal, speechless and dumb, and was tamely led to some unknown place. The torture was stereotyped, exactly in the same pattern as before. Now I was skilled at taking the jet plane posture, without the Red Guards' ferocious corrections of kick and blow. My graceful performance left no room to be desired. I was happy that my painstaking balcony exercise eventually paid off. Though my legs were still a little uncomfortable, I didn't feel sore and hurt unendurably. While bending down over there, I turned a deaf ear to the speeches delivered, which were routinely full of lies and worse than the eight-part essay.[1] The discourses were pieces of trash like "the wind blowing past in the autumn." On the other hand, I was satisfied that each session of torture took one part of labor off my working schedule and gave me a recess. As I experienced the ordeal of mass torture, I moved through the course of torture sessions and was close to graduation with a bachelor's degree in this field of learning.

Sometimes, I was taken away for interrogation instead. The location was the same, the Building of Foreign Languages, though the rooms varied from time to time. I didn't know the reason. Once marched inside, I saw the branch leaders of the Commune in our department; I apologize here for not knowing about their positions at that time; they sat seriously in a row as judges at a trial. I thought I had to take the jet plane posture, but, thank goodness, this time they spared me, asking me to stand there and permitting me to look up. I felt uncomfortable, like Jia Gui of The Famen Temple.[2] In the early period of the Revolution, I behaved badly in circumstances of this kind. Since the survival of my crisis, I had been quite cooperative. I realized resistance would bring me no good. The interrogation usually focused on the diaries with millions of characters that they confiscated from my home, pointing to some minor details or sentences in order to make false charges and slurs. While listening to their hoots of nonsense, I felt infuriated sometimes, thinking they had gone too far. Aware of the danger of offending them, I tried to check my emotion. At that time, when willful vilification raged, it was quite easy to find faults in the tons of diaries and papers. On top of that I was required to answer their questions. But answering their questions would fuel my discontent, which, by all means, should be brought under control. How distressed I felt! Occasionally I would rather prefer forming the jet plane posture during the torture session, a less emotionally depressed state in which I could ignore the speaker's ridiculous address at the cost of receiving a couple of slaps on the face. One old saying goes, "It's always the other mountain that looks higher." Was I so bedeviled that taking the jet plane posture felt more desirable?

The interrogators were either some former students of mine or faculty members I had hired in the past. At this point it never occurred to me that they were "ungrateful." In fact the thought was very unrealistic. I could forgive most of them. Like myself, they were victims of the factional frenzy that stripped them of the reasoning. But a few of them stuck out for their behavior. For example, a young professor of Korean, who was a firm supporter of the Commune, displayed extreme hostility toward me in the interrogation. Did he hope to claim a reward and promotion from the "Empress" by torturing his victims? Another faculty member of Indonesian, who used to be extremely deferential in front of me, now treated me in a shockingly rude manner. It turned out that he was not revolutionary before the liberation, when he worked against revolutionary students and attended the anti-Soviet rally. Later, when the disgraceful part of his history was revealed by someone, he took his own life, using the capitalist life-ending method.

But what most disturbed and frustrated me was the conduct of a teacher of Arabic. Before the Revolution he was honest and decent and we got along well. Now he joined the branch section of the Commune in our department, but not as a leading member. He was assigned the work of reading the diaries and papers confiscated from my home. With a pile of papers more than one meter high, I knew it was a mammoth and monotonous task for him to read and detect evidence of my "counter-revolutionary behavior." On the one hand, it was easy to pick up a few sentences from the papers and concoct a false charge based on them. On the other hand, it would take a great amount of patience, eye-strain and mental power to finish this job. If I were asked to read them once again myself, I would hardly be able to accomplish the mission. But this gentleman, whom I was not in a position to call "comrade" by that time, worked day and night and finally succeeded in reading all the papers gathered together and providing plenty of evidence for denouncing me. It is amazing that he spent a great deal of time reading the papers written by an unknown man like me. It would have been a worthwhile project to study my works if I had been a noted scholar or he had been really interested in the "Study of Ji Xianlin." Didn't he squander his life? From another perspective he undoubtedly would have been able to write a good research paper if he had spent the same amount of time and energy reading works of Arabic language and literature. Securing his master's degree and getting a promotion would have been down the road. I felt sorry for him that he failed to achieve academic success due to the involvement in my case. But what could I have done for him given the circumstances I was in?

The Commune members of our department were fairly polite while interrogating me, though emotion ran high occasionally. Certainly no one slapped me, for which I was profoundly indebted to them.

Given the fact that I became accustomed to the daily routine, I grew tired of a life going to work, torture and interrogation. Again my mind wandered aimlessly. I wished the country could have a savior, benevolent and sympathetic, to end this catastrophe and free innocent people like me from the shackles of agony. I was never a believer in anything, any religious deity, God, Heaven, Buddha or Bodhisattva, nor did I say any prayers for something. I counted on the leaders of my country. One woman, my next-door neighbor, had long treated me as "an enemy" and "a counter-revolutionary." She never looked at me directly. Instead she urged the two old ladies of my family to do the same as a token of expressing their firm revolutionary belief. The two ladies frankly rejected her by saying, "We depend on him as a bread earner!" When off work, I started to write letters to our state leaders, sitting in my dimly lighted room in such an unfriendly atmosphere, wanting to express my wishes for a dignified life. But it was only a pipedream. How could a miracle of that sort happen? A popular saying was that "the Cultural Revolution should be made at seven-to-eight-year intervals and last for seven to eight years each time."[3] I was fighting a losing battle as "a blind man wastes his material by lighting a candle in darkness." In my illusion I longed for a sudden turn in my life for the better when, one morning, I would wake up to see the close of the Cultural Revolution and feel myself lifted back to earth from the infernal world. By that time I would be thousands of times more zealous in eulogizing our "Great Savior of the People." How wonderful it would be! In the pitch-dark universe I seemed to see a pale beam of light flickering from the "Highest Building" (Mr. Chen Yinque has a line of poetry, "It is difficult to enjoy the beauty of the highest building at near sight").[4] Such a happy result, however, was nothing but a distant mirage on the political horizon. My daily routine continued to alternate between going to work, torture sessions and interrogations.

Even at home, free of outside disturbance, I was not relaxed. The next-door harsh lady, whom I had talked about just now, went out of her way to pester me by requiring that I move out of her room a mahogany square-pieced table and a couch, two pieces of furniture, which I had stored there thanks to a lack of space. The table was said to be the only one left in history in Beijing. I was hard put. I only had two rooms, one large and one small, which the Red Guards left with me after raiding my home. They now were full of things. How could I squeeze the big furniture into my rooms? The garage downstairs, which was used to store books, became almost a disgusting dumpster after the home-raiding. To add fuel to fire, a female member living downstairs put up a small- character poster requiring me to move my books out of the garage. Now I lost all my friends. Like a virus carrier, to whom could I turn for help? Would I be courageous enough to go outside? I was like Xiang Yu, who was besieged on all sides in front of the river Wujiang. As I had made a comparative study of suicide earlier, I would not take my own life by cutting my throat as Xiang Yu did. I wanted to live on. But what kind of life would I want to lead? I was desperate.

What was in store for me was not the light at the end of the tunnel but the light from an on-coming train.

The manual labor dragged on for the whole spring of 1968. It was a time of sunshine and glee again. Nature ran in its own cycle; it showed no damage from the Cultural Revolution and, instead, turned the campus into a garden of colorful blossoms. Spring was a lovely season for all and I had particular affection for plants. However, my pitiful state of mind color-blinded me to the sublimity of nature.

On the other hand, the "revolutionaries" were aroused by the balmy weather and unfolded new "revolutionary enthusiasm." The leaders of the Commune believed in the old Chinese saying that "a bumper harvest in the fall depends on timely plowing in the spring." They hoped to improve their endeavors and avoid resting on their laurels by outlining a set of creations. Of course, these creations were to be applied to the nearly one hundred identified criminals. I am not sure whether each of the revolutionaries was serious about "making the revolution." However, I can say that the majority of them enjoyed torturing others. The evil side of humanity had been restrained in the past. But now it was unleashed. By the way, I should make it clear that, among a few thousand campus workers and more than ten thousand students in the university, only a tiny population participated in the torture. These activists were born rascals, disobedient, riotous, cunning, greedy, lazy and lustful for private gains. Now they were provided with a rare opportunity for giving full play to their despicable instincts.

On May 4, 1968, the anniversary of the May 4th Movement and the Festival for Chinese Youth, we were picked up from home and marched to the coal yard.[5] This place was notorious. As the name suggests, it was used for storing coal and run by a group of workers. During the Revolution, it happened that all those who worked there supported the "Old Dowager." These men were heavily-built and their profession with coal required great physical strength. Dealing with us weakly-set scholars hardly did justice to their physique. A slap on the face or a kick to the body was as powerful as that given by Li Kui and Lu Zhishen in The Outlaws of the Marsh.[6] Such experience was personal to us and beyond description. To those "capitalist roaders," who once labored in the coal yard during the first persecution stage of the Revolution, the place sounded horrifying, just like descriptions of Zhazi Cave run by the KMT.[7]

This time we were taken there. Now I noticed that only some of us were singled out and sent to the coal yard. The decision was made by "going through a careful selection" and "regrouping for a desired result," because we were the "chief culprits."[8] Among us were Lu Ping and Peng Peiyun, who were condemned by the first Marxist-Leninist big-character poster. Each of us carried a heavy board of more than ten jin, which hung from the neck and bore our name on it. Ordered to sit on the ground, we fearfully kept quiet. I guessed this session would take a long time, so I asked to go to the restroom. It was a tedious trip and I tottered along with the board dangling about. I managed to get back soon and sat down on the ground as required. I was nervous, trying to figure out what disaster would befall me.

The suspense resembled that when the convict waited for his execution in ancient Chinese society. But finally it was the time. We heard a loud shout, "March them away!" A number of stout men came up, two grabbing each of us. As usual, our arms were twisted back up and two hands pressed hard against the neck from behind. The walking took forever until I saw No. 3 Student Cafeteria. We filed in from the left door and then stood in a line, taking the jet plane posture. There was no platform in the hall, so the host and speakers all stood behind a long table. A sideways glance told me Peng Peiyun was on my right side. But I couldn't see further to know about the positions of the rest of the troop. The routine proceeded as expected. Noisy chants of "down with so-and-so," probably the names of us being substituted one after another, were followed by a worshipful reading of Mao Zedong's quotations, for example, "Making revolution is not something like throwing a party." Then the speeches began. I didn't hear any of the words uttered. Frankly I didn't want to. I was tired of and loathed the nonsense. What I heard was the speaker's expressions to demonstrate loyalty to someone, sheer hoarse and exhausted howls. The repetitions of derision had long benumbed me. What I was most concerned about was that at what time this round of hell would finish. There was no way of checking my watch. I don't remember carrying my watch with me that day. I silently counted one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and eight and kept counting all the way up to three thousand. But the howls did not abate. I started to waver on my long-exercised legs and became dizzy with blurred vision. I had to stop counting. I took a glance and saw Peng Peiyun with a puddle of sweat on the floor in front of her. Whether I had a similar puddle in front of me, however, I didn't notice. The board grew heavier, as the iron wire gashed its way into my skin. I almost lost consciousness.

I had no idea how long had elapsed before I heard another shout, "Get them out!" I knew the affliction was over but not quite in the same way as last time. "When pulling a wooden winnowing spade, the mouse carries the small end, leaving the big end behind." I was then marched out of No. 3 Student Cafeteria, with the "assistance" of at least three students or workers. Hands back up and the neck clenched from behind, I kept my head low and my body bent down. I was dragged to the street. I had no idea how big the crowd waiting there to "enjoy the show" was, certainly bigger than that in the main student cafeteria, I guessed. The hubbub ran on like the mosquito buzz on a summer night. It was another street show but ran faster than last time. With the load on me and the exhaustion I had after taking the jet plane posture, I didn't feel up to walking fast. So the young men beside me hauled me forward as if they were dragging a dead dog. My shoes kept rubbing on the ground. Then the front parts of the shoes were torn and came off. As the socks could not stand the tearing, my toes stuck out after losing their protection. The consequence could be imagined. I had no way knowing whether my toes bled or not. I didn't even feel the pain. Now and then, rubble hit my head, causing no pain at all. I was lost about my existence between reality and dream. Vaguely I remember I was hauled along some road to some place, probably the main student cafeteria. But, a moment later, I was lugged back for no reason. Suddenly I found myself back outside the coal yard.

This extensive torture was an extraordinary violence, much crueler than any of the previous ones. I was left completely exhausted, lying on the ground, feeling dizzy and light-headed, my eyes blurred, ears ringing and heart beating fast. In half consciousness I felt a shocking pain caused by my toes which were bleeding. I collapsed. Now the place at once hushed, the tormentors were gone, and the audience, satisfied with the spectacle, left for dinner somewhere. Only the two men were with me now, Zhang Xueshu and Wang Enyong, as if we were the only humans left in the universe. They were younger and stronger than I, so they propped me up from the ground and helped me back home. The compassion they showed toward me at that moment left an indelible mark in my memory.

[1] The eight-part essay, a prescribed literary writing in ancient China, designed for the imperial civil service examination, known for its rigidity of form and poverty of ideas.

[2]Jia Gui, a subordinate character in the Peking Opera, The Famen Temple, who is a court eunuch, submissive to his superior Liu Jin but tyrannical to his inferiors. In the opera, Liu Jin asks Jia Gui to sit down and talk to him, but the latter would rather stand, subserviently replying, "I, your humble servant, have been accustomed to standing and would not like to be seated." Today Jia Gui is widely referred to one who is lack of self-esteem and confidence.

[3] The saying is a variation of Mao Zedong's quotation.

[4] Chen Yinqque (1890-1969), contemporary Chinese writer, poet and scholar, who was persecuted to death during the Cultural Revolution.

[5] The May 4th Movement, a democratic student movement that took place on May 4, 1919, in Beijing, when college students gathered in Tian'anmen Square and took to the streets, calling for an introduction of science and democracy and the building of a strong China.

[6] Li Kui and Lu Zhishen, two major characters in the Chinese classical fiction The Outlaws of the Marsh by Shi Nai'an, who are burly and rough but also courageous and faithful to their cause of advocating equality and eliminating injustice.

[7] Zhazi Cave, a prison, also named the Sino-American Institution of Cooperation, located on the outskirts of Chongqing and run by the KMT during the third civil war period of 1946-1949.

[8] "Going through a careful selection" and "regrouping for a desired result," two popular phrases used in the area of education in China during the Cultural Revolution.