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On the western outskirts of Las Vegas, away from casinos, tourists and shopping malls, the Spring Mountains rise from Burning Valley, an aerial view of red-striped sandstone. When the heat permits, eighty-eight-year-old Gao Ertai ventures out onto his back porch to gaze out over the mountains and let his brain wander to some other desert: the badlands of China’s Gansu province, where he has been exiled for two decades. and witnessed some of the worst crimes of the Mao era.
Gao’s descriptions of those moments have made him one of China’s most admired essayists. His most notable painting is “In Search of My Homeland,” a series of autobiographical sketches written in a sober, philosophical style. In China, the censors omitted some, namely delicate documents, however, the paintings are still largely intact and can be purchased, perhaps because the pieces are bloodless and detached, even if they faithfully bear witness to the famine, torture and betrayal. Berlin’s Liao Yiwu told me that the collection “could serve as a kind of history book. ” But, he added, “I read it over and over again for the language. “
Until recently, Gao’s readers were generally older people with a personal connection to the events he describes. But in recent years, Gao’s works have begun to circulate on Chinese social media. Some see in his denunciation of the Mao era parallels with the current situation in China: the arbitrary rule of an aging leader, the harsh treatment of dissent and systems of government that inspire other people to be informed about each other. Then there is Gao’s directness: he talks about his weaknesses and the Schadenfreude he feels when his tormentors come into conflict with factional politics and are persecuted themselves. In one case, he attacks a tyrant and beats him mercilessly. “There is a lot of authenticity in the writing,” novelist Ha Jin told me. “He is fair to himself. “
In an essay broadcast on WeChat, Gao and several others are banished to a remote hut to clear the land. They start hunting gazelles and end up having a good amount of food. Once the sentence is served, they face a dilemma: do they deserve to admit that they ate well?They were meant to work, not hunt. Some men are quick to remain silent and inspire others to do so. But can men accept the truth among themselves? By promising not to say anything, do you rarely pave the way for denouncing others?”Those who make statements are to be feared, but not as much as those who say nothing,” Gao writes.
I decided to stop over in Gao to find out how it feels about its new relevance. Lively, witty and passionate about fitness (he can still do twenty push-ups), Gao lives with his wife, Pu Xiaoyu, in a large housing estate. of modest bungalows, all beige or beige, with xeriscaped front yards. The couple’s home is bright and sparsely furnished, with canvases painted by Gao, an artist in training, elegantly stacked in front of one wall in the living room. demonic or mythical characters and lone survivors. In one of them, a red apparition turns out to be able to crush other people with a fly swatter. The office in Gao is quieter. It is filled with Chinese-language reference works, works on philosophy and classical literature, especially books written by Gao’s favorite poet, Du Fu, who wrote about war, famine and lost friendships in 8th-century China.
For two days, I chatted at the kitchen table with Gao, Pu, and a mutual friend of ours, the Chinese freelance journalist Jiang Xue. Gao, who is tall and thin, wore his silver hair pulled back in a ponytail; The soft and radiant face of Pu highlighted through circular glasses. Gao, who is in dire need of a hearing aid, relied on Pu to perceive our questions, but he answered lucidly and forcefully. She also helped him in a more vital way, through providing answers to his drafts that helped him set the philosophical tone of his essays.
“I have to thank him for that,” Gao said, explaining that when channeling his hatred toward the Cultural Revolution, Pu “would say, ‘This is the language of the Cultural Revolution, it’s tasteless, it’s boring, it’s ‘written in anger. ‘” ‘” He told us: “The explanation for the calm is because of her. » This moderation places “In Search of My Homeland” in a different category from most of the writings about the Mao era. Many of those other works, specifically about. the Cultural Revolution, known as “scar literature,” imply rage directed toward the afterlife or an attitude of self-pity In his appearance in “In Search of My Homeland,” Gao writes that some Chinese readers wondered why his writings lacked. the “warmth” of his predecessors. His reaction was that his generation had been educated to hate, but his reports had taught them to let their hate pass.
“I write about genuine things, genuine people,” he told me. I describe what I see. “
In popular culture, Las Vegas is a place where any sin committed there stays there: a purgatory of oblivion. For Gao, it is the opposite: a haven of memory, where he benefits from the calm and stability necessary to rediscover the past.
Gao’s trauma was rooted in beauty. The 1950s were an increasingly authoritarian era in China under its founding leader, Mao Zedong. Beauty was not in the eyes of those who beheld it; It was mainly explained through its use in the struggle for elegance. A peasant painting was revolutionary and therefore good. An ancient fresco depicting flying goddesses represented the interests of the ruling elites and had to be criticized or even destroyed.
Gao opposed this didactic vision. In 1957, when he was twenty-one, he was recruited to teach at a school in northwestern China’s Gansu Province. There he wrote essays on aesthetics, adding one entitled “On Beauty”. Hundred Flowers Campaign, a movement put forward by the Communist Party to inspire China’s professional elegance to voice their opinion. Gao’s essay was published and he became a minor celebrity.
That same year, Mao cracked down on those who dared to speak out – an occasion known as the Anti-Rightist Campaign, which silenced China’s graceful elegance and paved the way for twenty years of disastrous totalitarian rule. people were persecuted by “rightists”; many were imprisoned, banished or exiled. Gao among them and sent to Jiabiangou, an infamous hard labor camp.
Freed from possible criticism, Mao implemented a delusional economic crusade called the Great Leap Forward to industrialize China in the midst of disaster. The result of what is now known as the Great Famine, which lasted from 1958 to 1962, killed some forty-five million people. and it is widely considered to be the worst famine in history. In Jiabiangou, about two thousand prisoners died of starvation. Many have resorted to cannibalism.
Gao survived thanks to his education as an artist. In 1959, the Communist Party was making plans to celebrate its first decade of existence and needed other people who could illustrate its triumphs. Party officials in Lanzhou, capital of Gansu province, remembered Gao as a painter. It was taken from Jiabiangou, just as the first detainees were starving. His task was to paint epic canvases of the Party’s triumphs.
He had just over six months left to complete the paintings. At first it seemed like it was going to fail. Gao stayed in a luxury hotel, gorged himself on food and gained weight, but he was chronically exhausted. Malnutrition was like a depressant; His reaction time was so slow that he bumped into people. His legs were swollen from edema, making it difficult to climb the scaffolding surrounding the immense structures. After all, his strength returned as his deadline approached: October 1, China’s National Day.
Gao embarked on this mission, seeing it as the price of his survival. He painted portraits of healthy peasants and shrewd officials who won the Party’s praise; Gao was allowed to remain in Lanzhou to find more work until the summer of 1960. By then, so many detainees at Jiabiangou had starved to death that the camp was nearly closed. Gao ordered to report to some other camp, which was tough but allowed him to survive. He was detained for two years and then released.
The day after his release, Gao, a twenty-six-year-old man, dressed in torn clothes and only a sleeping bag, walked through famine-ravaged villages. He reflected on his long record as a convicted rightist, a prestige that made him a permanent pariah in Mao’s China. In his essay “Towards Life,” which has circulated on social media in recent years, he recalls: “I knew that going to school was impossible. I would be lucky to find a corner away from others and spend my days in peace, but in this China composed entirely of communes and soldiers, this wish is an illusion.
“After a while,” Gao continues, “I came up with a small oasis in the vast desert, the Mogao Caves in Dunhuang. It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of caves in the history of art. There are about seven hundred, filled Buddhist frescoes that blend Chinese, Western, Indian, and Central Asian cultures, from the 4th to the 14th centuries. Gao crossed the Gansu River to Dunhuang in hopes of examining the caves. It was set off for an assignment at the Dunhuang Research Institute; He ignored considerations about Gao’s political trustworthiness and hired him. This placed Gao in one of China’s most prominent cultural sites, comparable in importance to Beijing’s Forbidden City, just as it was about to be demoted by the Cultural Revolution.
When it was created in 1966, the institute’s leaders were beaten and tortured. “Overnight,” Gao later wrote, “these other gentle and reserved people turned into ferocious beasts and jumped and shouted violently, suddenly sang in the most sensitive tone of their voices, suddenly burst into tears, slapped each other, got up and shouted, ‘Long time!’ to live,” or to play gongs and drums to spread the mind of the “Great Man. ” In the entire Mogao Caves region, only the Buddha icons and bodhisattvas retained their dignity and self-control.
Gao was relegated to spending his days walking along cliffs and sweeping sand from caves. Previously, he had examined the frescoes for insights into life in medieval China. He had observed performances of agriculture, silkworm farming, weaving, construction, hunting, marriages, funerals, begging, butchery and martial arts. Today he writes: “Facing the walls of those small stone caves, I had a feeling of openness. It is a shame when evening falls and I have to go out again, with the others dragged outside, to make confessions in front of the icon of Chairman Mao, sing propaganda songs, listen to exhortations, denounce and criticize each other. be heard. -complaints and self-criticism. And like the ghosts written through Dante that bit, gnawed and tore at each other, we had nowhere to hide. There were walls everywhere.
Mao died in 1976 and the reformers took power. Two years later, Gao was officially exonerated and was able to leave his exile in northwestern China. He moved to Beijing, where he worked at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and soon after met Pu, who worked in the fine art office of the Capital Museum. They then moved to Chengdu, where they taught at Sichuan Normal University; They married in 1987. Gao began writing philosophical texts on the Marxist concept of alienation for a literary magazine called New Enlightenment. The essays were a direct critique of the regime because Marx described alienation as anything that happened in capitalist societies, i. e. , that does not happen in a communist state. Two years later, the government arrested him because his writings helped motivate student protests centered in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.
The arrest was a shock, he told me. Sichuan Normal University was very active on June 4,” the day the protests were violently suppressed, “but I didn’t participate,” he said. “I didn’t know what was happening, but I arrested him anyway. “
Gao imprisoned for more than 4 months. Once released in 1990, he began looking for a way to leave China. Two years later, he and Pu fled as part of a Hong Kong-based program to expel dissidents from China, known as Operation Yellow Bird.
Gao and Pu spent a few years in New York and New Jersey among the network of Chinese dissidents that had emerged in the United States after the Tiananmen Square massacre. But the couple never felt comfortable in the exile scene. Gao remembered that he hated the petty disputes that tormented him. In 2003, he won a scholarship to the University of Nevada. The couple has not left the state since.
Gao finished “Finding My Homeland” in Las Vegas, but had started it decades earlier. He had kept a diary, although on rare occasions versions of it had been confiscated and destroyed. Later, he took notes on pieces of paper, which he rolled up. or folded and then hidden in the lining of the cotton winter jackets once ubiquitous in northern China. Gao still helps save those notes in a giant photo album that he pulled out to show us. The handwriting is small and precise, with touchup marks showing that Gao was already seeking to refine his thoughts.
Gao’s publication history reflects the complexity of censorship in China. In the 1980s, her works on his aesthetics, added to those from the 1950s, were reprinted and now appear to pose no problems. In 2021, they were reprinted through Beijing Publishing Group, one of the largest publishers in the country. The company also reprinted one of Gao’s essay collections.
But, while the works that nearly led to Gao’s death in the 1950s are now widely available, his memoir has had a more complicated history. The first two sections of “In Search of My Motherland” were published in China in 2004. with an essay on his father’s death at the hands of the communists removed. A third section, dealing basically with the 1980s, adding Gao’s arrest after the Tiananmen massacre, has never been published in its entirety in China. The Uncensored Book, published in Taiwan in 2009, sixty-three essays. An edition published on the continent in 2011 and 2014 has two subsequent essays removed.
Unfortunately, the e-book suffered much more serious damage when it was translated into English in 2009; only a portion of the trials appear in an edition published through HarperCollins. The first section, about Gao’s youth and their reports on the Japanese invasion of China, adding a gruesome account of how the Communists killed his father, was omitted entirely, as it was the third section. What remains are Gao’s reports in Jiabiangou and Dunhuang, which are valuable testimonies of the Mao era, although in some tactics they are cliché: Chinese literature as crime literature. None of Gao’s other e-books have been translated into English.
If “In Search of My Homeland” still speaks to the Chinese people, it is due in part to the work of independent Chinese historians, who have kept the famines and camps of the Mao era in the popular consciousness, even as witnesses of this generation. They have. He died and the government tried to erase his memory. The writer Yang Xianhui, the underground filmmakers Hu Jie and Ai Xiaoming, and the Parisian director Wang Bing, among others, have contributed to the so-called Jiabiangou, an appropriate component of Chinese slang. And that, in turn, fueled interest in the Gao trials.
“People say things like, ‘Sooner or later, they’ll take you to Jiabiangou. ‘It’s like saying you’re going to the Gulag,” said Zhang Feng, a Chengdu-based blogger and recent visiting scholar at Columbia University. For me. ” These things are quite old for today’s young people, however, due to various restrictions” – especially severe COVID-related lockdowns – “people are curious about them. “
The complete Taiwanese edition of Gao’s essays is shared among readers in PDF format, although some mainland readers have difficulty with the popular Chinese characters used on the island. (Since the 1950s, the People’s Republic has replaced popular Chinese characters with simplified versions, similar to writing “across” as “across”. ) Some Gao enthusiasts on the mainland have restored the censored essays in the mainland edition and the have become a simplified version. characters.
Helen Gao (no relation), a young woman founded in Beijing, said Gao’s writings give her an idea of her grandparents’ generation. What caught her attention the most was the lack of autonomy in their lives. They were “like billiard balls,” he said, tossed from one end of China to the other.
“From the reader’s point of view, the distance between my life and Gao’s life is an advantage,” he wrote in an email. “This allows me to better appreciate “In Search of My Homeland” for the good appearance of its language, its philosophical reflections and its dark humor. It is this last facet that most fluidly connects the e-book with its readers today.
The last time Gao had close contact with young Chinese was in the 1980s, when he was training in Sichuan. But he was fascinated by the 2022 “white paper” protests, which opposed Xi’s draconian COVID policies. “China has barely replaced since 1949,” Gao told me. From poverty to relative wealth, with skyscrapers and bullet trains, these adjustments are superficial. The fundamental truth is that the Chinese Communist Party relies on lies and violence to oppress and exploit the Chinese people. “
Today, toward the end of his life, Gao has more private concerns. She is writing a new volume of memoirs, about her stay in the United States, taking walks and living a quiet life with Pu. He is very proud. of the mainland Chinese edition of “The Search for My Homeland”, although some essays have not been published. “It’s important,” he told me. I wrote it for the Chinese to read. ” ♦
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