My Bodhi Tree

by Zhang Xianliang

THE BOOK: 'A man searching for a cabbage finds he is pulling at a frozen corpse. Offered a bowl of hot water, he discovers a boiled baby curled up inside. Snapshots from the landscape of starvation cram My Bodhi Tree, the Chinese poet Zhang Xianliang's sequel to his bestselling Grass Soup. Here, Zhang covers one year out of the 22 he spent as a political prisoner : 1960, when Mao Tse-tung's policies triggered a famine claiming 30 million lives. A brilliant study of the psychology of survival, the book shows, too, how hunger dehumanised an entire generation, kickstarting the atrocities of the Cultural Revolution and after'. - New Scientist.

226 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1994

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

[Gu Kun · Rating 5 out of 5]

Of all the heart-rending true stories from China I've read since the 1970s this one is the most gripping. Probably for its unimpassioned tone. It's about hunger.

[Philip · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can say now that after finishing the second and last part of Xianliang's journey through the hard-labor camps that his story is compelling. Credit has to be given to the translator Martha Avery for transposing the literary value of this work, as well as to Xianliang's ability as an author, as I never felt any hiccups from clunky dialogue or sentence structure which could result as words and phrases are translated from one language to the another. I think the one moment where Xianliang captured my heart as a foreign reader is when he started referencing Hegel, there's just something audacious about a Chinese intellectual imprisoned for thought crimes using western philosophers to describe his experience starving to near-death in a labor camp. This also says volumes about the type of individuals who were uprooted from an academic life to do, ultimately, meaningless and inefficient hard-labor. In volume 1, Xianliang talks about how, given one pot of communal gruel, each work party sought out ways to divide it fairly, and unsurprisingly, in a camp made up of engineers and university professors, ingenious levels of reasoning and tools were crafted to carry out this task. In some ways you can see the tragedy of the cultural revolution, a highly educated engineer, maybe an expert in the planning and manufacture of railroads, wasting all his energy to make a system of weights and measures for thin rice porridge. Xianliang laments over the fate of an entire generation of intellectuals who were steeped in and believed in communist ideology, that for all their hopes and dreams for the future, dying for their cause meant dying of starvation. As more and more convicts died, even elements of traditional burial important to Chinese had to be foregone, the bodies being stripped naked and tossed into mass graves. Xianliang notes that this generational and nation wide experience cannot fail to have an effect on the psyche of an entire people, and that one must look back at the past and work through the trauma, lest the same mistakes happen again. Already, in my own modern Chinese reading, there are references to a "lost generation" who's mentality and experience carry a ripple effect to the behavior of the current people living in China today.

Some quotes I felt were worth remembering:

"From then on, every time I have met a person who humbly says that he has committed Thought Mistakes, my conditioned reflex has been to excuse myself and politely move away. I have learned the hard way. An intellectual may have good motives and start with a clear sense of reality. But after undergoing repeated struggle-and-criticism sessions in a highly politicalized environment he will be unable to keep from feeling that his thinking must indeed have problems. Eventually he will decide that he must wake up and face his mistakes. Then, through bitter hardship, after reforming what was not wrong in the first place, he will lose track of himself and lose a grounding in reality. In Troop Leader Ma's words, he will do harm to his own basic nature. Traumatized by ever more frightening darkness, in the end he will reach a point where he has lost his humanity. It is more dangerous to be around this kind of intellectual than it is to walk among wolves after nightfall in the deepest mountains." (Pg. 46)

"History has given us innumerable lessons, wise men have given us plenty of warnings, but people continue to court disaster as they go on repeating the same mistakes. I fear that even after writing so much about things I personally experienced, it is probable that this dark period in China's history will happen over again. Even now there are many who not only are unwilling to mention that period but who zealously sing the praises of those who created it. They recall, with great fondness and zest, that 'beautiful' time." (Pg. 164)

"The main reason the system was a pale shadow of the Russian gulag was that those administering the system were a bunch of peasants. Although Chinese peasants have their shortcomings and are fundamentally unsuited to managing large institutions, by intuition alone they have a good sense of what is real and what it not. They could not grasp an idealized or formalized approach to 'truth' as represented by Communist ideology, but they were generally well endowed with a sense of humanity. Even as they scorned intellectuals, they admired them. The emotions were very complex. They could swallow the concept fed to them by the authorities that these people were class enemies of the state, but when faced with an actual person. any hypothetical crime evaporated. It was obvious that we were nothing but shriveled, famished racks of skin-covered bones. When the peasants saw us, the dire warnings of the authorities dissolved into pity. The humanity of Chinese peasants, and indeed of all Chinese, is a strong acid. It can corrode to a pile of rust the most rigidly constructed set of rules." (Page. 189)

[Roma · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not an easy read, but well written and very interesting. The author's 1960 diary during his incarceration in a Chinese re-education prison farm, with explanations and comments he later made.