Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China (10 page)

As graduation approached in the spring of 1959, Gan asked their party branch secretary for permission to marry Lin Zhao. The man immediately rejected the request, adding with contempt that two Rightists could never wed. Soon afterward, the party ordered Gan to report for labor reform in Xinjiang, the desolate province bordering Kazakhstan in China’s far west. He was being punished for his forbidden romance with Lin Zhao, who was being sent to Shanghai on medical parole. They tried to enjoy what was left of their time together, but the summer was fleeting, and in late September, Gan accompanied Lin Zhao to the city’s central train station. He promised to come find her as soon as he could, and he asked her to wait for him. Then they embraced on the platform and wept. She left on an overnight train heading south, and the next morning, Gan began his five-day trip west.

He spent the next twenty years on a military work crew in Xinjiang, digging up grass and other vegetation from the hard soil for use in cough syrup and other medicine. At first he wrote Lin Zhao a letter every week, but after six months she stopped writing back. A soldier returning home to Shanghai checked on her for him and sent a letter saying she was ill and in the hospital. But something about his choice of words led Gan to conclude she was really in prison. For years, he kept photos of her at his bedside, and she sometimes appeared in his dreams after the long days of backbreaking labor. Eventually, Gan gave up hope that he would ever be allowed to leave Xinjiang. He convinced himself that Lin Zhao had been more fortunate and had gotten married. It was not until 1979, after he was rehabilitated and allowed to return to Beijing, that he learned she had been executed.

Upon returning to Beijing, Gan moved on with his life. He married, divorced, and married again, and he had a son. But he told Hu he often found himself thinking about Lin Zhao. Sometimes he wondered how things might have been different if he and Lin Zhao had been allowed to marry. Perhaps, he said, he could have persuaded her to compromise and do what was necessary to survive. Perhaps, if they had settled down and started a family, she would have been more careful. Perhaps she would still be alive today. Once, when his wife was in the other room, Gan even told Hu that he had loved Lin Zhao more than he ever loved his wife.

But it was not until more than a year after Hu met him that Gan revealed to the filmmaker the depth of his devotion. Hu was in Beijing again, staying with his sister, when Gan called and asked if he could help him sell an antique book. Hu said he would drop by and take a look, but Gan insisted on bringing it to him instead. Later, Hu realized that Gan wanted to make sure he was telling the truth about where he was staying, a final precaution before placing his trust in him completely. He must have been reassured by meeting Hu’s sister and seeing her apartment, because then he told Hu his secret: He had a collection of Lin Zhao’s prison writings, nearly 140,000 words of it. Hu was dumbstruck. Was he hearing correctly? Could it be true? The disappointment would be unbearable if it wasn’t, and he didn’t want to get his hopes up. How could the old man have obtained such material, he wondered, and why did he hide it from him for so long? Gan wanted to show it to him, so they went back to his apartment, where he retrieved an old blue Adidas gym bag. From the bag he pulled out a thick stack of paper, bound with string and packed in brown wrapping paper. There were nearly five hundred yellowing pages, each full of writing in black ink, and he was willing to let Hu read it.

Later, Gan explained where the pages came from. After the Cultural Revolution, he had been fortunate enough to receive a letter from an old friend telling him to flee his prison crew and rush back to Beijing because the political winds had shifted and the Rightists were being rehabilitated. His escape and early return to the capital meant he was able to get permission to live and work in Beijing while most Rightists were assigned jobs near the labor camps where they had been held. Gan was given a position in the library of the Institute of Literature, a research center in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. The director of the institute, Xu Juemin, was married to a former classmate of Gan’s, and the couple often invited him to their home for dinner. On one such evening three years after he returned to Beijing, Gan walked in and saw a woman who looked just like Lin Zhao—it was her sister, Peng Lingfan. As it turned out, the institute director happened to be a distant cousin of Lin Zhao’s. The four of them spoke of little but Lin Zhao that evening. Gan thought it was as if fate had intervened to keep her in his life.

A few years later, Peng immigrated to the United States, and she gave the institute director a package of papers, photocopies of a portion of Lin Zhao’s prison writings. When the party was rehabilitating Rightists, Peng had fought to clear her sister’s name posthumously. A court eventually agreed but it didn’t provide any details of her case nor did it disclose the whereabouts of her remains. One afternoon, though, Peng was summoned to an office of the Shanghai public security bureau located on the Bund, the avenue of majestic European buildings on the Huangpu River. The official who met with her didn’t give his name, and instead of asking questions, he offered some answers. He said the city’s public security apparatus had long been divided about how to handle Lin Zhao, and even now, long after her death, the question of her rehabilitation remained a matter of intense dispute. Many people had been punished for trying to protect her, he said, and some had died for it. Her execution, he said, was approved by higher levels, and those who had argued for it continued to hold important posts. The official appeared nervous. “I hear you have an excellent memory, but there is no need to remember our conversation,” Peng later quoted him as saying. Then he gave Peng a bundle of papers. She recognized Lin Zhao’s handwriting immediately.

Gan knew nothing of the documents until long after Peng had moved to the United States. The institute director finally showed them to him and asked for his help. Both he and the director had retired by then, and the director’s eyesight was failing. He couldn’t read Lin Zhao’s handwriting, and hoped Gan might be able to decipher it. Gan took the papers home and kept them hidden. At the time, he was working as a volunteer in the guard booth at his apartment complex. Each morning before breakfast, he sat in the booth studying Lin Zhao’s writing, trying to make out the tiny, faded characters she scribbled so long ago in prison. The material was written in ink, but Lin Zhao indicated in the text that she had written almost all of it in blood first, then copied it after prison authorities gave her pen and paper. Now, slowly, Gan copied her words again, sentence by sentence, page by page. He worked on it at least an hour a day. Sometimes, in the privacy of the guard booth, he cried while reading her words and committing them to paper again. When he finished, the final product totaled 469 pages. And now it was in Hu’s hands. Gan told the filmmaker he could borrow it for three days.

Hu read feverishly deep into the night, driven by the excitement of discovery. Nearly two years had passed since he first heard Lin Zhao’s name and set out to find her prison writings, and he could scarcely believe they were finally in his possession. He had been looking for them for so long, and he had heard so much about Lin Zhao’s literary talent, that it seemed unlikely these pages could meet his expectations. And yet they did. He was mesmerized by the material, blown away by the passion and intensity of her words. He was reading a copy of a copy of a copy, but the writing was so fierce that it made sense to Hu that it had originally been written in blood.

The document was ostensibly a letter to the editors of the
People’s Daily,
the party’s official newspaper, but it was unlike any letter Hu had ever seen. The main text was 438 pages long, and there were eight appendices of material. Lin Zhao appeared to have composed the letter over a period of several months when she was thirty-two; in the first paragraph, she wrote that it was Bastille Day, July 14, but by the time she signed and dated the letter, it was December 5, 1965. The main body was a stream of thoughts, arguments, and accounts of prison experiences presented in a long, meandering text without any clear structure. Some parts read like a diary, other parts like a manifesto, and occasionally it deteriorated into an incoherent rant, but every page was brimming with emotion and defiance.

“The Anti-Rightist Campaign—that miserable reign of terror in 1957 left a mark and a void in the lives of many people, and in the life of this young person,” Lin Zhao wrote near the top of the letter.

Lin Zhao sprinkled the text with allusions to literature and history. When she accused prison authorities of depriving her of pen and paper, she recalled that a czar had used the same tactic in trying to silence the dissident poet Rainis. “But it may not work so well on this young rebel!” she declared, noting that she had already written two other letters in blood to the
People’s Daily.
She often referred to herself in the third person, as “the young rebel,” and described herself as a “freedom fighter” and a “soldier of Christianity.” She wrote that she fully understood the terrible cost of challenging the party’s rule, but that she had no choice, because her conscience demanded that she do so. She accused the party of taking advantage of the idealism of her generation, and asked whether political change could be achieved peacefully rather than through violence. She also described how difficult it was to write in blood, how she would prick her finger and use a hairpin as a pen. Sometimes the blood dried too quickly and it would take her an entire afternoon to write a few words, and sometimes she would bleed too much and it would make her dizzy. Blood was a recurring image throughout the letter.

Lin Zhao wrote of the abuse she suffered in prison, of being beaten and tortured, of her fear of sexual assault, of guards who handcuffed her in painful positions and force-fed her through her nostrils. When she could not bear the torment, she wrote, she tried to commit suicide by swallowing soap or cutting her wrist with glass. She said she struggled to retain her sanity in the face of such agony.

At times, Lin Zhao’s writing grew so muddled and confused that Hu wondered if she had indeed suffered a mental breakdown. But for every rambling passage, there were others that were as clear and articulate as anything he had ever read. Perhaps the sharpest writing appeared in the supplemental material appended to the letter: four pieces of poetry, one of which was a satire of a well-known poem by Mao; three short essays; a statement by Lin Zhao upon her conviction in 1965; and an annotated copy of her December 1964 indictment. Lin Zhao copied the indictment word for word and embedded her own comments in the text. Hu found it striking not only because it was the first detailed account of Lin Zhao’s alleged crimes he had seen but also because her remarks were so unyieldingly defiant and scornful.