There are many parallels between Zhu Xiao-Mei's experience in Communist China and life in a cult in present day New York and Boston. I am saying this not only for myself but for all the others as well. I am scarred for life - it is an experience that will never be eradicated from me. It grows more distant with time but it will never disappear completely. Fear of criticism, self-doubt and a fear of being manipulated are all a part of my life. We were debased. We became perpetrators and not just victims. We were educated to subjugate others as we had been subjugated. "The full extent of the catastrophe remains unknown."
These are some excerpts from Chapter 27: A Wounded Life.
One who is skillful in using men puts himself below them. (Laozi)
The Cultural Revolution scarred me for life. Each morning when I get up, I wonder how I can go on living, how I can find peace after what I have experienced. The legacy of that period has left me with a severe psychological handicap.
The sessions of collective denunciation I endured rendered me perpetually afraid of criticism, unable to trust either myself or anyone else. When one has lived through such a regime, when one has been forced at twelve years old— at an age when one cannot be guilty—to criticize oneself, then what is a friend or a family member but someone who will denounce you tomorrow, and that you will in turn criticize?
Whenever I walk onstage, there is always a moment when I wonder why the audience has come to hear me. I am tremendously grateful, but at the same time I want to give them their money back; I do not deserve their presence. Doubts begin to set in: the audience is actually there to criticize me , to judge me, just as if it were a self-criticism session. Only my faith in music gives me the strength to carry through to the end.
I also fear being manipulated, as I was so often in China. I try to tell myself that I was young at the time of the Cultural Revolution, and therefore susceptible to all forms of propaganda. This was the case and is why I have always felt an aversion to student demonstrations. But it wasn’t just students who were involved. Hundreds of millions of Chinese—people who were older and more experienced than us— allowed themselves to be indoctrinated. Age didn’t make any difference, either in China or in any other country that experienced totalitarianism. I try to understand how the Communists’ noble ideas could have led to such a catastrophe, or how, for years on end, I couldn’t see anything or didn’t want to believe what I saw. I try, but I simply don’t understand.
The Cultural Revolution was debasing; it turned me into a perpetrator. At one point, it even extinguished in me all sense of a moral life. I criticized my fellow human beings, accused them of grave misdeeds, investigated their pasts. I took an active part in a process of collective destruction. How can I ever be free of such things? ....
Friends gave me passages from Hannah Arendt to read. I found her description of one of the governing principles of totalitarian regimes very accurate: the “arbitrary selection of victims,” the first step in the process of total domination. Arendt elaborates:
The next decisive step in the preparation of living corpses is the murder of the moral person in man. […] Through the creation of conditions under which conscience ceases to be adequate and to do good becomes utterly impossible, the consciously organized complicity of all men in the crimes of totalitarian regimes is extended to the victims and thus made really total.
I am continually haunted by this part of my past. In a certain sense, I was released from prison only to become a prisoner of myself.
I often wonder whether I should hate Mao Zedong for what he did to me. On a purely theoretical level, his analyses were not incorrect. The Chinese people did need to be liberated. How could I forget the documentary they screened for us at school, which showed the sign the English erected at the entrance to Waitan Park. On it was clearly written: “Dogs and Chinese Not Admitted.” Nor could I forget the peasants who were so cruelly exploited, or the old woman I met during my first session of Yi ku si tian. Despite these things, and the spirit of hope he kindled, Mao was a criminal. He was responsible for killing tens of millions of people, and for the moral deaths of hundreds of millions more. Therefore, yes, I hate him. And every passing day deepens my hatred of this man who, since he lacked the courage to admit his mistakes, carried out a cynical headlong rush into the future. “One who is skillful in using men puts himself below them,” as Laozi said. Mao kept himself above men, even if it meant killing them to remain there. During the thirty years that I have lived in fear, in despair of ever finding inner peace, I have had time to understand this.
After the Cultural Revolution, there were no important trials, except one for the Gang of Four. Nothing at all like the Nuremberg trials organized in the West in the wake of World War Two.
No doubt this is because the truth of Mao’s disastrous reign has yet to be precisely established, due to a lack of well-researched historical studies. How many deaths were caused by the Cultural Revolution? By the Great Leap Forward? The full extent of the catastrophe remains unknown, as well as the real reasons why it happened. The time has not yet come for an objective assessment of what occurred.
It is understandable that the Chinese people wish to turn the page on those dark times and finally lead normal lives. I think, however, there is a deeper source for this attitude, which is their concept of life. It can be found in the first great book of Chinese philosophical thought, the I Ching. Its title— known in English as The Book of Changes—says it all. Life is a continual process of transformation, and it is this process of change that we should honor, rather than a return to the past. Criminal acts are not forgotten, but a sort of natural justice that only the passage of time can bring about eventually supplants human justice. Chinese philosophers have an expression for this: bu de liao—knowing when to leave the past behind, instead of endlessly seeking revenge.
On the other hand, the absence of criminal justice is evidence of a profound weakness. The trials that followed World War Two immensely buttressed the West’s resolve: by enshrining the principle of “Never again!” Western nations encouraged a sense of vigilance. They strengthened universal moral standards and forged new ones, all of them designed to prevent, now and forever, the return of the Hydra.
