Escape (Cultural Revolution Youth Underground Memoir Text)

Author: Wang Zexun
Publisher:
Publication Date: 2002-01-01
Features: This is an unflinching historical account of the flight of a youth laborer who fled. The protagonist suffers punishment for speaking out, enduring humiliation and brutal torture. He is torn away from love, heroism, dignity, spirit, and all human qualities, living like an animal. Finally, unable to bear the torment, he begins his life of escape, traveling from the Tarim River to the Taklamakan Desert, the "sea of death," and from the ruins of the Wudou conflict in Inner Mongolia to the water towns and forests of Jiangnan. He winds his way through paths, escaping capture time and again, witnessing every imaginable chaos of class struggle and its extreme sanctification, as well as the lies that tower above all truth. Whoever harbors human aspirations becomes a "criminal." The "crimes" of the youth laborers are as absurd as myths: a careless word, a bow, a statement, or listening to a foreign radio station at night could lead to labor reform, imprisonment, sentencing, humiliation, tying up, whipping, and public criticism. The criticisms took various forms—intellectual struggles, accompanying struggles, violent struggles, internal struggles; some were forced to kneel and submit like animals, ridden through the streets; others were surrounded and shouted at, covered in ink, sputum, and saliva, and forced into grotesque poses. Thus, among the youth laborers emerged traitors, sycophants, those who fell on their swords, those who knelt collectively in plea for forgiveness, those who supported one another, those who worried about the world in sorrow, and those who declared the earth-shattering cry, "We must live." In hair-raising chases, they made a grand escape, traveling collectively through the Tian Shan mountains. On this page of darkness and spectacle from the age of human-made ignorance, no longer slips out of history. Also recorded in the text is the true and heartbreaking scene of the Tarim River (once the longest inland river in China) and its primitive forests, which were artificially desertified. The author, with a spirit of refusal to adorn the truth, poured out his heart over twenty years, revising his manuscript five times. Although it still has rough edges, it possesses a harsh beauty, a deep penetration into the essence of the youth laborers' life, leaving readers shaken and moved to tears.