Original subtitles

Well, I guess I'll start from the beginning.

It was just before liberation, and colleges in Lanzhou were accepting students.

I had no trouble getting into the Lanzhou University department of foreign languages

as an English major because I'd done well in English classes

All through high school, I'd dreamed of going to college.

I'd always been a good student,

and I figured that if I went to college,

I could use that knowledge to make a contribution to society.

So I took the entrance exam, passed and was accepted to Lanzhou University.

Then on August 26, 1949, Lanzhou was liberated.

When the PLA troops entered the city, we all turned out to greet them.

Not long after that, I went to visit Lanzhou University with some friends.

The PLA was already there, passing out revolutionary songbooks

with songs like You are a Beacon and The East is Red.

It didn't take us long to learn the songs by heart.

We felt so liberated, like the skies were blue again and everything had changed.

Suddenly, going to college seemed pointless and boring.

Joining the Revolution seemed the way to go,

so I gave up on college.

At the time, the Gansu Daily was recruiting staff.

I was a decent writer in high school,

and the journalists and editors at the Gansu Daily were said to be the best.

I figured I'd better throw myself into the Revolution and start serving the people,

so I gave up on college and applied for a job at the paper instead.

The hiring process was simple.

All they wanted was a brief background statement.

Of course, at seventeen, I didn't have much background to write about.

I wrote about my family, why I wanted the job and my hopes for the Revolution.

They hired me straight away, and that was the start of my revolutionary career.

I remember that I wore a cheongsam to the interview,

but when I got hired, they issued me a grey uniform, same as everyone else.

Back then, uniforms came with the job.

I felt so proud wearing that uniform, like a real revolutionary.

In May of 1957, I got to attend the national agricultural exhibition in Beijing.

all the papers sent representatives. I was chosen to represent the Gansu Farm Report,

and was sent to Beijing with a deputy director from the Gansu Daily.

At the time, there weren't many opportunities to go to Beijing,

much less attend a big agricultural exhibition.

I felt very lucky to be chosen.

No one else from the paper got to go.

I'd been doing good work for the second section,

so it was a kind of reward, an encouragement of sorts.

On May 1, the papers announced a new directive from the Central Committee.

That was the start of the anti- rightist rectification campaign.

At the time, none of us gave it much thought. We were too busy sightseeing and visiting other people.

After all, it was my first time in Beijing and I went to see all the famous sights with a friend.

the Forbidden City and the Summer Palace, etcetera.

I also met up with some of my old classmates from Lanzhou.

I remember being surprised to see lychees in the markets.

You couldn't buy them in Lanzhou, but in Beijing, they were everywhere.

Back then, lychees only cost 5 or 6 jiao (6 cents) a pound.

Right when we left Beijing,

The People's Daily published a major anti-rightist editorial, Why is This Happening,

but again, I didn't pay it much mind. I certainly didn't think it would affect me.

After that, I returned to my post in Lanzhou.

But that editorial had signaled the start of the anti-rightist struggle to come.

At that point, the Party was still mobilizing and soliciting viewpoints.

I was so naive back then. Since Party leaders were soliciting opinions,

and I considered myself an activist, I wrote some big character posters

and spoke out against the small minority of cadres who had erred.

I really didn't give it much thought.

While I was in Beijing, my husband Wang Jingchao had written several essays,

at the request of the leadership, of course.

At the time, Chairman Mao was calling for The People's Daily to publish more essays,

to change to tenor of the paper.

In those days, The Cultural Reporter was in the vanguard,

and The People's Daily was lagging behind.

When the center called for essays, of course, Gansu Daily followed suit.

They mobilized some staffers,

the most talented and progressive ones,

to write essays about the new campaign.

After that, my husband wrote his first essay, "A Brief Critique of Bureaucracy".

It created quite a sensation within the paper.

That was about the time Chairman Mao gave his famous speech

on contradictions among the people on Feb.,

and later, came out against bureaucratic excess.

"Whether in culture or in academic discourse, let a hundred schools of thought contend,

a hundred flowers bloom. Don't stifle the people with bureaucracy.'

In his essay, my husband was just responding to Chairman Mao's call.

It was an incisive essay, very frank,

a powerfully worded critique.

He felt bureaucracy was stifling the people,

and that bureaucrats were "arrogant with position, alienated from talent.'

That one really hit a nerve, and caused quite a stir.

A lot of people expressed their support.

After that, he wrote his second essay.

I think it was called something like. "On Thrice-Estranged Cadres".

It was about cadres estranged from the Party, the Leadership and the Masses.

He pointed out that some cadres were unwilling to accept constructive criticism.

Of course, this essay didn't endear him to the leadership.

Certain cadres and their toadies began to distance themselves from Jingchao,

and the masses followed suit.

By this point, the leaders were already unhappy with my husband.

They'd branded his writings "poisonous weeds", but he was still unaware of this.

Then he wrote his third essay.

I think it was called "On Conflicted Morale"

That third essay was never published.

At the time, Wang Jingchao was one of Gansu Daily's leading writers.

Originally, the leadership thought quite highly of him and his writing.

He had studied at Xian's Northwest University.

When Xian was liberated, he joined up with a revolutionary unit from Gansu,

and marched with them into Lanzhou.

In September of 1949, he helped establish Gansu Daily

with a group of other alumnae from Northwest University.

He was part of this core group, one of their best writers.

Whenever there was an important interview, he was the one they sent.

But during the anti-rightist struggle, his third essay was branded subversive.

At the time, I was down in Wushan conducting interviews.

I had no idea that an anti-rightist struggle had begun at the paper,

or that I'd become caught up in it.

When I was doing interviews out there My boss sent a letter telling me

to come back right away and take part in the struggle.

While I was in Wushan, I'd been writing regularly to my husband.

It was during the Hundred Flowers movement, and I remember asking

him in a letter whether we harbored any rightist tendencies ourselves.

Back then, we were still soul searching, questioning, trying to improve ourselves.

Then I got that letter telling me to come back and join the struggle.

never imagined how it would affect my life.

I took the train back to Lanzhou.

I got home at about midnight, just as my husband was getting ready for bed.

I just washed up and prepared to go to bed.

It wasn't until after we went to bed that he calmly told me...

There was an anti-government "little black clique" at Gansu Daily,

and he was the accused ringleader! I was absolutely shocked.

How could anyone even think that we were anti-Party or anti-Socialist,

much less part of some so-called "little black clique"?

Supposedly there were 6 or 7 members.

He told me they'd been struggling against him for ten days, day and night.

These were huge struggle sessions, involving up to two hundred people.

At that time, there were about 100 people in the editorial department,

and another 100 in other departments.

all those people struggling against him, and this had been going on for days!

As if he were some evil mastermind.

We tried to imagine how anyone could think him capable of such a thing.

At the time, I never imagined I'd eventually be branded a rightist too.

I just couldn't believe it.

I couldn't believe he'd become the target of such political persecution.

That night, we hardly slept a wink. He told me all about the struggle sessions.

The next morning, we both went to work as usual.

His office was in the cultural section, and I was with the Gansu Farm Report.

I still remember the socialist labor competition chart hanging above my desk,

with all the red flags our team had earned.

When I got back, my colleagues handed off some work but didn't really speak to me.

That afternoon, while I was working on the second floor,

my husband was in a struggle session on the third.

Though I wasn't allowed to attend, I could hear them shouting at him,

trying to get him to confess.

"Why do you have such deep hatred towards the party and society?" He couldn't explain.

People cursed him, saying "You should go meet God with your granite head."

When they shouted that he was full of shit, he dared to shout back that they were full of shit.

He didn't admit that he was against the party and socialism.

But in a situation like that..

. you couldn't get a word in edgewise. You couldn't even defend yourself.

Struggle sessions were supposed to be about dialogue, but the dialogue was one-sided.

It went on like that for about a week.

Then came the big character posters about me.

They wanted me to make a clear class distinction and denounce my husband.

They wrote things like, "Why do you two always speak and march in lock step?"

They wanted me to make a clear class distinction, but how could I?

In my heart, I knew he was innocent. How could I denounce my own husband?

A week later, they started holding struggle sessions against me.

I need to use the bathroom.

Shall we continue?

A week later, the struggle sessions started. I was considered a "minor rightist".

But from the day I joined the revolution, I'd always toed the party line.

Whatever the leaders said to do, I did.

I was conscientious and obedient, and worked hard at my job.

So the sessions against me were small, never more than 20 people,

and most of those were colleagues.

But already, I'd been branded a rightist.

I had to stand while everyone else sat, just stand there with my hands at my side.

I had to listen to every criticism, every slur.

It was a very painful experience.

I wanted to die of shame! Hadn't I forsaken college for the Revolution?

Hadn't I served the Revolution well?

From 1949 to 1957, I'd earned nothing but praise for my work.

How could I possibly be anti-Party? Standing up there, I just wanted to die.

Suddenly I was a class enemy!

Someone to criticize and denounce.

They even accused me of collaborating on Jingchao's essays.

asked how that was possible, since I was in Beijing at the time.

Then someone said we must have talked about it at home,

plotted out beforehand what we were going to say.

They wanted me to confess our secrets, tell them everything we talked about at home.

But there weren't any secrets to confess.

Our whole union

was based on a shared love of Socialism and the Party.

We were both outstanding at our jobs.

He'd dropped out of college to join the Revolution,

and I'd sacrificed my college dreams..

In those days, not just anyone could get into Lanzhou University.

A lot of my classmates didn't get in. I was one of the few who did,

but I gave it all up for the Revolution. I'd devoted my life to the Party!

And now to be branded a class enemy? It was more than I could bear.

How could I face anyone? Better to die than go on living like that.

But I wasn't allowed to talk during those struggle meetings.

I couldn't even.

.couldn't even try to defend myself.

I had to listen as they twisted the facts

into all sorts of horrible accusations.

When I got home that night, I was so upset.

I told Jingchao about the struggle session.

He'd been going through it for weeks, so he knew exactly how it felt.

I remember that he hugged me and said:

"How could they struggle against my little Jiao Jiao, my little sweetheart?"

We were still quite young then.

He had all sorts of pet names for me, but he'd never called me that before.

It was only after the struggle sessions began that he started calling me that.

Of course, he could say that at home, but in the cruel world, he was powerless.

He couldn't speak out.

How could he comfort me? There was nothing he could say.

At the time, I figured I was better of dead.

Life was just too hard.

The only thing that stopped me from suicide was the thought that it was too selfish.

If I died, Jingchao would be left alone.

We already had two small children. I couldn't leave him to raise them all alone.

What would happen to my children if I died? What would they do without a mother?

I couldn't leave them without a mother.

So whenever I felt like dying, I thought of my husband and children.

I couldn't leave my husband and children to face all that hardship alone.

After that came more struggle sessions.

They usually took place in the afternoon. In the mornings, I sat in the office

one morning in the office,

after one of those interrogations, I decided that I did want to die.

"Forget it, life's too painful," I thought, "I'd rather die.'

In the valley of death, maybe all the pain would disappear.

I didn't even stop to think about my family. I just couldn't stand the pain.

So I left the office and went to a pharmacy to buy some sleeping pills.

Because I'd never had insomnia,

I didn't even know what pills to buy.

When the pharmacist asked how many I needed,

I must have told him ten or twenty times the normal dosage.

Then I went straight home and swallowed all the pills.

I took the pills and lay down.

Leaving the office, I had run into my youngest son in the nursery.

I remember him crying out for his mama, but I just ignored him.

I didn't care about anything anymore, not even my own son.

In my pain, I'd made up my mind. I wanted to die.

So I went home, swallowed all all those pills and lay down.

When I didn't come back to the office, my colleagues started to get worried.

They came knocking at my dormitory,

wanting to know why I'd left the office.

Then they saw the empty packet of pills and asked me what had been in it.

You see, there was already some concern that people might attempt suicide.

I told them it was nothing, so they made me go back to the office.

I didn't want to go, but they forced me.

As it turns out, the pills didn't work.

They just made me drowsy for a few days, then it passed.

Nobody ever found out what I'd done.

Because Jingchao was considered a major rightist,

his struggle sessions were expanded to include the whole media syndicate.

At that time, the syndicate included both print and broadcast media.

They started holding big sessions in an auditorium.

At that time

my name hadn't appeared in print.

So at meetings, I tried to stay in the back where I wouldn't attract too much attention.

Starting with Jingchao, they called the major rightists up onstage, one by one.

Then they made them stand on stools and strike various poses.

That's what they called it, "striking a pose"

After that, someone started shouting:

"Wang Jingchao's wife should be up there!"

So I got dragged from my inconspicuous corner

and made to stand onstage with the others.

And strike a pose, of course.

The sessions could become very heated.

But the worst that happened to me was that I got called up front and made to pose.

There were three or four other sessions like that.

Some involved the whole syndicate, others just the newspaper staffers.

Of course, Jingchao was always painted as the mastermind of the "black clique".

They tried to get him to confess to some dark plot, some secret scheme.

After that, things began to escalate.

I remember after one session,

he'd left the office before me,

I came home to the smell of pesticide.

Our dorm was infested with bedbugs,

so we'd gotten a bottle of 66 Powder" to kill them.

I remember coming home to find the bottle missing from under the bed,

and the whole house reeking of pesticide. I was so scared he'd taken it.

I said, "You took it, didn't you?"

I kept crying and asking, "You took it, didn't you? You took it."

He admitted that he'd thought of taking it, but then decided not to.

He said he was under a lot of pressure to confess to an anti-government plot.

But how could he confess, when the charges were fabricated to begin with?

When they saw he wouldn't confess, the struggle session turned violent.

That's when he started feeling like maybe he'd be better of dead.

That's when he thought of suicide.

When I realized he hadn't taken the poison after all,

I can't tell you how relieved I was.

That night, we didn't eat a bite, didn't even turn the lights on.

We just lay in bed together.

Jingchao cried on my shoulder.

In our whole seven or eight years of marriage,

he'd never cried in front of me.

It was the only time I ever saw him cry.

He told me he wouldn't confess to a plot that didn't exist.

The "black clique" was a fabrication, and the "secret plot" even more so.

Both of us were so miserable then.

We really felt like we'd be better off dead,

but we couldn't bear to leave each other

to face the pain alone.

In the midst of all that hardship, our love seemed sweeter than ever.

It was sweeter than anything we'd ever known.

During that time, our love seemed to blossom

into something very beautiful.

It was all the more precious because it belonged only to us.

It was something no one else could share,

something only we could understand.

That night was so bittersweet,

a moment of joy in the midst of our sorrow.

Eventually, the anti-rightist struggle ended just the way the leaders had intended.

The "black clique", of course,

was found to be guilty, and the "membership roster" made public.

Innocent or not, you had to confess.

Everyone in the black clique had to have signed confessions in their dossiers.

Like it or not, you had to sign. You had no choice.

Once you signed, your fate was sealed.

Finally, in late April of 1958, our sentences were handed down.

Of the 7 or 8 rightists at Gansu Daily,

one was a man named Chen Shuren.

He didn't live in the dormitory with us.

He was already dead when they pronounced him guilty.

I heard he committed suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pills.

They called that proof of guilt, and said he killed himself to escape punishment.

One day, when he didn't show up for a struggle session, they went to his house.

That's how his family found out that he had killed himself.

But the struggle sessions didn't end, even after you were dead.

They'd just claim you killed yourself to escape justice.

Anyway, seven or eight of us at the paper were sentenced as rightists.

They kept adding people to the list.

Five were said to belong to the black clique.

Most of them I'd never even talked to,

but somehow my name got dragged into it.

Because I was "Wang Jingchao's stinking wife",

I guess that made me part of the gang.

When the verdicts were handed down,

my husband was named as Gansu Daily's biggest rightist.

They said he had a vile attitude because he'd dared to curse back at his accusers

That was proof enough, I guess.

He was branded an ultra- rightist, fired from his job

and sentenced to Jiabiangou labor camp in Jiuquan.

I was also accused of having a bad attitude,

but my punishment was less severe.

I was demoted five pay grades,

from grade 23 down to grade 18.

Because we had two children then,

one in kindergarten and one in nursery school,

Jingchao asked his boss if I could serve my sentence in Lanzhou,

so he could look after the children.

My mother had been ill for a few years, and she relied on us to support her.

With her health problems, she couldn't possibly

look after the children on her own.

Jingchao's boss refused his request,

but said there were other options.

Jingchao could go back to his hometown and work,

or find some other way to support himself.

He didn't have to go to the Jiabiangou labor camp. But the advantage of labor reform

was that he could rid himself of the rightist label sooner rather than later,

and be accepted back into society.

We were so naive back then.

We really believed that the sooner we were politically rehabilitated, the better.

Jingchao hadn't been back to his hometown in years.

To go back now would be a loss of face,

and might set his political rehabilitation back indefinitely.

That's how simple we were. If I'd known how it would end,

I'd have never let him go to that camp..

. it was a death sentence.

But we naively believed in the Party, and all its promises of rehabilitation.

So on the 28th or 29th of April,

we boarded a train together,

a train that would take us to our separate labor camps.

We didn't arrive in Jiuquan until two or three in the afternoon the next day

When we were close to Jiuquan, he had an idea. He said,

"Let's talk to the cadre who took us to the personnel department."

He first thought of going to Anxi to check on me. Mainly because he was worried about me.

In my twenties, I was very thin and frail.

The girls at the paper used to tease me that a strong wind could blow me over.

Although my family wasn't wealthy, we had always had enough to eat.

And after joining the Revolution, of course, I had everything I needed.

Unlike Jingchao, I'd never had to weather any hardships.

Therefore, he is very worried about me. He said he wants to send me to Anxi Mountain.

After sending me to Anxi, he will return to Jiuquan and then go to Jiabiangou (Dry Gulch).

But the cadre wouldn't allow it.

Since Jingchao had lost his job and couldn't afford the extra train fare,

So he didn't make it. He got off the train in Jiuquan.

There were five or six other people traveling with us,

They were the only rightists in their families.

Because we were the only couple, I think the others felt sorry for us.

When we got to the station, they helped Jingchao unload all of his bags and boxes,

then shook his hand goodbye.

I was the last to say goodbye.

Then we left him at the station, and continued on our journey.

When I saw him standing all alone on that platform, my heart just..

. .he looked so sad and pale. He couldn't even wave goodbye.

I was so distraught, because I knew

it might be a very long time before we saw each other again.

But I think at that moment..

.he was more afraid for me than for himself.

I was his world, his heaven, his sun.

And now suddenly, that sun had gone away.

I think he was afraid of losing me forever.

I think he was afraid that if he lost me, he'd fall into the abyss.

As for me..

.I felt like I'd been struck by lightning.

The future seemed bleak.

How would I ever get through this alone?

At least during all those struggle sessions in Lanzhou,

we had our sweet whispers,

things the outside world wouldn't allow us to say.

But now that we were far apart,

who could I confide in?

Who could I pour my troubles out to?

It seemed like we'd hit rock bottom.

We'd lost our freedom,

even lost the right to confide in the people we loved.

That's.. that's what I remember thinking

as we left him and continued on to our camp in Anxi.

The No. 10 Collective Farm was about a dozen miles from Anxi township,

and it wasn't connected by rail.

We had a lot of luggage, so we stayed for a while at a local inn.

You know that saying: "Weep, all ye who travel beyond the Jiayu Pass"?

We'd traveled far beyond it, but I was still naive enough to think it didn't apply to me.

I figured this place was my ticket out of being a rightist.

If I worked hard, in a few years the Party would rehabilitate me,

and I'd be welcomed back into the arms of the masses.

Then I could make a new start.

I never imagined what hardships lay ahead.

A few days later, we loaded all of our luggage and bags onto a pull tractor.

It was a long trip, twelve miles, so we set out right after breakfast.

The farm seemed nice. They even held a little welcoming ceremony.

It was a brand new collective, started by

demobilized soldiers and local farmers.

I remember they welcomed us as 'our comrades who have erred"

We were all a bit surprised to hear that.

After we were branded class enemies, most people refused to call us "comrade".

That was one of the most painful things for me, not being called "comrade" anymore.

So I was very moved to hear the camp director welcome us as "comrades".

He said that as long as we worked to the best of our ability,

we would be treated the same as everyone else, no distinctions.

I remember thinking I had heard him wrong.

Because back in Lanzhou, we were no longer comrades, but class enemies.

But I guess the anti-rightist struggle hadn't reached this far yet.

To the people here, we were just

comrades who had made some mistakes.

After that, everyone called us "comrade".

For two or three years.

about two years, I guess..

.we really did work hard.

That's how society worked back then.

If you made a political mistake, if you offended the Party in some way,

you could still work hard and try to reform yourself.

You figured a little hard work would do you good, only make you stronger.

Those first few years, we always ate our fill. Hunger wasn't a problem yet.

And if a rightist had special skills,

say in teaching or accounting, the leaders always made an effort

to get them transferred to a job where they could utilize their skills.

Although the work was physically tiring,

we didn't have to deal with too much political discrimination.

All in all, I spent two fairly happy years on that farm.

In late summer of 1959, as part of the National Day celebrations,

several of the rightists on our farm were rehabilitated.

That was a glimmer of hope for all of us.

But in late 1959, they decided to transfer all the rightists to the No. 4 Work Farm.

That was when our troubles really began.

Because the No. 4 Work Farm was mainly for ex-convicts,

the cadres and wardens were stricter.

They made very clear class distinctions. To them, we were the class enemy.

From the moment we arrived, we never had enough to eat.

The cadres ate white flour. We got the bran.

I didn't want to transfer, because I was afraid of political recriminations.

At the No. 10 farm, we didn't always have to be on our guard.

We could laugh and talk as we worked.

But at No. 4, most of the workers were male ex-convicts, and that scared me.

The sexes were segregated, because the wardens didn't want any trouble.

I told my foreman I didn't want to transfer,

because I thought I was making real progress with my labor re-education.

I didn't think he would mind.

After all, isn't that why we came?

But he reported me to the farm director.

Xu Fulian was the first female rightist to be transferred.

One day when I ran into her, she told me:

"You'd better hurry up. I heard Director Li say: 'if those lady rightists don't transfer soon,

I'll have them trussed and bound and brought over here in ropes! '"

You've talked to other camp survivors, so you know

they could truss you up so tight you'd be paralyzed for life.

I was so terrified that I asked for a transfer the minute I got back to camp.

I transferred with two other women, Shi Tian'ai and Wang Guifang.

It was easier than working in the fields,

but there was a lot of political pressure.

I wasn't allowed to talk to my colleagues, and they weren't allowed to talk to me.

No one ever said a word to me. I was just an accounting machine.

You worked and you worked, until they told you to stop.

It wasn't physically tiring, but the workload was heavy.

I worked every night from 7:30 to midnight.

I was always hungry.

Would you mind turning the light on?

Okay.

I could tell my eyesight was getting worse

from poring over account books all day.

I couldn't get new glasses way out there

so I had to put my face as close

as I could to whatever I was reading.

My myopia was getting worse, but there was nothing I could do.

Then I met a former convict from Wushan who worked in the hospital.

I'd been in Wushan, too, so we started talking.

mentioned I was thinking about taking cod liver oil to improve my eyesight.

When I asked if he had any,

he said "Sure, do you want some?" and I said I did.

Then he gave me a little bottle of it.

At the time, I knew.

.I really ought to have a prescription,

but what doctor would give me one? So I went ahead and took it anyway.

No one but my roommates saw me drinking it, but a few days later

the accounting section chief called me in for a little chat.

He said;"What's this I hear about an ex-convict giving you cod-liver oil?"

Of course, I had to admit it.

Then he said someone had seen me take it.

He kept saying what were you thinking, don't you know nothing's free?

Now this guy will think you owe him, he'll expect all kinds of favors.

It was awful, all the things he said.

Sure, I took a bottle of cod liver oil.

But I was still drawing a salary, wasn't I?

was entitled to medical care. Who cared about a little bottle of fish oil?

But he made it sound like I'd compromised the office,

and gave me a big long lecture.

remember it like it was yesterday, so I wrote about that story in my book.

Later, I started to doubt that anyone had seen me take it.

figured one of my roommates must have turned me in.

That happened a lot in camp,

people informing on each other.

After my transfer, I learned about the food shortages at Dry Gulch Farm.

Of course, I was very anxious for a letter from my husband.

About two weeks later, I got a letter.

It was only one page long.

It didn't say much, just that he was busy digging irrigation ditches.

He said he got a food subsidy of a few yuan per month.

But he was only allowed two letters a month,

so he asked me not to write him more than twice a month.

was so disappointed.

Because Chairman Mao had promised us

that rightists wouldn't be stripped of their civil liberties.

Before we left Lanzhou, we promised to write each other as often as possible.

Letters were our only means of communication.

I could tell the censors had read his letter, because it wasn't even sealed!

knew right then that our right to privacy had been violated.

How could we write anything personal in our letters now?

My communication wasn't censored.

so I wrote him back a nice long letter

telling him all about my job and my roommates and where they came from.

After that I wrote him two letters a month.

Both he and I had always signed our letters: "With kisses'

When he was away doing interviews, we wrote each other long letters once a week.

But I could tell right away that this letter was different.

All he wrote about was work and daily life.

The letters I wrote him were longer.

I always signed them "with kisses"

I figured if the censors wanted to censor that, let them!

In his second letter, he wrote:

"Today I got paid; so l bought a pound of biscuits.

l ate them all at one siting.

I think I might have lost some weight. My glasses don't fit like they used to."

When I read that letter, I knew for sure that he was starving.

He'd gone hungry as a child,

also when he was in the military hospital and the National Middle School

But at least when he was young, he could steal food if he had to.

He and his school friends used to dig up sweet potatoes from farmers' fields.

But now, as a rightist, he had no choice. He couldn't afford to break the rules.

He had to sit around and starve.

Of course, it broke my heart to know he was going hungry.

But there wasn't much I could do.

After my salary cut, I was only earning 58.24 yuan a month.

Of that I sent 35 to the kids in Lanzhou,

which left about 20 a month.

decided to start sending him 10 yuan a quarter, 3 yuan a month,

so that he could at least buy some biscuits.

I figured that would help a little.

Most of the letters I got from him weren't even sealed.

always made a point of "reminding' him to seal his letters,

so the censors would see it,

but they still arrived unsealed.

The censors knew those letters were worth their weight in gold to us.

but to them, we were no better than dogs.

After reading our letters,

they couldn't be bothered to reseal them.

So you didn't want to write anything too personal.

I could write all about my life,

but Jingchao couldn't even tell me what he was suffering.

Anything he wrote.

.could be used against him.

Of course, he knew that.

When our rations were cut to 15 pounds of grain per month, I wrote him about it.

I knew his situation was much worse than mine, but it was important news

and I thought he'd want to know.

At that point, it was all we could do to stay alive.

Soon I stopped writing letters,

and he stopped writing back.

After our rations were cut, I worked in the accounting office until one day,

a cadre named Zhang told me I didn't have to come to work the following day.

He said the hospital ward was full of patients,

and they needed help stoking the fires under the "kangs", the platform beds.

It was a makeshift hospital, housed in a building on the other side of camp.

So the next day after breakfast, walked across camp.

I brought along a tin of gasoline,

in case l had trouble lighting the fires.

When I walked into the hospital,

saw that all five rooms and all five kangs were full.

The blankets were filthy,

the whole place crowded with patients.

I knew at once I'd need more kindling, so I took a scythe and went outside

to cut some wild grass. then used the grass

to light the fires under each kang.

Of course, I wasn't happy about being sent to work in the hospital.

I'd just eaten breakfast, and I knew I'd be hungry again soon.

But I had a job to do, so I did it.

Al of the patients were men, workers who had graduated from labor reform.

They knew the camp rules,

so none of them said a word to me or asked me any questions.

just concentrated on my work stoking the fires beneath the kangs.

That first day, there were some young men working there, not patients,

just workers called in to patch the windows with newspapers.

They looked better fed than the others.

remember one of them offered me some of the flour paste he'd been using.

'Do you want to eat some?" That's what he asked me.

said no. Even though I was starving, I wasn't going to eat that filthy paste.

On the second day,

someone came up behind me while I was working.

remember hearing this voice ask: "What are you doing here?"

It was Ouyang Xia, a rightist who had been our foreman at the other camp.

I told him I'd been sent here to light and stoke the fires.

Then he said something I'll never forget:

"Right now, all we're struggling for is survival.'

He stood there for a moment, then left.

Those words were so important to me,

so very important.

Ours was a life or death struggle,

but I'd never dared to think it, much less say it.

Back then, we were always "struggling against factionalism" or "struggling for the Party".

But "struggling for our own survival".. who would dare to say such a thing?

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized he was right.

This was a struggle for survival.

Our lives were in danger,

and we had to find a way to go on living, a way to fight for our survival.

I couldn't stop thinking about those words, but I was still too afraid

to say them out loud.

That morning, I finished my work at the hospital,

then went back home to wait for my next meal.

All of us were starving.

But there was no way I could tell my roommates what I'd heard.

If you even complained of hunger, that was criticizing the Party's grain policy,

something to add to your crimes.

To say you were "struggling for survival" was practically treason.

But in my heart, I knew he was right.

One night, my roommates and I-got to talking

about how bad things had gotten.

We were trying to think of some way to feed ourselves.

At the time, I was still worried about my rightist status,

so l said something stupid about

not wanting to break the rules. if it might set back my labor reform.

As soon as I said that, the other women started scolding me.

Tian'ai said, "How can you worry about your political status at a time like this?"

"With so many people dying, that's the last thing on the cadres' minds!"

In the end, we all agreed.

We had to do something drastic if we wanted to survive.

We all knew Wang Guifang's husband had escaped starvation

by running away from his camp and hiding out in Xinjiang.

She said we ought to put our heads together.

In the end, we decided stealing was our best option.

I could hardly bring myself to say the word!

To the cadres and wardens in our camp,

stealing was the worst offence you could commit against the party.

Taking more than one's share at meals was bad enough,

but stealing was far, far worse.

But we had to steal, if we wanted to live.

Right behind the accounting office, there was a big pile of cottonseed.

The girls suggested that l go out that night and try to steal some.

Since I worked in the accounting office, no one would think it strange

if they saw me hanging around out back.

At least it wasn't as bad as stealing grain, violating the rationing policy.

This was just a little cottonseed, right?

Since I was the only one who could do it, that night I took my big handkerchief

and snuck out to steal some cottonseed.

But when I got there, I saw that the pile was covered with a big tarp.

Finally, I managed to find a loose corner

and started stuffing-seed into my handkerchief.

Suddenly, I heard someone shout "Hey, who's there?"

But when I turned around,

saw it was a cadre I knew from the No. 4 camp.

We'd even acted in a play together. As soon as I saw it was him,

I knew he wouldn't tun me in.

so I just kept stealing seed and then went back to my dorm.

Of course, he never told on me.

He was a rightist, too.

We ate the cottonseed, but it didn't seem to make any difference.

The seeds were too small to fill you up,

and they weren't nutritious enough.

We decided we had to find something else to eat.

Shi Tian'ai said scavenging for seeds wasn't going to feed us.

She'd found that out back in October when they cut our rations to 24 pounds.

But if we didn't get some nutrition soon, we'd collapse.

She said she used to steal flour from the mill.

She'd stuff a little bit in her pocket and then, when she got back to the dorm,

mix it with hot water and drink it.

She said it was a lot-better than cotton or grass seeds.

She suggested that we try to steal some flour from the mill.

It was better than nothing.

All of us were aware of the high death toll in other camps.

I'd seen a few deaths in our hospital, too,

but I never told my roommates about it.

Anyway, since Wang Guifang and Shi Tian'ai worked in the mill,

we agreed that they should try to steal some flour for all of us.

Of course, none of us wanted to die.

Survival was what mattered.

Shi Tian'ai was a single mother with a daughter to raise.

I didn't want to die, either.

had to stay alive for my family.

I didn't even know if my husband was dead or alive..

but I wanted the chance to see my children and parents again,

to tell them I'd been falsely accused.

If we died, who would speak for us?

No matter what, we had to survive.

But even if we managed to steal some flour,

how were we going to cook it?

Shi Tian ai said she was good at making boiled dumplings.

She could make dumplings, and no one would be the wiser.

But how to boil them?

Then someone suggested pancakes.

But our dorm was so close to the salaried workers' quarters,

we were afraid they-might smell us baking them.

We talked about making noodles,

but if anyone walked in while we were cooking them,

we'd get caught red-handed.

If we got caught, our roommates would get fired from the mill.

They'd lose their jobs and

we'd lose our access to flour.

We racked our brains thinking

how to turn that raw flour into something edible.

Finally, we found a solution.

One day when I came home,

saw that Wang Guifang had stolen some flour from the mill.

That night, we brought home soup from the canteen.

mixed in some stolen flour while the soup was still hot,

and drank it down just like that.

From then on, that's what we did.

Steal a bit of flour here and there,

never too much; in case anyone noticed.

We'd wait until we were alone in our dorm,

then mix it with hot water and drink it.

That seemed to do the trick.

We were all so relieved.

At that time, I was still working in the hospital every morning.

One day while I was working, l broke out in a cold sweat.

I knew it was the first sign of collapse.

When I got back home, I told Xu Fulian what had happened.

The doctor, who was also a labor camp worker, gave me some medicine.

But it didn't work. I asked her what to do.

She said most of the cadres and salaried workers

had stopped showing up for work.

If they weren't working, why should we?

She suggested we take a day of.

So the next day Xu Fulian and I stayed home.

We hadn't had a day off since we got there, and we were exhausted.

Our roommates asked the cadres if we could have the day off,

and we stayed in bed and rested.

Xu Fulian had a watch, and she woke me up around 9:30

so that we could go line up for food.

The salaried workers still got 15 pounds of rations a month,

though they hadn't worked in weeks.

We had to wait in line ourselves. If you asked someone else,

half your food would be gone by the time it got to you.

When people are starving, they do things like that.

was afraid they might not serve me, but I got a decent portion.

Back then, everyone kept a careful eye on that ladle!

You wanted to make sure you got your fair share,

that every serving was the same size,

and that the gruel wasn't too thin or watery.

Of course, you never said anything, but you sure paid close attention.

When I got to the front of the line, I was happy with what they gave me.

Xu Fulian thought her gruel was more watery than mine,

but she couldn't really complain.

We went back to the dorm and waited for the others to return.

They came back with a little raw flour, which we split among the four of us.

After eating; we felt a lot better.

At least we had a little raw flour to supplement our diets.

We were fortunate to have two roommates who worked at the mill.

Not everyone was so lucky.

That little bit of stolen flour probably saved our lives.

Then in.

.I think it was on December 20, 1960.

they raised our rations from 15 to 24 pounds a month.

We weren't aware they'd already decided to disband the worst camps.

The cadres from the northwest region held a big meeting in Lanzhou

and started disbanding Dry Gulch, my husband's camp, in December 1960.

By then Dry Gulch was a disaster area.

We had some deaths in our camp, but not nearly as many as at Dry Gulch.

But from December 20; our monthly rations were back up to 24 pounds.

Since coming to the No. 4, I'd given up any hope of visiting my husband at his camp.

The atmosphere at No. 4 was a lot stricter than at No. 10.

I figured the cadres would turn down my request.

Another problem was money.

Dry Gulch was far away, and couldn't afford a train ticket.

Besides, I was a hated rightist, with no freedom of movement

They wouldn't let me leave.

Even if they did, how could I possibly help him, with no money?

Then in late December, I got a letter from my father.

He said he wished he could help Jingchao, but the kids were

too small, and my parents too old, to make the trip.

He suggested that I try to save him, because I was a lot closer.

I showed the letter to our Party Secretary, a man named Liu Zhigui.

He gave me permission to leave right away, which surprised me.

By this time, the cadres were aware of the crisis in the camps, but I wasn't.

My parents weren't party members, so they didn't know either.

I went straight home and wrote a letter to my parents,

telling them I was going to save my husband.

still needed money for the trip, so I asked Du Bo for a loan.

However, he was also demoted at that time.

But he still had a salary of 58.24 yuan.

Another thing is, once he became a cook, he didn't have any family burden.

As soon as I got permission to leave,

I asked him for a loan and he lent me 100 yuan.

asked him for a loan and he lent me 100 yuan.

It had snowed a lot before I left,

but I had to sit on the roof of the truck.

The only person who got to sit in the cab was the wife of a canteen worker.

There was a pecking order in camp, and everyone wanted to

get in good with the canteen workers.

So I sat on the roof, with my coat wrapped around me.

A few hours later, we got to the station.

managed to get a ticket right away.

I got of at Clearwater Station. I think it was a one-minute stop.

I had one bag full of food, money and grain coupons for Jingchao.

And another with clothes in case

I had to go back to Lanzhou, in case Jingchao wasn't there.

Clearwater Station was so small it didn't even have a platform.

It was. already dark when hopped of the train with my bags.

asked for directions to the camp at a shack near the station.

The man there pointed to a little path in the snow,

and said that if I followed it west I'd eventually reach the camp.

By this time, it was completely dark.

The path was covered in snow and I was the only person around.

From the time I left the station,

I didn't meet another soul.

must have walked for three or four miles in the snow.

My luggage was heavy. but all I could think was

that Jingchao was waiting for me, waiting for me to save him.

Maybe he was on his last breath,

so I couldn't waste a minute, I had to keep on walking.

Finally, I reached a stand of date trees, and the path started to disappear.

I set my luggage down, looked left and right

All I could see for miles around was snow,

and not another person in sight.

Years later, I met Gao Jiye, another camp survivor.

He wrote a book called "Flight", about his escape.

He said I was lucky not to have run into any wolves that night.

But that night, wolves were the last thing on my mind.

I had to save my husband.

He was waiting for me

If only I could reach him in time, while he had breath left in his body,

I knew that I could save him.

So. didn't think about wolves or any of that.

I was focused on saving my husband.

Remember how in the book, Gao's mentor is eaten by wolves?

Gao always said I was lucky not to have met up with any wolves.

It never occurred to me.

At camp, I knew a man named Feng Shiwei.

Once he went into town to buy supplies, and got chased by wolves.

They followed his ox cart the whole way, pacing him,

speeding up when he did, slowing down when he did.

I'd heard that story, but I wasn't thinking about my own survival.

All could think was that Jingchao was waiting for me to save him.

So when I lost sight of the road, I looked around

and finally saw something that looked like it might be a road,

so I picked up my bags and kept walking.

A while later, I ran into a man on the road:

asked if he knew the way to camp.

He said, "See those lights up ahead? That's the camp office.

I was concentrating so hard on the road that I hadn't even noticed the lights.

I'll bet the man came to the camp looking for a family member.

Maybe he hadn't found them, and was on his way back home.

I doubt he was a cadre, because the cadres didn't do night patrols

I followed the lights to the office

When I walked in, I saw two men sitting inside

I told them I was looking for Wang Jingchao.

They took out a thick ledger and started flipping through the pages

I figured the camp must be huge

if they had to look through that big book to find out where he was

Finally, they found the page they were looking for,

and told me he'd died on December 13th

That hit me like a thunderbolt.

Here I thought I was rescuing my husband, and he was already dead!

I sat down on a wooden bench.

There wasn't much furniture.

At first I was in shock.

I couldn't even cry.

Then it hit me.

my husband was gone, gone from this world.

He was gone forever.

I cried and I cried..

The two cadres just ignored me and went on with their work.

They didn't offer a single word of comfort.

They'd seen so many bereaved families.

I guess this was how they dealt with grief, by ignoring it.

don't know how long I cried. Finally, they called in one of the "small rightists"

to find me a place to sleep for the night

So I left the office with him.

By then, it was dark.

We walked for I don't know how long before we reached a sort of cave

The office had proper kerosene lamps

but here in the cave they used lamps made from ink bottles,

just like at our camp.

It was a large cave.

with a long dirt platform covered with blankets.

He led me into the back of the cave

gave me two blankets

and said to wrap up in those if I got cold in the night.

A while later, another man came in. Another small rightist, I guess.

In the cave, they had a makeshift brick stove

and a few sticks of kindling.

They heated up a pan of water on that

and made some rice noodles

One of the men said his aunt in Wuhan had sent them.

He asked if I was hungry and I said yes

that I hadn't had a thing to eat all day

I thought it was nice of him to offer.

Those cadres in the office hadn't cared enough to offer me any food.

They couldn't be bothered.

So when the men offered to share theirs, I said yes.

really was hungry, because I hadn't eaten a thing all day.

Of course, I didn't eat much because I knew they didn't have much to spare.

I knew what it must have cost them to share those noodles.

So I just ate a little.

I had some little bread rolls with me, so I gave them one each.

They kept saying over and over how delicious they were.

By then, our rations were up to 30 pounds, same as the cadres

But these men had never seen food like this.

After eating, they went straight to bed.

They were at one end of the cave, and I was at the other.

They said to roll out my bedroll anywhere l wanted.

They went right to sleep,

but I felt uncomfortable. I was still a young woman then.

How could I get any sleep, alone in a cave with two strange men?

So I just sort of sat there, wondering what I should do.

The man who brought me must have noticed I was nervous, because he said:

"Sister, you need your rest. Don't worry, you're safe here.

By that time, it was already quite late, so I figured I might as well.

I spread out my two blankets.

I was sure that they had belonged to someone who'd died.

The cave was almost empty,

but it was full of blankets and quilts.

Anyway, I spread out my blankets and covered myself with my coat.

The roof of the cave was covered with boards and tree branches.

but you could still see the stars through the cracks.

And it was drafty, like there was an ill wind blowing through the cave.

I couldn't get to sleep that night.

I was exhausted from my long trip, and from crying all day,

but I kept tossing and turning.

I remember lying awake and looking up at the stars.

I kept thinking about all the men who had died in this cave.

Maybe they were still here. maybe their spirits never left.

Maybe they were peeping down into the cave through the cracks

wondering what was happening here.

All those angry ghosts..

They didn't leave this world willingly.

The world rejected them.

Now they were in another, darker place,

and they didn't want to be there

They were in no hurry to walk that road into the netherworld.

They still loved this world.

But the world had already turned its back on them.

It had separated them from their loved ones, forever.

They must have had so many hopes and dreams.

But now those hopes..

..were lost to them.

Of course, I also thought of my husband.

He had hoped to reform himself.

to be welcomed back into the arms of the people.

He had hoped to continue his writing.

to make a fresh start, but now he was gone forever

We'd never see him again.

I remembered how, during the worst of the struggle sessions,

he would hold me in his arms,

and call me his little "Jiao Jiao"

I thought of the sound of his heartbeat,

and of our hearts beating together.

But now his heart had stopped beating.

and I would never hear that sound again.

He had left me and the children to face all that hardship alone.

And I was still a rightist.

My husband was gone, and I was still a rightist.

I didn't know how I could go on.

I couldn't bear the burden alone.

I was weak, frail, a rightist..

..how was I going to raise those two kids all by myself?

remember before we left Lanzhou, he quoted a line from War and Peace:

"While there is life there is joy".

But now his life was gone

And that joy..

.. that joy that everyone deserves, was something he would never know.

I wondered if he knew I was here,

if maybe he was up there somewhere, looking down at me.

still don't know how I managed to get through that night.

I just remember tossing and turning, tossing and turning..

..until finally the sun came up.

The next morning, one of the men left early.

I got dressed and told the other man

that I wanted to see my husband's grave.

He had to ask the cadres for permission.

When he came back, he said Jingchao's grave was far away,

but that I shouldn't worry, he'd been given a proper burial.

I said didn't care how far it was,

but he tried to talk me out of going.

That's when I got suspicious.

We had a lot of deaths in our camp too, and the burials were hasty.

I figured they probably couldn't-find his grave.

But I didn't want to stand at some stranger's grave.

crying.

and-mourning

Sol told him to forget it:

figured-there was no point, if we couldn't find his grave.

That night they moved me to a new place, another cave.

There were three other people inside.

A brother and sister from Gansu, Pei Zifeng's children.

The other was a female postal worker.

The kids said their father, a former schoolteacher, had died in the camp.

The postal worker also lost her husband.

I told them I was a journalist and that my husband -had died here, too.

After that, we didn't have much else to talk about..

mostly we just cried.

What else was there to say?

That cave was full of quilts, too, from all the people who had died.

Some had been buried in their quilts, but for others, no one had bothered,

so there were a lot left over.

That night, we slept under those quilts.

assume there must have been other widows and orphans in those caves,

and some camp survivors, too,

but we didn't meet any of them.

As for the camp cadres, their job was finished. they didn't care about us.

Before I came, l had prepared myself-for the worst

If Jingchao were dead, I'd go straight-back to Lanzhou.

When I left Lanzhou, my sons were four and seven years old,

and I hadn't seen them in a few years.

After leaving my camp was free to go home.

Back then, train tickets were hard to come by,

so I asked a cadre to help me get one.

He said okay

A few hours later, he came back

and said we didn't have to pay for tickets.

Under a new policy, everyone in the camps,

whether staff or prisoners, would be sent home together.

He said there was a train leaving later that same day

and that I could go home with everyone else, without buying a ticket.

We left that same day.

We left from Butte Station instead of Clearwater Station,

because the trains only stopped at Clearwater for a minute,

and there wasn't even a platform.

That's when I met Wang Zhi.

I had so many bags I asked the camp if they could send someone to help,

and they sent Wang Zhi.

The scene at the station was like a refugee camp,

with everyone pushing and shoving to get onboard.

I knew Wang Zhi had to stay behind,

so I gave him my last little bread roll. Years later, he still remembered that!

He never met Jingchao:

Later, on the train, a man came up and asked if I was Jingchao's wife.

He said he'd heard l was in camp, but he wasn't allowed to talk to me there.

That's how I met Zhou Chunsheng.

He was a 38th Division cadre for years..

until he had a child out of wedlock.

Then he lost his military commission and got sent to a labor reform camp.

He said her and Jingchao had been friends,

and that everyone respected Jingchao and called him "Specs".

We didn't talk much, because of course I was still in mourning.

It was a very long trip. Back then, trains were slow.

What made it worse was that they didn't give us any food.

The bread that was meant for our group went missing.

They were supposed to feed us, but-they never did.

I'd already eaten all the food I'd brought.

There was a farmer sitting next to me.

He had some noodles,

so I traded him some money and grain coupons for half-a bowl of noodles.

That's all I had to eat.

I don't know how the others managed.

They lied to us through the whole trip, kept telling us to wait a while longer.

But by the time we got to Lanzhou, all the food was gone.

We never got any of it.

I figured at least I could eat when I got home.

I didn't know there was famine in Lanzhou, too.

In the years that I'd been gone, the city had been starving.

Later, my sisters told me that at that time, one was in elementary school and the other was in junior high.

At that time, the eldest sister had been admitted into university.

On Sunday, the two younger ones would walk for miles to the vegetable market to pick radish leaves.

Who would eat radish leaves?

They'd gather up whatever leftover leaves the farmers had,

and carry them home in burlap bags.

Before that, no one in the city ate radish leaves.

All that time in Lanzhou, my sisters and sons had been going hungry.

The minute I walked in the door,

It was during winter break, so my sisters were home.

They hadn't known conditions in the camps were so bad.

My parents had even offered to send one of my sisters

to Jingchao's camp with supplies, if it came to that.

But by the time I got there, he'd already been dead a month.

Even so,

I think just knowing l was home safe was a comfort to them.

It could have been worse.

After that, I went back to the paper,

and spent a few years doing odd jobs.

Then in late September of 1961

the leadership announced that we former rightists would be rehabilitated.

It was the day we'd all been waiting for.

But when I heard that Jingchao and all the others who had died

would be posthumously rehabilitated,

all I could do was cry.

What did it matter now? We'd lost a husband and father!

Even though I had survived

and I had my sons back, we would always be a broken family.

The paper gave us a little apartment, and I moved in there with my sons.

Later, after my rehabilitation,

was transferred into the archives department.

Raising a family of three on a salary of 58.24 yuan a month wasn't easy.

There were times we went hungry. Even as late as '62, food was scarce.

But the three of us managed to get by.

Then during the Cultural Revolution, it happened all over again!

I haven't told you about that yet.

I was branded a rightist again.

By March of 1969,

the paper was under military control, taken over by ultra-leftists.

Sixty or seventy of us were detained in cowsheds.

One was arrested.

Because of my so-called bad attitude, my punishment was relatively severe.

was branded a rightist, lost my job and got sent down for labor reform.

got sent down my dad's hometown of Huining, though I'd never lived there.

I had no choice.

They said our family were landlords,

During the Cultural Revolution, I wrote materials in the cowshed, saying that our family was not a landlord and had no land

We were working class.

They asked a lot of questions about my father's hometown of Huining.

But I didn't even know the name of the nearest commune!

I hadn't been back in decades. How on earth would I know?

Then they asked me about a commune called "Gangou".

said I'd heard my dad talk about a place by that name when I was little.

From that, they managed to get in touch with some relatives on my father's side.

Then in early April,

got sent down to Huining for labor reform.

I remember there was a huge blizzard the day I arrived.

You know that woman from Huining, Auntie Wang Xiulan? She said:

"As long as we have two hands. we needn't live idly in the cities.

That started the whole trend of sending down the urban unemployed,

shipping them off to the countryside.

Anyway, I was sent down in early April.

My older son had been sent down already, and my younger son was in junior high.

The plan was to send down my younger son as well,

because I was unemployed and he needed someone to look after him.

But he was smart for his age.

He knew conditions in the countryside were bad,

so he asked his advisor on the Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Team for advice.

He told my son he didn't have to go if he didn't want to.

After that, I transferred my son's residence permit

so that he could stay with my mother in Lanzhou.

The school gave him a few days off to help me get settled in Huining.

I had some uncles in Huining, my father's half-brothers.

Same father, different mothers.

They'd moved back to Huining when..

.here it gets a little complicated.

You see, my grandfather had a wife and a concubine.

My father was born to the first wife, and my uncles to the concubine.

When my grandfather died in 1947, the concubine had to leave Lanzhou.

Her people had some land in Huining, 20 or 30 mu, that they rented out.

Later, when she was branded a landlord for having that bit of land,

the whole family found themselves stuck with a bad class background.

Even though my uncles were considered "landlords", they were all very poor.

When I got sent down, the paper assumed one of my uncles would have room for me,

that I would "be provided for". That's what they always said, right?

But when I got there, I realized that none of them had any room to spare.

My oldest uncle was only seven or eight years older than me.

He had a wife and four or five kids.

The whole family lived in one room and slept on one big platform bed.

The other uncles weren't any better of. They lived in single rooms or caves.

None of them had any room for me.

Of course, my uncle also knew that I was a rightist,

and as a landlord, he faced enough class tension as it was.

I remember him saying..

. oh, but the house is so small.

and we're probably better off

not "eating at the same trough".

Do you know that phrase?

He meant that if we lived together, we'd both be guilty by association.

He said I'd be better off in a non-landlord household.

The cadre who had traveled with me, Captain Zhang, was a nice man.

He was still in the village, staying overnight with one of the local cadres.

My uncle said I'd better hurry up and catch him before he left,

and see if he could arrange someplace else for me to live.

So my uncle dragged me over there,

and we asked to speak to Captain Zhang.

told Captain Zhang that there was no room for me at my uncle's house.

Naturally, he understood.

There wasn't enough room for me, let alone all of my things.

I'd brought along

a whole carload of things, and there wasn't any place to store them.

The captain said he'd think it over, and sent us home,

so I spent that night at my uncle's house.

The next day, the captain told me there was a family of farmers named Wang

who were wiling to take me in.

That same day, my younger uncles came over to help me move my things.

The Wangs were "lower-middle peasant" class. When my uncle heard the news,

he said the Wangs were nice people, and that they'd take good care of me.

So that day, we loaded all of my things into a handcart and took them over.

The family lived in an "arch cave". Do you know what that means?

Right, it's shaped like an arch, made of mud bricks. I'd never seen one before.

The walls were just packed dirt.

The family was so poor they couldn't afford rafters or roof tiles,

so the ceiling was made of mud bricks, rounded like an archway in a city wall.

They had an empty room, so moved my things in there.

You could cook in there, too.

The whole room was only two or three meters in diameter,

and about six or seven meters long, with a kang for sleeping.

For cooking, I'd brought along a steel wok.

In the countryside, they used those big woks,

but mine was smaller, about this big.

My uncle helped me set up a small brick stove in the corner of the cave,

so I could do my own cooking.

After that..

..he used some kindling to make a fire,

and helped me boil some water in the wok.

I had a thermos I'd brought from home, so after that, I always had hot water.

The Wangs were really good to me.

We were actually distant relatives, several times removed.

The grandfather of the family told me to call him "Grandpa Wang"

I can't remember exactly how we were related, but they treated me like family.

l was in my 30's, and the parents in their 50's, so I called them "Mother and Father Wang".

At that time, I still hadn't received a ration card,

so the first night, the family shared their dinner with me.

.I think it was buckwheat noodles and homemade pickles.

As I said, the Wangs were distant relatives of ours.

One of my uncles knew them well. That night, mother Wang told me

they hadn't used that empty room in a while, but they'd heat the kang for me.

So I had a warm bed to sleep in that night.

After dinner, I went straight to bed.

The next morning..

I had to go to the commune offices to apply for a ration card.

The commune was several miles away, and there was a lot of red tape to sort out,

so I didn't do any work that day.

Once I got my ration card, they gave me a months' supply of wheat flour

so I could start cooking for myself.

Father Wang also told me to buy a little wicker basket,

the kind you could tie onto your back.

Everyone in the village used those baskets for work, and for carrying things around.

Our work was mostly hauling manure from one place to another.

Also, you had to gather wild grass for kindling,

and donkey and horse dung to fuel the stoves.

started work on the third day. My job was mostly carrying manure.

The leader of our work brigade had already told everyone about me,

so from the start, they knew was a rightist from Lanzhou.

But the farmers didn't seem to mind as much as the brigade leader.

He was the type who used the Cultural Revolution as an excuse to be a bully.

But the women I worked with were very friendly and curious,

and asked me all sorts of questions.

At first I worked with the brigade leader,

until the other women told me that he loaded the baskets too heavily.

They said if I joined up with them, the work would be much lighter.

It wasn't like the labor farm, where you had to work quickly, and couldn't stand around:

The farmers said, "You're working for the state now..take it easy.

That's how it was then. No matter how hard you worked, you earned the same amount of points.

So the work was easier than at the labor camp.

The brigade leader could quit work whenever he wanted to,

call over some of the men to play Go with clods of dirt on a homemade board.

He was just putting on a show of working.

Since this was my second strike, I figured there wasn't much chance of rehabilitation.

The farmers in the commune never treated me like an outsider.

I remember one day we were goofing off, when someone saw the boss coming.

They said, "Careful, the boss is here. Don't let him see you not working.'

They knew it didn't mater if they slacked of, but if I got caught

I'd be seriously punished.

The farmers really looked out for me. They treated me like family.

I remember right after I arrived, Mother Wang told everyone they shouldn't treat me

differently because I was a rightist.

She said I wasn't an "ist", and that

they shouldn't treat me as one,

but as a guest, a member of the family.

The first day I was there, when I didn't know how to light the stove,

they helped me light it. They were always very kind.

Every day, Mother Wang left a pile of kindling at my door.

They always called me "sister" and always made sure that

I had a warm bed to sleep in.

After so many years in cold labor camps, it was like I'd gone to heaven,

like I'd found some personal freedom.

But life was hard for the farmers. They didn't even have wells.

They relied on stored rainwater.

If you wanted to wash your face,

you'd splash a bit of water on your face, and that was it.

But they made an exception for me, they let me use a wash basin.

The family took good care of me.

But after that first month, things got more difficult.

After I finished my ration of flour, I had to grind the wheat myself.

There weren't any machines or donkeys to turn the millstone.

The donkeys were commune property, so you had to turn the millstone by hand.

The others would help winnow and prepare the wheat,

but you had to grind it into flour yourself.

The work made me feel faint, because I wasn't used to it.

It wasn't strenuous work, but for some reason it made me dizzy.

One day I broke out in a sweat while working,

and Mother Wang came in and asked me what was wrong.

She said, 'Why are you sweating? You don't look so good."

So I told her I felt faint.

I don't know why, but all that grinding made me dizzy.

She told me to sit down, and finished the job herself.

The work at the labor camp was hard, but I got used to it.

This was lighter work, but for some reason I couldn't handle it.

was so worried about what I was going to do.

I couldn't even grind a little wheat without feeling faint!

But the family rescued me again.

Mother Wang knew a family up on the mountain who owned a donkey.

There are no donkeys in our team, we borrowed them from farmers on the mountain.

I spoke kindly and they lent them to us.

Even when I couldn't do my work, the family still found a way to help me.

After that, I never had to grind my wheat by hand again.

The year I arrived, Huining had a lot of rain, so the harvest was good.

was young and healthy then, and was able to work a lot.

managed to earn enough grain that year

to last me well into the second year.

But the third year, there were droughts and food shortages.

In Huining, the farmers didn't harvest the wheat with sickles.

They pulled it up from the roots.

I learned how to cut wheat on the farm, but pulling it out by hand is difficult

And it causes blisters

Mother Wang is a "middle-lower" level farmer and doesn't do much work in the fields. She does some household chores instead.

Mother Wang took a look at my blistered hands and said,

"How are you going to work tomorrow, with those hands?"

When I told her I only knew how to use a sickle,

she said, "Why didn't you say so? We've got a sickle you can borrow."

The wheat was so low you had to squat down to harvest it.

But because the women there had bound feet, they couldn't squat.

Instead, they'd kneel on the ground to take the pressure of their feet.

Most of the women used homemade kneepads.

Mother Wang had them because she had bound feet

she lent me her kneepads and the sickle.

It wasn't heavy work, like at the labor camp.

And the others in the commune.

.were very good to me. They treated me like a person, not a class enemy.

Then came the drought,

and there wasn't enough to eat.

Times were tough.

Even the dogs had no water to drink.

People used to let their dogs out at night so they could go drink from the river.

The river water was bitter, but people barely had enough water for themselves,

let alone their dogs.

The first winter, we got a large ration of potatoes,

several hundred pounds of them.

We stored them in the cellar, so we always had potatoes handy.

Even the noodles we ate were made from potatoes and flour.

To this day, I can't eat potatoes because I got so sick of them!

But the next year, we had a drought, and the peasants were starving.

got by on grain coupons sent from home.

It was worse for the peasants. Even their dogs died.

The brigade leader never went hungry, because he stole.

While the peasants' dogs were starving to death,

Rumors had it that he was fattening up his pigs, made 40 bowls of lard from the pigs.

His kids always got the easiest jobs in the commune,

but received the most work points.

They could steal grain, so they never went hungry.

By then, the class struggle had intensified.

I think it was Lin Biao who said..

there was some directive or other, I can't remember the number..

. something about evacuating urban residents to the countryside.

I think that's what it was. I can't remember exactly.

At any rate, quite a few people were evacuated from Lanzhou to the countryside.

Our brigade leader liked to lecture us about that.

Once a war breaks out now,

If these "ists" dare to have activities,

We can handle them anytime and execute them, that's how serious it was.

But by 1972,

some Cultural Revolution cases were being reopened.

A lot of us from paper had been arrested and sent down

there were rightists like me,

and so-called "bad elements' and counter-revolutionaries.

There was one man who'd been accused of pilfering.

His wife was unemployed and the family was poor.

They said he'd been stealing.

.. oh, coal or something like that.

For stealing that little bit of coal, he was branded a "bad element" and sent down.

At that time, it was a double punishment.

You lost your job as well as your party membership.

My relatives in Lanzhou wrote me a letter

suggesting I come back and have my case reopened.

But how could I?

Then my sister sent a telegram saying I had to come home

because my younger son had pneumonia.

He needed me to look after him.

But my supervisors said the telegram wasn't "official"

because it didn't have an official work-unit seal.

My sister's work-unit was a small factory,

but she was on good terms with her boss.

So she was able to send another telegram

with the factory's official seal.

asked again if I could go back to Lanzhou, and this time they gave me permission.

Of course, my real motive for going home was to try to reopen my case.

At that time, Lanzhou had a strict residence permit policy.

Once, my son and I were staying at my mother's house,

At that time my mother was staying at my second sister's house

inspectors came knocking in the middle of the night to check our residence permits.

One of them was a relative.

Of course he knew who I was, but he asked my son anyway.

Then he winked at us, and left without checking our permits.

After that, we moved into my second sister's dorm, who worked in a government agency at the time.

She'd just had a baby, and needed help

with babysitting and housework. And they don't check permits in government agency.

So I helped her out around the house while I waited for news on my case.

The paper was under military control, so of course, things moved slowly.

They were very cold to me, not at all helpful.

all the paperwork had to go through the public security bureau.

The first time I applied to be reinstated, my request was denied,

and they said I had to go back to Huining.

Fortunately, I had a cousin whose husband worked in the public security bureau.

Although he hadn't worked there long,

his supervisor had some influence.

By going through that back channel,

I finally managed to have my case heard, and get my job back.

came back to Lanzhou in April of 1972,

but it wasn't until August of 1974

that I was able to get reinstated at the paper.

I knew I couldn't stay there long.

It was too politicized an environment,

and I was a recently rehabilitated rightist. I knew the paper didn't want me,

so I thought I'd find another job in Lanzhou.

My mother was already in her sixties then,

and she was in very poor health.

My sister had worked in hydroelectric design,

but when the Cultural Revolution came,

she was transferred to a factory. She had a young child,

but my mother was too ill to help much with housekeeping or babysitting.

was working at the paper then, in the archives department.

decided to apply for a transfer to another job,

so that I could help more around the house.

The Cultural Revolution had left Lanzhou with a shortage of educated workers,

particularly junior high school teachers.

told the paper that I had a heart condition and that my mother was ill,

so I wanted to leave the paper and find work as a teacher.

They didn't want me anyway,

but they gave me an ultimatum:

I had to transfer to southern Gansu.

If I didn't transfer within three months, I'd lose my job.

I'd only just been reinstated, so how could I protest?

I just got my job back.. I couldn't afford to lose it again.

So in the end, I had no choice but to accept the transfer.

I had another reason for going. By then I'd remarried,

and my second husband was living in southern Gansu.

He'd worked at the Northwest Institute of Minority Studies

until it was disbanded and most of the faculty sent to southern Gansu.

Southern Gansu was freezing, and the high altitude only made it worse.

I couldn't stand the altitude. It was 2900 meters above sea level.

If it had been anyplace else, I could have brought my mother.

But if I couldn't stand the altitude, I knew it would be worse for her.

Even though I had to transfer,

I put it off for as long as I could, until April of 1975.

Although she never told me, my mother told friends

she didn't think she'd live very long if I left.

You see, she lived in a house with no indoor plumbing.

After I left, it was just her and my two boys.

If she wanted to go to the bathroom,

she had to walk 7 or 8 minutes to the nearest public toilet.

She was already blind in one eye,

and the other eye wasn't much better.

She could hardly take care of herself anymore.

She knew she wouldn't live long if l left,

but we didn't have any choice. When I arrived in Gansu, they asked

what I could do, and I said I'd like to teach junior high school Chinese.

They knew I'd only graduated high school. but I told them I could handle the job.

So they posted me to a new school that needed a language teacher.

Then I got a letter from my sister saying that mother was seriously ill.

I wrote back and told my sister that we should try treatment,

but to send me a telegram if mother's condition didn't improve.

Less than a week later, a telegram came.

My sister hadn't even received my letter yet,

but her telegram said to come home right away.

I'm sure my colleagues were suspicious.

I'd only just arrived, and already I was asking for leave to go home.

By the time I got back home, mother was seriously ill.

She couldn't walk, so my my brother-in-law had to carry her to the hospital.

But because she was dying, the hospital wouldn't admit her.

was a rightist, my sister was a factory worker,

and her husband had been sent down to Zhangye. None of us had any influence.

We finally managed to get her into a hospital of Chinese traditional medicine,

where they diagnosed her condition as a retinal-hemorrhage.

perhaps brought on by excessive stress.

The prognosis wasn't at all good.

I think that when I left, my mother knew she was going to die.

later told a friend blamed the Gansu Daily

for driving two members of my family to their deaths:

first my husband, then my mother.

If I hadn't been sent away, my mother wouldn't have died so soon.

Because I hadn't officially started work, I didn't have classes to teach.

My one sister couldn't afford to take a leave of absence from her factory.

My other sister had two young kids at home, a newborn-baby and a toddler.

So I took a leave of absence to look after our mother.

Two or three months later,

after a long illness, my mother died.

The funeral arrangements were fairly simple:

It was just the two of us my second sister and l:

She was able to take a few days of work,

but my other sister couldn't come.

Later, during winter break, my sisters-came home

and we placed a simple headstone at my mother's gravesite.

Finally, in December of 1978, I was politically rehabilitated.

Because Jingchao was considered a major rightist, his case wasn't resolved until 1979.

In the end, all of the dozen or so rightists at the Gansu Daily were fully rehabilitated.

Then in 1979, I was transferred to the Nationalities Institute.

In 1990, I finally

got back in touch with some of the survivors of Gaotai camp,

including Cao Zonghua and Xu Denghao, who lived near Gaotai.

I sent Cao a letter, and he wrote me back immediately.

He wrote: "Dear Sister, I am now back in Gaotai,

I led a group of workers in Gaotai recently.

I know that your husband

...died in one of the camps in Gaotai or Mingshui. But I don't know his name.

I thought I might be able to help you find his grave, but until I got your letter

I didn't know how to look.

For so many-years now, I've hoped to help you find his grave.

All those years, I'd been hoping for the same thing.

When I left the camp in 1961, the cadres had lied to me.

I never found his grave, never got to say goodbye, or make offerings.

For decades, I'd waited for the chance.

Finally in 1991, my oldest son and I

went to Gaotai-to look for his father's grave.

to give him a proper burial at last.

There weren't any roads leading out to the graveyard,

but Cao Zonghua knew the area well, so he led us there on bicycles.

My son Faxia rode a borrowed bike, and I rode on the back of Cao Zonghua's bike.

Although thirty years had passed,

I still hoped we'd be able to find where they had buried my husband.

For fear that some family members might come to find the graves, the camp cadres

had placed stones with the names of the dead on the grave mounds.

Some were written in black ink, some in red paint.

They put the names face down so that the writing wouldn't fade.

Seeing all those graves, I felt so sad.

After all this time, I wasn't sure if I could even find my husband's grave.

When I'd left here, my boys were babies.

Now I'd brought my adult son

who had already started working

to see where his father was buried.

The moment we entered the graveyard, I started crying.

It was enormous, filed with grave mounds. We walked from mound to mound,

turned over every stone, but all the names had faded.

Cao Zonghua said that when he'd last visited in 1979, the names were still visible.

But that was years ago, and too much time had passed.

picked up every stone to read the name,

but we couldn't find my husband's.

It was the same for every grave. Al of the names had faded.

In the end, we made our funeral offerings in a little clearing in the graveyard.

We had some fruit-and peaches that Cao Zonghua had bought locally,

and some funeral scrolls we'd brought from Lanzhou.

There was a long poem I'd written,

and some funeral couplets by fellow survivors Yang Kang and Du Bozhi.

Before he read his poem, my son cried out "papa" for the first time in 30 years.

He'd never called his father "papa"

He'd lost his papa before he was old enough to speak.

To hear him calling for his papa for the first time ever was so moving.

. by the time he finished reading his poem, all of us were in tears.

The sky was overcast that day.

The graveyard was completely silent,

no birds or insects chirping.

In the midst of-that silence, we burnt our funeral offerings.

and knelt on the ground, weeping.

Then I started to read the poem I'd written,

but I kept breaking down in tears.

I knew that I should be the one to read it, but I just couldn't go on.

Somehow, in the end, I managed to read it through.

Then Cao Zonghua read the couplets that Yang Kang and Du Bozhi had written.

They talked about my husband's three great essays, the persecution he'd faced,

and the hope that he would rest in peace.

We also burned some paper offerings in the local tradition.

Cao Zonghua lived far from the graveyard,

but he was ten years younger than me,

so he gave me a ride back on his bicycle.

It was a bumpy ride, but at least we'd done what we set out to do.

We'd made our funeral offerings and taken a lot of photos

including pictures of the cave I'd stayed in so many years ago.

We wanted to record every detail.

Though it was painful, at least we got the chance to say goodbye

before we went home.

After 30 years, we'd made our peace

but not all of the families were so lucky.

We may have been the only ones.

Some of the grave mounds were surrounded by stones,

as if the families had been there

but hadn't been able to move the remains.

How many must have traveled the same road, suffered the same loss.

I never found my husband's grave.

They'd found their loved ones, but hadn't been able to give them a proper burial.

On some of the graves.

we saw remains, skeletons,

skulls with their mouths open,

bones half-buried in the sand.

It was as if they were crying out

about the injustices they'd suffered that wouldn't let them rest in peace.

After the 1978 Central Committee Directive No. 55, most rightists were rehabilitated,

or the cases against them overturned.

According to official figures,

552, 877 rightists were politically rehabilitated,

That number accounts for 99.98 percent of the total accused.

Only 96 people weren't rehabilitated. The book "Leftist Calamity" confirms this number.

Nowadays, some people will tell you that only 5 or 6 were left,

but it was actually 96.

Dai Huang's book "Nine Lives" cites the same number, 96 people.

But the scope of the entire movement was much greater than reported.

In the end, 99.98 percent were either rehabilitated or found innocent.

I think that the remaining .02 percent,

those 96 people, were left as examples,

so as not to repudiate the entire anti-rightist movement.

But I believe it should have been fully repudiated.

And that figure of 550, 000+ only includes recorded cases.

Many others went unrecorded.

College students, for example, were often dealt with harshly.

Many students in Lanzhou were accused as rightists and sent to labor camps.

Some never made it back alive.

Our family wasn't the only one persecuted.

I knew a lot of people who had suffered just as badly,

so I had to write the truth about it.

That's why, when I retired in 1989, I started writing my book.

At first I encountered a lot of resistance, even from my sisters.

"Why write this?" they asked.

"Why bother writing a book that might never get published?"

Some of my friends worried that the experience was too painful to relive.

They didn't understand why I would want to dredge up all those old memories.

"Why dredge up the past? Wasn't it painful enough the first time?"

But that's exactly why I had to record that period in history.

The fact that I'd lived through it personally

was all the more reason to write it.

After all, it was my own story.

Who better to tell it than me?

And if I didn't write it, would else would?

I should answer that.

Hello?

Yes, this is she.

No, I hadn't heard that.

Yes.

Yes.

Another survivor.

Yes.

Right.

Yes, he and my husband were in the same camp.

Oh, about seventy-four.

No, he's older than me.

I had two sons. My oldest died in 2003

It's just the youngest now.

Were you rehabilitated?

Were you a rightist?

No, I mean..

Oh, they did?

And you were rehabilitated later?

So you were okay during the Cultural Revolution.

Why don't I take your name and number?

Let me get a pen.

Okay.

That's "Zheng" as in "correct"?

Shao Zhengxiang?

Okay.

Thank you for calling.

Goodbye.

That was a call from Kunming. Another survivor.

This film is dedicated to all those who lived through the revolution those who made it and those who suffered it