Grass Soup

by Zhang Xianliang, Martha Avery (Translator)

Zhang Xianliang, one of China's greatest living writers, spent twenty-two years in Chinese prisons and labor camps until his "rehabilitation" in 1979. Through most of those years he kept a diary of his experiences. Because any detail would have meant the diary's destruction and Zhang's execution, the entries were curt and cryptic; sometimes entire days were condensed into two or three words. This is a frightening portrait of how a major civilization can bring itself to its knees by mass complicity, told with a deft matter-of-factness that only highlights the horror.

Genres: China, Nonfiction, Memoir, History, Asia, Chinese Literature

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Zhang Xianliang (Chinese: 张贤亮; December 1936 – 27 September 2014) was a Chinese author and poet, and former president of the China Writer Association in Ningxia. He was detained as a political prisoner during the Anti-Rightist Movement in 1957, until his political rehabilitation in 1979. His most well known works, including Half of Man is Woman and Grass Soup, were semi-autobiographical reflections on his life experiences in prison and in witnessing the political upheaval of China during the Cultural Revolution.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Lorenzo Berardi · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Grass Soup" is an extraordinary little book dealing with the infamous Chinese "labour camps" during the worst years of the Communist regime, when the horrors of Bejing rhymed with the ones of Pyongyang.

At that time, Zhang Xianliang was barely 23 years old but already labelled as a right-wing extremist and an enemy of the Chinese people. Zhang was an "intellectual", a pernicious, disgusting semi-human sub-specie created by the evil influence of the American imperialism in the socialist Chinese motherland.

And yet, due to his status of a potentially "useful intellectual" being only mildly corrupted by the Western enticements and having an undeniable skill for writing sharp tazebao and elegiac poems to the Great Helmsman, Zhang only needed to be "re-educated".
A strict and extended diet of green grass and red ideology under the blue skies of China would have healed comrade Xianliang, just in case he managed to pull himself together and keep himself alive.

And Zhang Xianliang got by. Despite all odds and difficulties he survived to his re-education and, years later, wrote a book out of the dry notes he took during the long hard months he spent at the labour camp. Zhang wrote no diary. The tiredness of his body and the fear of the recoils he could have experienced has his notes being read by the authorities (as they eventually did), forced Zhang not to leave a written trace of his daily torments.

Zhang was no Primo Levi and no Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. He wrote "Grass Soup" as a free man and when his own mind had cooled off, but his goal was not to reveal the horrors of the Chinese re-education scheme or show the existence of a labour camps archipelago in China, but rather to look back at himself in those days.

"What I was thinking to when I wrote down those dry monotonous notes and what lies beyond their apparent repetitiveness? And how much the impact of hunger into my stomach and brainwashing into my mind annihilated the intellectual betrayed by his brain making a self-preservation instinct driven man out of me?".

Zhang Xianliang never poses these two straight questions to himself here, but both are implicitly stressed out all through the pages of this book.
The wonder of "Grass Soup" is that is a heartbraking story, the account of a small personal victory into a wider national defeat, but there is humour and even fun here. Mr Xianliang chose a style which combines miracolously well unforgettable scenes of death and human abjection with equally memorable moments of temporary peace of mind through laughters, one's fill and moral resistance.

The author spending a whole afternoon just eating kilos and kilos of melons and pissing in a grove or the vain pursuit up and down the river bank of a cow with her tempting udders full of milk, are comic highlights. But then again these "Life is Beautiful-like" moments were brought by hunger and desperation.
The fact that Mr Xianliang survived to his re-education was due to his ability of not giving up in the darkest times, behaving with well-chosen impulsiveness and with the awareness that the thin line separating the saved from the drowned was partly luck but, above all, a matter of self-discipline.

[Velvetink · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thought police Mao style, 1950's & 1960's. Re-education work camps. It's not great literature, but even so, Zhang's descriptions of the political mind games & austerity stay with you. I'm left thinking about grass as food and how any kind of extreme ideology brings out the worst in humanity.





50cents 17//1/14

[That dorky lady · Rating 2 out of 5]

ಬಹುಶಃ ಇದರ ಮೂಲ ಚೆನ್ನಾಗೇ ಇದ್ದೀತು. ಕನ್ನಡ ಅನುವಾದ ನುಂಗಲಾರದ ತುತ್ತು. ಕಷ್ಟಪಟ್ಟು ಇದನ್ನು ಓದೋದಕ್ಕಿಂತ (ಮೂಲ ಹೇಗೂ out of question ಆದ್ದರಿಂದ) ಇಂಗ್ಲಿಷ್ ಅನುವಾದ ಓದುವುದು ಉಚಿತ ಅನ್ನಿಸ್ತಿದೆ. Stopped reading at page 29.

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

In 1958 at the age of 23 Xianliang was imprisoned for being a poet and an intellectual.

Two years later he was allowed to keep a small notebook and a pen, and began to keep a diary. Almost all his notes and camp records were destroyed in front of him but the authorities allowed him to keep his notebook, from that he wrote of his experiences in the camp, deciphering the cryptic notes.

It is a heart wrenching tale. He was treated harshly, like all the others in the camp, but never brutally. They were expected to do hard labour, and would graduate onto other tasks for good behaviour. The food was a thin, barely nutritious grass soup, made from thinning from beet or rice.

He suffered this for 22 years before the authorities saw fit to release him. He had been regularly dismissed as a capitalist for any minor infringement, and even though he suffered greatly, he never lost his humanity. It is a fascinating book, and timely too as the Chinese authorities announced this week that they would be closing these camps. Finally.

[Philip · Rating 4 out of 5]

Can it be that the precious springtime in my life, expended in hard labour, has nothing more to show for itself than this? The yellowing pages, the fading ink of the characters lead me back, one by one, to past events. They make it impossible for me to doubt that these events did indeed make up my life. I do not want to judge the past. I also do not want to use material that has only recently become available to enhance these notes. I want the diary to stand as an original manuscript, telling people just how far the world can fall. And how, even at that debased material and spiritual level, people go on living. Pg.7

I originally hesitated in picking up this book as I didn't just want to read another horrifying account of the Chinese cultural revolution. Unfortunately, when leafing through the work, Xianliang's references to Don Quixote and western philosophy drew me in. As someone who hopes to be well-read themselves how can I abandon a fellow reader in the worst time of his life. As an intellectual Xianlang fell into the rightest camp, as someone in between the Chinese people and western capitalists, and was "lucky" enough to share his hard labor camp with other writers, engineers and professors. In this way their thought crimes were actually treated worse than traditional criminals, who were still thought to hold a place within the Chinese general society and would actively commit even more crimes to escape the hard labor camp if they happened to fall into one. At least criminals got some days off. As someone who has only an inkling of Chinese culture, I hear a lot of how important food and food security is to the Chinese people. Something like the most common greeting amongst people is the saying translated as: "Have you eaten yet?" And after reading this work I can understand why, experiencing years of hunger and near-famine of a country wide scale turns a person inside out. Xianliang himself laments at the feeling of losing his humanity, writing that at a certain level of hunger nothing else matters, your friends and family included, everything is seen as a means of getting food. And in an odd turn of events, one of his cell-mates, a non-intellectual Muslim religious leader notes to him the truth that the longer one keeps someone on the edge of starvation the easier it is to control and brainwash them. Overall, this is a pretty depressing book, especially the ending, and it's only part 1 of Xianliang's memoirs. Definitely going to take a break before tackling part 2, but would recommend to other readers interested in recent Chinese history.

This work has quite a few noteworthy quotes I wanted to keep in mind:
"As I wrote it, the first thing I would think of was not what had happened on a particular day, nor of the thoughts I might have had that were worth setting down. Instead, I would think first of the events or thoughts that I must absolutely not write down. The social circumstances in which we were living at that time did not allow a person to have personal thoughts or private matters. Anything private had to be 'handed over' to the Party. This included, of course, a diary. Depending on the degree of secrecy and the degree of evasion, the leaders would evaluate one's loyalty to the Party. People who willingly handed over their most unmentionable secrets were considered to be most loyal."
"In order to express absolute loyalty, infinite loyalty, some people would fabricate anti-Party and anti-Socialist thoughts that they had never had. It was these people who eventually suffered most, who were thrown into the labour camps to be reformed. Among the multitude of 'thought criminals', people who were sentenced because of their thinking, many had handed over diaries to the leaders which contained a few words or sentences that were incriminating."
"So, experience taught people to be hypocritical. As political movements started rolling over the country, gathering in ever more people, the experience became general, to the point that dishonesty became a common practice among all Chinese. Dishonesty not only permeated our daily lives, it affected our standard of ethics and culture - not just then but also later." (Page 4)

"Leaders who had some experience in the matter seldom used the enticement of good times in the future to make people work. Instead, they used the hard times of the past to drive people on. The panorama of the future was much too indistinct, whereas the pain and trauma of the past were real." (Page 34)

"Have you ever heard more than one thousand people coughing hard at the same time? It was an intense, wild coughing, an explosive sound erupting uncontrollably from unhealthy lungs. It was like the crashing of ocean waves coming in from a distance, one wave always higher than the next. Especially during late rollcall on a winter night, the coughing could almost make the freezing air shiver. You simply could not believe that the ear-splitting sound was coming from the human respiratory system. It was more like glass being shattered. Some coughs were low and suppressed, others resounded, some were extended, others were short barks. Some were accompanied by phlegm, others were a dry rasping that wouldn't stop. It was though every animal in a forest had simultaneously begun to roar. I have never seen this bone-chilling collective coughing described in any book about concentration camps or prisons." (Page 65)

"The trick could be summed up by the phrase 'borrowing a body to put your soul in'. No matter what inspiration poets got from nature, life, love, anything that sparked a passionate response, the result had to be neatly redirected to some leader who was to be praised. Artistic sentiments could certainly be expressed - they just had to be associated with someone it was permissible to extol. For example, memories of one's mother, or love for one's mother, had to be changed to love for the Party. Anything to do with the sun, or moon, or glorious sunrises, in fact all of Nature's rays of light, had to applied to the Great Chairman Mao Zedong. Light could be used only to describe him. Any tended emotions born of feelings for a young woman, or a lover, were best applied to lauding the achievements of textile workers, or female tractor drivers. Poetic sensitivity might be graced with the most exquisite sentences, with what is often called divine inspiration, but the poet had better bestow that inspiration on something to do with a hydroelectric plant. Modern farming equipment, a steel furnace, a lathe etc. would also do. My poem 'Train' is an example. All of these came under the rubric 'New Things Produced by Socialism'. Without this device, you would have no place to express your poetic impulse, and it would slowly disappear from your mind." (Page 73)

"By then, the policy of 'lowered-rations-to-be-substituted-with-gourds-and-greens' had already been in effect for more than a year. Those who were close to dying had already died; those who hadn't died were now in the process. People were going rapidly in succession. In the end, whether or not one would die depended on fate. Would I die? I had no way of knowing. I knew only that the weakness and exhaustion of my body was something I had never seen described in any work of literature, from Qu Yuan and Homer all the way down to today. I won't repeat what I have already written about that, but I want to add one point. Every moment, twenty-four hours a day, I had to be aware that I must not forget to breathe." (Page 80)

"I have written 'poverty-of-thinking', but the one thing our impoverished country did not lack at all just then was 'thinking'. The leaders were madly checking out every person's thoughts, sorry only that they could not reach into each brain, scrape out what was there and examine it under a microscope. Every evening, in the small-group discussion meetings, the lifestyle-investigation meetings, during the Individual Thought reports, the Personal Summary of Reform Improvement reports, it was emphasized over and over again that every person had to 'hand-over', expose, his own thinking." (Page 210)

"I knew then that the most beautiful thing on earth is not discovering the truth, as books say, or sex with a woman, as the criminal convicts were always saying. Instead, the most beautiful thing is to be full." (Page 221)

[Grace · Rating 5 out of 5]

a beautiful, poignant, poetically written memoir of the author's golden years spent in LABOR REFORMATION CAMPS. seriously, it's amazing writing and very worth the read if you're interested in a "dissident" (totally harmless poet's) view of this dark corner of chinese history.

[Sara Haenes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Provocative but sad. Set in a Chinese concentration camp.

[nicole · Rating 4 out of 5]

sooo fascinating!

[Nan Clarke · Rating 2 out of 5]

I tried to like this book but couldn’t. The period of China’s history covered in the book interests and saddens me. Autobiographies and memoirs are among my favorite genres. So I should have been drawn into Xianliang’s story, but that never happened. I got through the first fifty pages or so, flipped to the last twenty pages, read them, and considered myself done.

I cannot complain about the book itself; I simply did not care for the writer’s style.

[Gul · Rating 5 out of 5]

Disturbing account of labor reform camps in China under Mao. Worth a read.

[Danielle · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is like a diary/memoir. This story took place during the Chinese Revolution, and because it is written in a form of a diary/memoir some texts can be viewed as the "dark times".

[Hanna (lapetiteboleyn) · Rating 5 out of 5]

A devastating and fascinating look into Mao's reform camps.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was OK l suppose

[Hamish Scott-Brown · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hard going and depressing but worth reading if you'd like an incite into hardships and life north of the DMZ in Korea

[Dixie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This non-fiction account of the Chinese writer, Zhang Xianliang's twenty-two years in Chinese prisons & labor camps until he was "rehabilitated" in 1979 is amazing. Condemned as an "intellectual. "The story is from diaries that during most of the years in prison he kept. With his potential for being executed for the diary, it is beyond me to think how he wrote it in the first place and then was able to keep it a secret and then write this book & live! A look into how a major country almost destroyed itself with ridiculous policies and statements that so many knew were not working or true. Even the author's words treat the matter of having to eat grass because no food could be grown, so many dying all around so routine, shows how horrible things were. The book even talks of how easy escape was, but the Chinese people all over the country were starving by the millions, so many prisoners actually chose to stay there because they usually had more food than those on the outside. The author did escape only to return for this very reason.

(There seems to be new evidence indicating the number of Chinese who died between 1950 - 1976 (by violent political campaigns and starvation) – is millions higher than previously thought. Some estimates say that Mao’s repression, radicalism and neglect may have been responsible for up to 80 million deaths).

[Lori Clark-Erickson]

Lexile: 1130
Historical Event/Time Period: Chinese labor camps in the 1960 19s
Liked: The story took place in China and told some very interesting things about the Chinese Government. This is quite an interesting book if you are into Chinese history.
Disliked: The main character rambles on a lot about his hunger and his fatigue.
Summary: Zhang, who was sent to the Chinese labor camp for being a writer and a poet, is trying to survive the hardship of the camp. Food rationing across China has been taken due to a famine which is causing many to die in the camp. Zhang writes of his days in a journal that tells of how he survived this horrible imprisonment.

[Judi · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an expanded diary of an intellectual who spent 22years in Chinese prison and labor camps. This book covers his entries from 1960, which he wrote in brief and then expanded into this book. Awful, awful -- what was Mao thinking? Why did the people go along with this? Shocking fact: famine-related deaths in China from 1960-62 are estimated at 30,000,000! For me who knows virtually nothing of Chinese history, this book left me with more questions than answers about the Cultural Revolution and Chinese history.

[Paula Nichols · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this already knowing a little about this period of Chinese history, and the paranoia bred into people thanks to the different drives for 'honesty' put in place by the Mao leadership. Zhang describes the relentless questionings of himself and his fellow prisoners well, and the mental punishments and endless self examinations endured. It's not what I would call a 'fun' read, nor is it particularly gripping in story - after all it is a diary. However, to understand what the Chinese people endured during this period is important, and is often overlooked.

[Mimonni · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vent’anni passati in una campo di correzione attraverso il lavoro in cina danno vita a uno stringato diario che l’autore usa come filo conduttore per narrarci questa disumana esperienza. Ne traspare tutto lo stupore di essere sopravvissuto e aver potuto vivere l’annientamento fisico e psicologico riservato agli intellettuali. Nell’incomprensibilità degli eventi traspare sempre una sorte di piccola luce interiore, ancora quello stupore di riuscire a vivere nonostante tutto.

[Brooke Marie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Again, having to read this one for China class =/ NOT looking forward to it...uck. Stay tuned....

Well I finally finished it. It took awhile. I didn't care for it. There were interesting parts, but overall, i guess i just didn't like the style of writing.

[Pola · Rating 4 out of 5]

Przerażające, jak wiele cierpienia jest w stanie człowiek przetrwać. Do czego człowiek jest zdolny, żeby siebie ocalić, mimo, że wie jak irracjonalne działania musi podjąć. Samokrytyka, wiece, szpiegowanie i wydawanie współwięźniów nabiera innego wymiaru, gdy jest wynikiem chęci ocalenia siebie.

[Reuel · Rating 3 out of 5]

A memoir of China's Cultural Revolution.

[circle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Skipped some pages