Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China (9 page)

When the famine struck, those who had been punished as Rightists witnessed it up close. There were serious food shortages in the cities, but conditions were most severe in the countryside, where many of them had been sent for reeducation through labor. They told Hu how the old and the young died first, how the strong survived by eating bark, insects, and even dirt, how people in the most desperate parts of the country resorted to cannibalism. These were the most difficult interviews Hu had done yet, and he often teared up behind the camera as he recorded the stories. Huang Zhen, a Rightist and veteran of the Korean War who had befriended Lin Zhao in Suzhou, told Hu of his duties at a labor camp in a once-bountiful region not far from the Yangtze:

As the famine spread, only one senior party official mustered the courage to point out the obvious. Peng Dehuai, the minister of defense and a hero of both the Revolution and the Korean War, sent a private letter to Mao that criticized the Great Leap Forward and described the dire conditions he had seen on a recent tour of the countryside near his hometown. Mao responded by distributing the letter at a party plenum in July 1959 and launching a vehement attack against Peng as a Rightist who was plotting against the party. It was a ridiculous charge, but in an effective bit of political theater, Mao threatened to quit and lead the peasants in a new revolution against the government if other party leaders didn’t back him. The showdown was over almost as soon as it began. Never again would a member of the Politburo dare to openly challenge the Chairman. Peng was humiliated and stripped of power, and Mao launched another purge of party ranks that eclipsed the Anti-Rightist Campaign, with as many as six million people punished. To prove that Peng was wrong, the party accelerated the Great Leap Forward instead of slowing it down, and millions more across the nation died of hunger.

Lin Zhao had been skeptical of the Leap from the start. The effort to kill mosquitoes that she mocked as “insanity” was one of the early phases of the campaign. But if she laughed at the party’s crusade against the “Four Pests”—rats, sparrows, and flies were also targeted—she was angered by the reports of mass starvation in the countryside that followed, and by what she saw as the stubborn refusal of party officials to do anything about it. This was what moved her to risk imprisonment and publish the underground magazine with the physics students in Gansu Province, where starvation was especially widespread. “We were certain we would be punished for doing it,” one of the students, Gu Yan, told Hu. “But we felt we had to do it. Somebody had to stand up. If nobody dared to speak out, there would be no hope for the nation.”

As Hu located and interviewed people involved in the magazine, he discovered that Lin Zhao and her friends also used the mimeograph machine to print an open letter to party leaders criticizing the Great Leap Forward and protesting Peng Dehuai’s ouster. But none of the people he interviewed had copies of the letter or of the magazine. The materials had all been seized by the police when Lin Zhao and the others were arrested.

Hu was always looking for examples of Lin Zhao’s writing. He wanted to hear her describe in her own words what she had been through, and he asked everyone he interviewed if they had saved any letters, essays, or poems, anything that might offer some insight into her thoughts at the time. Most said they had destroyed everything like that to prevent the authorities from using it against them. But occasionally he would come across an old letter, or a poem scribbled on the back of a photograph. Several people told Hu that Lin Zhao routinely made copies of writing that she considered important, and gave them to friends for safekeeping. It was as if she knew that her words were in danger of being lost, and that some day, someone might try to recover them. Before her arrest, for example, Lin Zhao asked a university dean she respected to hold a stack of her writing for safekeeping. The dean, however, burned the collection during the Cultural Revolution.

Hu learned that Lin Zhao was released from prison on medical parole for several months in 1962, and that during that time she wrote a series of political essays and letters, including one to the president of Peking University. After finishing each piece, she sent a copy to the police, and another copy to the prison authorities. But she also gave a copy to an old classmate, someone who was not politically active and who escaped scrutiny by the party. Hu tracked down the classmate, and made arrangements to go see her. But before he could make the trip, he received a phone call from her son. The woman had passed away. Hu asked the man if his mother had said anything about Lin Zhao before her death, or if she had perhaps left a package for him. The man said he would check, but a few days later he called back and said he had found nothing.

Such disappointments were common in the course of Hu’s research. But he took heart that Lin Zhao had been thinking ahead and trying to hide copies of her writing. He was sure that there was a stash out there somewhere, just waiting to be discovered, and he was determined to find it. He was less certain about how he might obtain her prison writings, the material she had penned with her blood. But he was confident that he would find those, too. He had already unearthed so much of the buried past, and he had come to believe that the party could not keep such things hidden forever.

H
U OFTEN WENT
back to see the people he interviewed. At first he was being thorough, keeping in touch in case they had come across new material or located someone else for him to talk to. But then he found himself visiting them just for the company. He worked alone on the documentary for the most part. He had no colleagues, and other than his sister and a handful of others, he had no one to talk to about the film. Most of his friends weren’t interested and couldn’t understand his obsession with a woman long since dead. But the old Rightists he interviewed, men and women in their sixties and seventies, appreciated what he was doing. They shared his commitment to documenting Lin Zhao’s life, and they recognized the importance of recording this piece of history that they had lived through. Hu felt comfortable around them, and they welcomed him into their lives, too, for they understood loneliness.

One of the people Hu befriended was a retired librarian in Beijing named Gan Cui. He was an unassuming man in his late sixties, with thinning white hair, piercing dark eyes, and a smoker’s stained teeth. As a Rightist, he had spent much of his life doing hard labor in the desert province of Xinjiang, and the experience left him with a roughness that never completely disappeared, even after he was rehabilitated and sent to work at a literary research institute in Beijing. He dressed plainly, sometimes carelessly, with little regard for fashion; a typical outfit might include a ragged sweatshirt and green camouflage trousers, or a jacket with only the top buttons fastened. When they first arranged to meet, Hu walked by Gan twice without spotting him, because he looked more like an aging roughneck than a literary scholar. But Gan knew how to tell a story, and Hu went to see him whenever he made the trip to Beijing. He enjoyed sitting in Gan’s cramped apartment, sharing a pot of tea with the old man as his two pet macaws chirped in Chinese, “Hello, miss! Hello, miss!” And every time Hu visited, Gan shared a little more of his past.

As a young man, Gan was a journalism student at People’s University, a new school established by the party near Beida to train officials after the Revolution. During the Hundred Flowers Movement, he admired those who spoke out about the party’s shortcomings, but was shrewd enough never to make any speeches or put up any posters himself. His record was spotless, and he might have made it through the Anti-Rightist Campaign unscathed were it not for an incident at the start of the crackdown. At the time, the most prominent critic of the party on campus was a young woman in the law department named Lin Xiling. In a series of bold speeches at Beida, she rebuked the party as undemocratic, bolstering her arguments with details obtained from a boyfriend who worked for a senior party official. She described the party’s suppression of independent thinking as Stalinism, at a time when Stalin was still considered a hero, and she even challenged Mao himself. “Chairman Mao’s statements aren’t golden rules. Why can’t they be opposed?” she asked. Such daring won her a following on campuses across the country, but it also made her a target. When the Anti-Rightist Campaign began, party officials prepared an ambush. As an officer of the campus student association, Gan was told to invite Lin Xiling to a public debate but to make sure it turned into a denunciation session. He did as he was told. The first seven speakers he called followed the party’s script, delivering speeches condemning her. Then Lin asked if she had a right to speak. Without thinking, Gan said yes and gave her the floor. She was only able to say a few words before party loyalists shouted her down and seized the microphone from her. In the heat of the moment, Gan scolded the students who had disrupted his meeting: “Does it make sense to let only you speak but not to let her?” The outburst would cost him twenty-two years of his life. When the university failed to find enough Rightists to meet the party’s quota, it accused Gan of “supporting and sympathizing with Lin Xiling” and added him to the list.

At first he received the lightest possible sentence, a form of probation that allowed him to stay in school. He was told to report for work at the journalism department’s reference library, and it was there that he met Lin Zhao. She was twenty-six then, and had been sent to work in the library after her stint at the orchard at Beida. They were the only ones working in the library, and their job was to read through and catalogue its collection of old newspapers. But their supervisor was a kindly woman, and she let them have access to the library’s vast collection of old books. Gan found a rare block-printed edition of
The Plum in the Golden Vase,
the famed Ming Dynasty erotic novel, and spent most of his time studying that. Lin Zhao preferred more high-brow fare, novels from the Qing Dynasty written in classical Chinese. When she saw what Gan was reading, she laughed, and found another book for him: a translation of
The Decameron,
the collection of bawdy novellas by the fourteenth-century Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio.

As Rightists, they were both outcasts on campus, and naturally, they became friends. When Lin Zhao came down with tuberculosis in the winter and stopped coming to work, Gan visited her daily and tried to nurse her back to health. He moved a stove into her cold dorm room and made sure she had enough coal and firewood, and he brought her breakfast and lunch. When she lost her appetite for the dull fare from the cafeteria, he woke every morning at five to take a bus to a downtown hotel so he could bring her back a bowl of its tasty Cantonese porridge. As Lin Zhao began to recover, party officials noticed how much time the two spent together, and summoned Gan to a meeting, where he was warned that they were not permitted to date. Annoyed, he returned to Lin Zhao’s room and told her of the party’s latest commandment. She laughed, and asked if he was afraid. He said no, and she said, “Let’s go for a stroll.” And then the two began walking on campus holding hands, openly defying the party.

“It wasn’t that we developed what you would call a romantic relationship on our own,” Gan explained to Hu. “It was the organization that kept putting pressure on us about it…. The more they tried to prevent us from dating, with her personality and my personality, the more we dated, just to show them.”

Gan and Lin Zhao often went on long evening walks together, and on Saturday nights they might go dancing or take in a play if they could get free tickets. He learned to play the
erhu,
a classical Chinese string instrument, and serenaded her under the window of her second-floor dorm room. She put on a colorful
qipao,
a body-hugging traditional dress, when everyone else was wearing drab Mao suits, and took him to the restaurant of an expensive hotel. They ordered a single dish, the cheapest, fish head braised in soy sauce. As a child, Lin Zhao had attended a school run by Christian missionaries, and now she started going to church again, bringing Gan along. He watched in awe as she practiced English with the foreign diplomats who attended the service; like most other students, the only foreign language Gan could speak was Russian.

The two of them often talked about literature, and she showed him what she was writing, plays and long poems that contained thinly veiled criticisms of the party’s rule. Gan admired her writing; he could see she was more talented than he. But he urged her to be more careful and more realistic, arguing that it was useless to challenge the party. He said she was like an egg trying to smash a rock, adding that even if she had an army of a hundred thousand troops, the party could still crush her. But Lin Zhao refused to give in. She said it might take thousands, or tens of thousands, or even millions of eggs, but the rock could be broken. With steady effort and time, the political system could be changed. Even dripping water, she said, could split a stone.