Great Prayer

Author: Yang Zhijun
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2002-01-01
Features: Back then, the country didn’t have much steel to make handcuffs, so as an escaping youth who was sent to the frontier, I had to make do with hemp ropes. We didn’t believe in fate. We were so young and yet became criminals without guilt—how could we accept that? To live was to appeal, and to appeal meant escaping and finding witnesses. That was the entirety of my glorious role as a frontier youth. They handed me over to the desert, which meant completely crushing my belief in escape. I was done. What was the point of a life without even the meaning of anger? I escaped from prison, from the farm, and now I had to escape from the bandit den. Stop hitting me. If the revolutionary faction comrades and leaders agreed, I’d leave. I no longer needed this world, and the world no longer needed me.
A group of innocent young men and women, the sent-down youth, were arrested after a small gathering and sentenced to 15 to 20 years in prison, then exiled to the desolate depths beneath the vast Kunlun Mountains. From then on, they were imprisoned, paraded, tamed, distorted, and even animalized. From then on, they escaped and were imprisoned, were imprisoned and escaped. Their entire lives, and the purpose of living, became escaping, appealing, and finding witnesses of their innocence. From then on, they set themselves on fire in protest, slashed their wrists in suicide, lost their minds, and were subjected to gang rape. From then on, their absurd yet legendary true experiences shook the world, leaving them in unimaginable pain and shame. From then on, they trekked through desolate wastelands, drifted along the Linggel River, struggled in cannibalistic bandit dens, and mingled with primitive immigrant tribes. They were disheveled, wrapped in animal hides, and even ate raw meat and drank blood. From then on, they were starved for sex, savage in their sexuality, and in their sexual desires, even pure love sank into the depths of primal, absurd, and animalistic lust.
They stilled and escaped, but their spirits collapsed before their bodies, like walking corpses. When the protagonists finally failed to escape the vast, profound, and omnipresent absurdity created by the hideous creatures wearing human and divine skins, they had become elderly men and women, diligent in vulgarity and skilled in apathy.