Hu learned that Lin Zhao was released from prison on medical parole for several months in 1962, and that during that time she wrote a series of political essays and letters, including one to the president of Peking University. After finishing each piece, she sent a copy to the police, and another copy to the prison authorities. But she also gave a copy to an old classmate, someone who was not politically active and who escaped scrutiny by the party. Hu tracked down the classmate, and made arrangements to go see her. But before he could make the trip, he received a phone call from her son. The woman had passed away. Hu asked the man if his mother had said anything about Lin Zhao before her death, or if she had perhaps left a package for him. The man said he would check, but a few days later he called back and said he had found nothing.
Such disappointments were common in the course of Hu’s research. But he took heart that Lin Zhao had been thinking ahead and trying to hide copies of her writing. He was sure that there was a stash out there somewhere, just waiting to be discovered, and he was determined to find it. He was less certain about how he might obtain her prison writings, the material she had penned with her blood. But he was confident that he would find those, too. He had already unearthed so much of the buried past, and he had come to believe that the party could not keep such things hidden forever.
HU OFTEN WENT back to see the people he interviewed. At first he was being thorough, keeping in touch in case they had come across new material or located someone else for him to talk to. But then he found himself visiting them just for the company. He worked alone on the documentary for the most part. He had no colleagues, and other than his sister and a handful of others, he had no one to talk to about the film. Most of his friends weren’t interested and couldn’t understand his obsession with a woman long since dead. But the old Rightists he interviewed, men and women in their sixties and seventies, appreciated what he was doing. They shared his commitment to documenting Lin Zhao’s life, and they recognized the importance of recording this piece of history that they had lived through. Hu felt comfortable around them, and they welcomed him into their lives, too, for they understood loneliness.
One of the people Hu befriended was a retired librarian in Beijing named Gan Cui. He was an unassuming man in his late sixties, with thinning white hair, piercing dark eyes, and a smoker’s stained teeth. As a Rightist, he had spent much of his life doing hard labor in the desert province of Xinjiang, and the experience left him with a roughness that never completely disappeared, even after he was rehabilitated and sent to work at a literary research institute in Beijing. He dressed plainly, sometimes carelessly, with little regard for fashion; a typical outfit might include a ragged sweatshirt and green camouflage trousers, or a jacket with only the top buttons fastened. When they first arranged to meet, Hu walked by Gan twice without spotting him, because he looked more like an aging roughneck than a literary scholar. But Gan knew how to tell a story, and Hu went to see him whenever he made the trip to Beijing. He enjoyed sitting in Gan’s cramped apartment, sharing a pot of tea with the old man as his two pet macaws chirped in Chinese, “Hello, miss! Hello, miss!” And every time Hu visited, Gan shared a little more of his past.
As a young man, Gan was a journalism student at People’s University, a new school established by the party near Beida to train officials after the Revolution. During the Hundred Flowers Movement, he admired those who spoke out about the party’s shortcomings, but was shrewd enough never to make any speeches or put up any posters himself. His record was spotless, and he might have made it through the Anti-Rightist Campaign unscathed were it not for an incident at the start of the crackdown. At the time, the most prominent critic of the party on campus was a young woman in the law department named Lin Xiling. In a series of bold speeches at Beida, she rebuked the party as undemocratic, bolstering her arguments with details obtained from a boyfriend who worked for a senior party official. She described the party’s suppression of independent thinking as Stalinism, at a time when Stalin was still considered a hero, and she even challenged Mao himself. “Chairman Mao’s statements aren’t golden rules. Why can’t they be opposed?” she asked. Such daring won her a following on campuses across the country, but it also made her a target. When the Anti-Rightist Campaign began, party officials prepared an ambush. As an officer of the campus student association, Gan was told to invite Lin Xiling to a public debate but to make sure it turned into a denunciation session. He did as he was told. The first seven speakers he called followed the party’s script, delivering speeches condemning her. Then Lin asked if she had a right to speak. Without thinking, Gan said yes and gave her the floor. She was only able to say a few words before party loyalists shouted her down and seized the microphone from her. In the heat of the moment, Gan scolded the students who had disrupted his meeting: “Does it make sense to let only you speak but not to let her?” The outburst would cost him twenty-two years of his life. When the university failed to find enough Rightists to meet the party’s quota, it accused Gan of “supporting and sympathizing with Lin Xiling” and added him to the list.
At first he received the lightest possible sentence, a form of probation that allowed him to stay in school. He was told to report for work at the journalism department’s reference library, and it was there that he met Lin Zhao. She was twenty-six then, and had been sent to work in the library after her stint at the orchard at Beida. They were the only ones working in the library, and their job was to read through and catalogue its collection of old newspapers. But their supervisor was a kindly woman, and she let them have access to the library’s vast collection of old books. Gan found a rare block-printed edition of The Plum in the Golden Vase, the famed Ming Dynasty erotic novel, and spent most of his time studying that. Lin Zhao preferred more high-brow fare, novels from the Qing Dynasty written in classical Chinese. When she saw what Gan was reading, she laughed, and found another book for him: a translation of The Decameron, the collection of bawdy novellas by the fourteenth-century Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio.
As Rightists, they were both outcasts on campus, and naturally, they became friends. When Lin Zhao came down with tuberculosis in the winter and stopped coming to work, Gan visited her daily and tried to nurse her back to health. He moved a stove into her cold dorm room and made sure she had enough coal and firewood, and he brought her breakfast and lunch. When she lost her appetite for the dull fare from the cafeteria, he woke every morning at five to take a bus to a downtown hotel so he could bring her back a bowl of its tasty Cantonese porridge. As Lin Zhao began to recover, party officials noticed how much time the two spent together, and summoned Gan to a meeting, where he was warned that they were not permitted to date. Annoyed, he returned to Lin Zhao’s room and told her of the party’s latest commandment. She laughed, and asked if he was afraid. He said no, and she said, “Let’s go for a stroll.” And then the two began walking on campus holding hands, openly defying the party.
“It wasn’t that we developed what you would call a romantic relationship on our own,” Gan explained to Hu. “It was the organization that kept putting pressure on us about it…. The more they tried to prevent us from dating, with her personality and my personality, the more we dated, just to show them.”
Gan and Lin Zhao often went on long evening walks together, and on Saturday nights they might go dancing or take in a play if they could get free tickets. He learned to play the erhu, a classical Chinese string instrument, and serenaded her under the window of her second-floor dorm room. She put on a colorful qipao, a body-hugging traditional dress, when everyone else was wearing drab Mao suits, and took him to the restaurant of an expensive hotel. They ordered a single dish, the cheapest, fish head braised in soy sauce. As a child, Lin Zhao had attended a school run by Christian missionaries, and now she started going to church again, bringing Gan along. He watched in awe as she practiced English with the foreign diplomats who attended the service; like most other students, the only foreign language Gan could speak was Russian.
As graduation approached in the spring of 1959, Gan asked their party branch secretary for permission to marry Lin Zhao. The man immediately rejected the request, adding with contempt that two Rightists could never wed. Soon afterward, the party ordered Gan to report for labor reform in Xinjiang, the desolate province bordering Kazakhstan in China’s far west. He was being punished for his forbidden romance with Lin Zhao, who was being sent to Shanghai on medical parole. They tried to enjoy what was left of their time together, but the summer was fleeting, and in late September, Gan accompanied Lin Zhao to the city’s central train station. He promised to come find her as soon as he could, and he asked her to wait for him. Then they embraced on the platform and wept. She left on an overnight train heading south, and the next morning, Gan began his five-day trip west.
He spent the next twenty years on a military work crew in Xinjiang, digging up grass and other vegetation from the hard soil for use in cough syrup and other medicine. At first he wrote Lin Zhao a letter every week, but after six months she stopped writing back. A soldier returning home to Shanghai checked on her for him and sent a letter saying she was ill and in the hospital. But something about his choice of words led Gan to conclude she was really in prison. For years, he kept photos of her at his bedside, and she sometimes appeared in his dreams after the long days of backbreaking labor. Eventually, Gan gave up hope that he would ever be allowed to leave Xinjiang. He convinced himself that Lin Zhao had been more fortunate and had gotten married. It was not until 1979, after he was rehabilitated and allowed to return to Beijing, that he learned she had been executed.
Upon returning to Beijing, Gan moved on with his life. He married, divorced, and married again, and he had a son. But he told Hu he often found himself thinking about Lin Zhao. Sometimes he wondered how things might have been different if he and Lin Zhao had been allowed to marry. Perhaps, he said, he could have persuaded her to compromise and do what was necessary to survive. Perhaps, if they had settled down and started a family, she would have been more careful. Perhaps she would still be alive today. Once, when his wife was in the other room, Gan even told Hu that he had loved Lin Zhao more than he ever loved his wife.
But it was not until more than a year after Hu met him that Gan revealed to the filmmaker the depth of his devotion. Hu was in Beijing again, staying with his sister, when Gan called and asked if he could help him sell an antique book. Hu said he would drop by and take a look, but Gan insisted on bringing it to him instead. Later, Hu realized that Gan wanted to make sure he was telling the truth about where he was staying, a final precaution before placing his trust in him completely. He must have been reassured by meeting Hu’s sister and seeing her apartment, because then he told Hu his secret: He had a collection of Lin Zhao’s prison writings, nearly 140,000 words of it. Hu was dumbstruck. Was he hearing correctly? Could it be true? The disappointment would be unbearable if it wasn’t, and he didn’t want to get his hopes up. How could the old man have obtained such material, he wondered, and why did he hide it from him for so long? Gan wanted to show it to him, so they went back to his apartment, where he retrieved an old blue Adidas gym bag. From the bag he pulled out a thick stack of paper, bound with string and packed in brown wrapping paper. There were nearly five hundred yellowing pages, each full of writing in black ink, and he was willing to let Hu read it.
Later, Gan explained where the pages came from. After the Cultural Revolution, he had been fortunate enough to receive a letter from an old friend telling him to flee his prison crew and rush back to Beijing because the political winds had shifted and the Rightists were being rehabilitated. His escape and early return to the capital meant he was able to get permission to live and work in Beijing while most Rightists were assigned jobs near the labor camps where they had been held. Gan was given a position in the library of the Institute of Literature, a research center in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. The director of the institute, Xu Juemin, was married to a former classmate of Gan’s, and the couple often invited him to their home for dinner. On one such evening three years after he returned to Beijing, Gan walked in and saw a woman who looked just like Lin Zhao—it was her sister, Peng Lingfan. As it turned out, the institute director happened to be a distant cousin of Lin Zhao’s. The four of them spoke of little but Lin Zhao that evening. Gan thought it was as if fate had intervened to keep her in his life.
A few years later, Peng immigrated to the United States, and she gave the institute director a package of papers, photocopies of a portion of Lin Zhao’s prison writings. When the party was rehabilitating Rightists, Peng had fought to clear her sister’s name posthumously. A court eventually agreed but it didn’t provide any details of her case nor did it disclose the whereabouts of her remains. One afternoon, though, Peng was summoned to an office of the Shanghai public security bureau located on the Bund, the avenue of majestic European buildings on the Huangpu River. The official who met with her didn’t give his name, and instead of asking questions, he offered some answers. He said the city’s public security apparatus had long been divided about how to handle Lin Zhao, and even now, long after her death, the question of her rehabilitation remained a matter of intense dispute. Many people had been punished for trying to protect her, he said, and some had died for it. Her execution, he said, was approved by higher levels, and those who had argued for it continued to hold important posts. The official appeared nervous. “I hear you have an excellent memory, but there is no need to remember our conversation,” Peng later quoted him as saying. Then he gave Peng a bundle of papers. She recognized Lin Zhao’s handwriting immediately.
Gan knew nothing of the documents until long after Peng had moved to the United States. The institute director finally showed them to him and asked for his help. Both he and the director had retired by then, and the director’s eyesight was failing. He couldn’t read Lin Zhao’s handwriting, and hoped Gan might be able to decipher it. Gan took the papers home and kept them hidden. At the time, he was working as a volunteer in the guard booth at his apartment complex. Each morning before breakfast, he sat in the booth studying Lin Zhao’s writing, trying to make out the tiny, faded characters she scribbled so long ago in prison. The material was written in ink, but Lin Zhao indicated in the text that she had written almost all of it in blood first, then copied it after prison authorities gave her pen and paper. Now, slowly, Gan copied her words again, sentence by sentence, page by page. He worked on it at least an hour a day. Sometimes, in the privacy of the guard booth, he cried while reading her words and committing them to paper again. When he finished, the final product totaled 469 pages. And now it was in Hu’s hands. Gan told the filmmaker he could borrow it for three days.
Hu read feverishly deep into the night, driven by the excitement of discovery. Nearly two years had passed since he first heard Lin Zhao’s name and set out to find her prison writings, and he could scarcely believe they were finally in his possession. He had been looking for them for so long, and he had heard so much about Lin Zhao’s literary talent, that it seemed unlikely these pages could meet his expectations. And yet they did. He was mesmerized by the material, blown away by the passion and intensity of her words. He was reading a copy of a copy of a copy, but the writing was so fierce that it made sense to Hu that it had originally been written in blood.
The document was ostensibly a letter to the editors of the People’s Daily, the party’s official newspaper, but it was unlike any letter Hu had ever seen. The main text was 438 pages long, and there were eight appendices of material. Lin Zhao appeared to have composed the letter over a period of several months when she was thirty-two; in the first paragraph, she wrote that it was Bastille Day, July 14, but by the time she signed and dated the letter, it was December 5, 1965. The main body was a stream of thoughts, arguments, and accounts of prison experiences presented in a long, meandering text without any clear structure. Some parts read like a diary, other parts like a manifesto, and occasionally it deteriorated into an incoherent rant, but every page was brimming with emotion and defiance.
“The Anti-Rightist Campaign—that miserable reign of terror in 1957 left a mark and a void in the lives of many people, and in the life of this young person,” Lin Zhao wrote near the top of the letter.
Of course, this was the Communist Party’s fault! It was not only wrong, it was outrageously wrong! Whenever I think of that miserable year, 1957, my gut aches and I cringe! Truly, whenever this particular year is mentioned, whenever I see it or hear it, it is as if I have been conditioned to feel pain! Until then, the intellectuals of China still retained some sense of justice, but after that year, it was almost completely destroyed, wiped out! Your respected newspaper, gentlemen, once again fostered violence and reeked of blood!
Out of Mao's Shadow Page 8
