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In Search of My Homeland: A Memoir of a Chinese Labour Camp
by Gao Er Tai
Reviewed by Bill Purves
HarperCollins has brought out a translation of excerpts from Gao Er Tai's Xunzhao Jiayuan under the title In Search of My Homeland: A Memoir of a Chinese Labour Camp. Hua Cheng in Guangzhou published the full work in 2004 (in simplified characters, alas), but these new translations are a treat for English-speaking readers.
Gao is a painter and calligrapher who was born in 1935 at the apex of China's modernization. He lived through the subsequent thirty years of regression and suffered almost relentless persecution throughout the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution before finally escaping to the United States in 1993. One of his essays published in a fine arts magazine led to his condemnation in the anti-rightists campaign soon after his graduation from university in 1955. He was exiled for reform through labour to what was in effect a death camp in the salt flats of Gansu province. His talent saved him at death's door when he was reassigned to paint patriotic murals for an exhibition, but all together he spent 21 years under one form or another of detention, exclusion and surveillance. The last straw was added with the Tiananmen protests of 1989, where he wasn't involved at all, but was rounded up anyway as one of the "usual suspects" and held without charge for another year. He fled to Hong Kong soon after and acquired refugee status in the US with the help of Salman Rushdie's Cities of Refuge program for persecuted writers.
So what's new? Haven't we had enough of scar literature from prison and labour camp survivors? What's new is that Gao recounts his experience from the perspective of an artist. He tells us little of his own travails. His account focuses not on the deadly labour, the beatings, the starvation, but on the beauty of the punishing desert and on the morality of his jailors and fellow prisoners. He recounts 21 years of penal life from an aesthetic and ethical perspective.
So don't start Gao's account expecting the usual linear description of years of abuse. Enjoy instead the rather disjointed impressions of an intellectual, a philosopher and an artist concerning Chinese society during the terrible period from 1955 to 1978. The publisher seems to have selected Gao's prison years as the most marketable section of his memoirs for this volume, but let's hope that a full translation of the artist's recollections will appear in English sooner rather than later.
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Bill Purves is a Hong Kong-based writer. He is the author of several books, including A Sea of Green: A Voyage Around the World of Ocean Shipping and China on the Lam: On Foot Across the People's Republic.
by Gao Er Tai
Reviewed by Bill Purves
HarperCollins has brought out a translation of excerpts from Gao Er Tai's Xunzhao Jiayuan under the title In Search of My Homeland: A Memoir of a Chinese Labour Camp. Hua Cheng in Guangzhou published the full work in 2004 (in simplified characters, alas), but these new translations are a treat for English-speaking readers.
Gao is a painter and calligrapher who was born in 1935 at the apex of China's modernization. He lived through the subsequent thirty years of regression and suffered almost relentless persecution throughout the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution before finally escaping to the United States in 1993. One of his essays published in a fine arts magazine led to his condemnation in the anti-rightists campaign soon after his graduation from university in 1955. He was exiled for reform through labour to what was in effect a death camp in the salt flats of Gansu province. His talent saved him at death's door when he was reassigned to paint patriotic murals for an exhibition, but all together he spent 21 years under one form or another of detention, exclusion and surveillance. The last straw was added with the Tiananmen protests of 1989, where he wasn't involved at all, but was rounded up anyway as one of the "usual suspects" and held without charge for another year. He fled to Hong Kong soon after and acquired refugee status in the US with the help of Salman Rushdie's Cities of Refuge program for persecuted writers.
So what's new? Haven't we had enough of scar literature from prison and labour camp survivors? What's new is that Gao recounts his experience from the perspective of an artist. He tells us little of his own travails. His account focuses not on the deadly labour, the beatings, the starvation, but on the beauty of the punishing desert and on the morality of his jailors and fellow prisoners. He recounts 21 years of penal life from an aesthetic and ethical perspective.
- The Cultural Revolution changed not only the daily lives of the people at the Institute but also the way they looked and acted. Overnight those gentle, reserved people turned into fierce beasts and violently leaped and hollered, suddenly sang at the tops of their voices, suddenly burst into tears, slapped themselves, rose at midnight and yelled "Long Life," or banged gongs and drums to disseminate the thoughts of the "Great Man". In the whole of Mogao Caves area, only those icons of Buddha and bodhisattvas maintained their dignity and self-possession.
So don't start Gao's account expecting the usual linear description of years of abuse. Enjoy instead the rather disjointed impressions of an intellectual, a philosopher and an artist concerning Chinese society during the terrible period from 1955 to 1978. The publisher seems to have selected Gao's prison years as the most marketable section of his memoirs for this volume, but let's hope that a full translation of the artist's recollections will appear in English sooner rather than later.
--
Bill Purves is a Hong Kong-based writer. He is the author of several books, including A Sea of Green: A Voyage Around the World of Ocean Shipping and China on the Lam: On Foot Across the People's Republic.
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