“The prison has been built;
A name has been found,
The convicts know their guilt;
All’s right, peace abounds.”

Ji Xianlin’s pithy “ditty” makes guilt & punishment the conditions for peace, and the order in which these lines proceed is important. The prison is the first thing we build, then we go looking for names to fill the registry. Revolutions seem to require crude homogenization. We have a rough idea of who we’re mad at, but we’re still not totally sure how to pick them out of a crowd, so we devise a template from which to work after we’ve decided someone needs to pay for their crimes. The locus of public scorn, the bearer of guilt for present conditions, is forever shifting. This occurs frequently throughout this memoir. One day a student is passionately berating a former professor for their capitalist sins, and the next they are being tortured for a sentence they wrote in a diary several years ago:

"Not too long ago he had been aggressive and brimming with revolutionary zeal as part of a panel that interrogated me. It turned out that someone had finally discovered the skeletons in his closet. That night, he took a capitalist overdose of sleeping pills and 'alienated himself from the people.'"

Guilt didn’t even exist so much as it was manufactured in tandem with the prison. The illusive enemy of revolution is a strawman created to be destroyed. The justifications are therefore just as hollow. As Lu Xun is quoted: “animals do not lecture their victims on why it is right that they be eaten.” Our need to scrawl permissions for violence is uniquely human. Despite what revolutionary jargon can lead one to believe, the action is not predicated on survival, but passion & hatred.
What’s exceptional about this memoir is how unexceptional Ji Xianlin is, and I do not mean this disparagingly. When the revolution began to foment, he did not see the writing on the walls. He eagerly participated as a mature adult. He joined his students in shouting slogans. His crucial mistake was critiquing the loudest mouthpiece at the time, and he was never forgiven. From then on, red guards would break into his home and destroy his belongings. They would have him stand in the airplane position for hours while they beat him and screamed in his ears. They would escort him to “struggle sessions,” where groups of people (students, citizens, children) would berate & belittle him for being a “capitalist roader.” Posters were made with his name and position at the university, a green light for any individual to attack or insult him with abandon. He sees colleagues and former students reverse from revolutionary to untouchable in the span of a day, subjected to the same bouts of public humiliation.
What is unique about Ji Xianlin is the stolidity of his prose. He writes so squarely about suicide and violence. He says how he “knew of people who leaped off tall buildings and smashed themselves to pieces, or people whose bodies were ripped apart on train tracks.” Apparently, because so much Chinese medicine was herbal, “only Western sleeping pills [could] be repurposed for suicide, which is why this is a ‘capitalist’ method.” He then remarks: “Trust the capitalists to invent a safe, painless, convenient form of suicide.” The writing about intensely dark corners of humanity is so straightforward and formal sometimes as to be funny, like Kafka. Humor figures strangely into the lives of the survivors. He recalls a conversation he had with a colleague years later, in which the colleague refers to a proverb stating the scholar could be killed, but never humiliated; however, the colleague jokes, the Cultural Revolution proved the scholar could be both killed and humiliated. While bursting into laughter, tears began to stream down his face. Humor and tragedy are often one in the same; Melpomene & Thalia are depicted cheek to cheek. What’s more is how absurd the revolutionary caste system becomes: “Once, an eight-year-old with a brick in his hand called to me: ‘Come here! Let me hit you!’ I hurried away–but not too quickly, so as not to give the child a fright.” Even before being assailed with a brick, he can’t help but be polite to his assailant. There’s another moment where he mentions his habit of punctuality even in the context of torture, as he wouldn’t want a session “delayed on [his] account.” You never forget that these are all regular people.
The depictions of violence in this book are not as extreme as one might assume, as everything is only the author’s experience. We often measure tragedy in its blood toll, but this book indicates the power of psychological anguish: “I could endure beatings, hunger, and thirst for the time being, but it was the absence of hope that things would ever change which drove me to despondency.” He endured one of the more brutal beatings in the cowshed, yet he doesn’t detail what transpired, suggesting it was only a blip in the interminable span he spent as a blackguard. He recalls returning to his bed and seeing the horrified faces of his bunkmates, yet having no idea what he may have looked like, only the sensation of hot blood rolling down his head.

"As the proverb goes, a cracked jug may as well be smashed, and I had given up on myself as though I were a cracked jug. I was no longer tempted by suicide, nor did I think about the future. I had simply stopped caring who I was or what people thought of me."

In pop psychology and self-help, no longer caring about what people think of you is supposed to be liberatory, freedom from internalized critique. It’s repeated so frequently we forget the obverse side of that mental state. No longer caring what people think can make you reconsider whether you were right to rule out living in sewage. Suddenly, eating from dumpsters isn’t so bad because your status can’t really get any lower. You lose that tether to human socialization entirely. While freeing in a sense, one must consider what they’re free from.
Finally, what’s quite interesting to me is in the appendix to the memoir, Ji Xianlin ends with an almost boastful Chinese nationalism:

"There is only one thing of which I am certain: The twenty-first century will be the century in which the culture at the heart of Eastern civilization, Chinese culture, experiences a renaissance. Today’s most pressing questions of human survival, such as the explosion in population growth, environmental pollution, habitat destruction, the holes in the ozone layer, the limits of industrial food production, and the limited freshwater supply, can only be addressed by the Chinese civilization. This is my firm and final belief."

While I think nationalism is inherently caustic, this final paragraph speaks to a propensity for forgiveness one wouldn’t assume Ji Xianlin to have. He appears steadfast in separating Chinese culture writ large from what it became in the mid-nineteenth century. Despite the sadism, deaths, suffering, and ineptitude, China as a people will continue. Cultures change at glacial paces, and for all the (sometimes explosive) vicissitudes of the present, history is a long and rigid arc, to transpose MLK’s phrase. Whether that arc bends toward justice or destruction isn’t clear to me. I can’t bring myself to be as certain as Ji Xianlin. His willingness to forgive is astounding to me though. Not all of us can stand to be so farsighted. Crisis makes one myopic. I can only hope our barbarisms are discarded, not traded. ( )