Xianliang Zhang (1936–2014)

In 1956 during the Hundred Flowers Movement, the author, Zhang Xianliang, was imprisoned for writing rightist poetry. He was shuttled between prison, labor camps, and state farms for the next twenty years and was only rehabilitated after Mao's death. This novel takes place in the same places he was held, and his protagonist is also named Zhang. This is not, however, a memoir, it's a philosophical novel about the emasculation of the intelligentsia by the waves of repression that swept the country and about the cost of survival in such a regime.

One night in 1966, Zhang is out inspecting the irrigation canals and hoping to bag a duck, when he sees a naked woman bathing in a secluded spot. He is mesmerized. Having been in prison and labor camps since he was a youth, he is a virgin and has rarely even seen women in the last decade. Their eyes meet and Zhang feels that he has met the feminine ideal. She is more crude about it. Ten years later they meet again. This time they make a connection and although he has been "hatted" as a counter-revolutionary and rightist, and she has been married and divorced twice, they decide to marry. Unfortunately, Zhang is impotent and their relationship is tested.

This novel was very popular in China when it was published in 1985, but Zhang's writings were later banned during the crackdowns on writers for being "vulgar" . Although the novel is critical of the regime of the time, his protagonist remains a committed Communist and struggles with how best to help his country get back on the right track. I wish there had been a few more footnotes, because some of the allusions to contemporaneous events and personages were difficult to place. Despite the grim circumstances, the novel is funny at times and not a slog to read. The most philosophical passages are exchanges between Zhang and his horse. Although I wouldn't recommend it as the first book to read about the time period, it is an interesting take on the absurdities of life at the time.… (more)

Xianliang Zhang was 21-years-old when he was first sent to a forced labor reeducation camp during the Anti-Rightist Campaign. His poetry had been deemed counter-revolutionary and he would spend a total of 22 years in the camps and prisons over the course of his life. This book is based on scraps of a diary he kept and covers a relatively short amount of time: June 11-September 8, 1960. Each chapter begins with a few diary entries, usually only a sentence or two per entry, and then the author describes all that he could not say about what happened on those days. Because his diary was subject to confiscation and reading by the censors at any time, he had to be extremely circumspect about what he said. But now the author is able to reconstruct the past from the clues in what was said, and equally important what was not said, as well as reflect on the experience from a point decades in the future. The result is a fascinating diary/memoir/history of the day-to-day life of an intellectual struggling to survive famine, but also of the mental gymnastics required to "rehabilitate" oneself when accused of wrong thoughts.… (more)