The Secret Piano: From Mao's Labor Camps to Bach's Goldberg Variations (12 page)

The streets of Beijing were deserted, emptied out after the departure of the city’s inhabitants. This contrasted sharply with the packed railway station plastered with banners glorifying the Revolution.

I pushed my way through the dense crowd, trying to get my bearings. Finally, I found the platform where we had been told to assemble. My future comrades slowly began to arrive. Every art school in Beijing was there—the Conservatory, the Fine Arts Academy, the Film Academy, the Dance Academy, and the Opera School. A soldier checked off each new arrival and assigned us to a section. Two cars had been reserved for us on a passenger train headed for Zhangjiakou.

As I waited to leave, I glanced around me. Families were separating: couples exchanged last, tender words, grandparents whispered good-byes to their children. People gazed at each other, some thinking they would never see each other again. At a distance, I could see young mothers handing their babies over to their families. I felt ill at the sight, and my courage flagged. Then I pulled myself together; this was ridiculous. A real revolutionary rejects all sentimentalism.

We were about a hundred people altogether. The soldiers ordered us to board the train cars. After an initial jolt, the train set off. Slowly and quietly, the Beijing station receded. Shortly after our departure, our
jiji fenzi
—the activist assigned to our section—encouraged us to break into revolutionary songs to the glory of Chairman Mao, and to read aloud selections from
The Little Red Book
. Halfway through our trip, the sky darkened. I looked out the window: the clouds were so threatening, one had the impression it was already night. The landscape was no longer visible; a few lights appeared here and there.

At the end of the day, we arrived in Zhangjiakou. The soldiers directed us to get off the train. After lining us up in front of the station, they packed us into two open military trucks, fifty students in each. Our destination: camp 4619 in Yaozhanpu.

We crossed the city of Zhangjiakou. We were a mere three hundred miles from Beijing, but it felt like the end of the earth. The unpaved streets were empty; the only sound came from our trucks. I looked at the modern, ugly buildings. Any invasion by the Soviets would pass directly through Zhangjiakou. This was no doubt why the city had been left in its present state, more of a big village than a city. It was hard to imagine that it had once enjoyed a Golden Age in the seventeenth century under the Qing Dynasty. It had been the center of tea and opium trading between China and Russia. Today everything exuded an air of poverty and gloom.

We left the city and turned onto a road full of potholes. Two hours later, we finally reached our destination, our faces covered in dust. We no longer resembled human beings; it was difficult to recognize one another. A harbinger of the years to come.

The Yaozhanpu camp was up in the hills. It was composed of three low, military-style buildings made out of red brick, positioned around a large square.

“Line up!”

We stood at attention in the dark and cold.

“Students, you will be divided up into sections. Then you will go to your quarters.”

Along with the rest of my section, I entered the room that had been assigned to us. Ten straw mattresses lay directly on the floor of a two-hundred-square-foot room. They were so narrow I wondered how we were ever going to sleep. I placed my things down on mine; it was covered with cockroaches. At that moment a soldier entered.

“Students, report to the mess hall!”

At the entrance to the hall, we were each handed an old, filthy mess kit. It looked as though it had served as a chamber pot, rather than a bowl. My stomach tightened, and I couldn’t eat a single thing.

That first night, I was unable to sleep. I thought about the cockroaches. I was sure they were going to crawl into my ears and puncture my eardrums. The girl next to me, Ouyan, was also a pianist. Each time she shifted, I woke up. We finally decided to lie head to foot, so we could get some rest.

The next morning at six, we were awoken by a soldier, and soon we were assembled on the square in front of our barracks. A fifty-year-old man with compassionate eyes approached us. He was Tian, the camp commander. He observed us at length, then addressed us in a serious voice:

“Among you there are tigers and dragons (a Chinese expression meaning “remarkable individuals”), but your minds remain bourgeois. This is why you must be re-educated.”

After Tian’s short speech, other soldiers explained our schedule and informed us about the rules of the camp. Everything was regulated, down to the smallest detail: only black, blue, and gray clothing was allowed; hair must be short; everyone was to wear the same cap; for the women, no skirts were allowed.

In a very short time, my hope of learning and transforming myself into a real revolutionary collapsed. The goal of camp life was not to educate us—it was to break us. Every day was the same, structured around the same hard labor. I didn’t know it at the time, but it would last five years.

Every morning, we were awoken at six.

“On your feet!” shouted the soldier in charge of our room, switching on the light.

The day began with running and marching exercises. Then we studied Mao’s
Little Red Book
for an hour, and always the same passages. We focused on two fundamental essays, “On Practice” and “On Contradiction,” and on two texts: “Serve the People,” a speech given in memory of Chang Se-di, a soldier who had given his life for the people, and “The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains,” the story of an old man who decided to use a hoe to remove two high mountains that were blocking the way to his house. His neighbor made fun of him, but not Heaven, who finally sent down two angels to carry the mountains away on their backs. For Mao, the two mountains were imperialism and feudalism.

At eight o’clock, having finished our study of
The Little Red Book
, we left for the fields. Our mission was to cultivate rice, in an area of China that was highly unsuitable for rice growing. Dry, sterile stretches of land lay battered by glacial winds and hemmed in by ominous yellow and black hills. Our first task was to dig irrigation ditches, using shovels that were for the most part broken. After that, we brought excrement from the camp latrines to spread on the fields. Then we carried water, which we poured into the ditches.

After a few minutes standing in freezing water, I no longer had any sensation in my feet. I often ran a fever, which caused me to sweat. My periods stopped, and I suffered from stomach pains, but there was neither a doctor nor a nurse in the camp. A few workmates knew the basics of acupuncture, which somewhat lessened my pain. In the summer, we were covered in insect bites, and leeches clung to our legs. I tried hard to reason with myself, but my courage failed me.

To spur us on, our
jiji fenzi
—with the help of the soldiers—organized competitions among us. How quickly could we dig this ditch? Who could fetch water the fastest? Who could haul back the largest amount of excrement from the latrines? Our
jiji fenzi
set an example by working faster than we did. I tried my best, anxious about criticism that might await me during that evening’s public denunciation session. Given my small build, however, I never had the slightest hope of winning.

We ate our midday meal right there in the fields. One of us was given the task of fetching hot water and food, generally potatoes, which we cut up each day in a different manner—in little cubes, in strips, in slices—or mixed with a bit of cabbage and carrots, just for a change. Occasionally we were allowed to have pork.

The afternoons were endless, even worse than the mornings, and I looked at my watch every five minutes. We worked until sundown. Then we returned to the camp. After sweating all day while standing in water, we were unimaginably filthy. Before we were allowed to wash, however, we had to go immediately to a self-criticism and denunciation session. This was not an arbitrary rule, and it played a role in our “re-education”: not allowing us to wash was just one way among many to deprive us of our dignity.

In small groups of ten, we were put under the authority of a soldier who had been trained in the art of pitting us against one another. I was well acquainted with self-criticism sessions, but this godforsaken place gave them a very particular cast. We quickly understood what was at stake, although it was never explicitly stated: those who demonstrated the best behavior would be allowed to leave first. The battle had begun, and the prize was our freedom.

When existence is reduced to a series of deadening tasks, when no higher consciousness, either cultural or religious, is there to guide one’s instincts, the only way to defend oneself is to attack. “Zhang didn’t work enough,” a comrade would exclaim. “He spent twenty minutes in the latrine!” Zhang would then respond in kind: “I heard Li complaining twice about camp conditions!” We left these sessions exhausted. Conversation was impossible. We couldn’t even look each other in the eye. And yet, we had to continue to live together.

We returned to the dormitory, where we ate dinner seated on our straw mats: potatoes with cabbage, accompanied by small yellow rice. It wasn’t until dinner was over that we finally had the right to clean ourselves up. Bent over a hole dug in the corner of the room, we splashed ourselves with a bit of water. In front of the others. Here, there was no room for any sort of privacy. The very notion implied a bourgeois attitude.

After washing, we finally had the courage to look at each other and exchange a few words. But the only place that we could speak freely was a little adjoining room where we went to get hot water.

Guo Baochang, an exceptional individual, held forth there. One day, he would become one of China’s greatest filmmakers. He was older than the rest of us, and the minute he arrived in camp he was considered to be a serious opponent to the Revolution. For this reason, he was given the task of heating water for the camp. Every day he carried large amounts of water and coal, going from the freezing cold outside to the sweaty heat of the boiler. Despite this, he was always in a good mood.

He had recently fallen in love with one of us, a very pretty singer from the Conservatory. In order to declare his undying affection in the traditional Chinese manner, he asked someone to deliver a love letter. His choice of messenger was, he thought, a cautious one: a young student from the Beijing Opera with so little schooling that he had trouble writing his own self-criticisms. Guo Baochang believed he was safe. Unfortunately, the young artist was not only uneducated, he was also nosy. He opened the letter, and discovered a text so difficult that he couldn’t even decipher it with a dictionary. So he asked a few of his comrades for help, and before the message had even reached the beloved, the whole camp knew about it!