Gao threw himself into the assignment, seeing it as his ticket to survival. He painted portraits of healthy peasants and wise officials that won accolades from the Party; Gao was allowed to stay in Lanzhou, completing more work, until the summer of 1960. By then, so many inmates at Jiabiangou had starved to death that the camp was on the brink of closure. Gao was ordered to report to another camp, which was harsh but survivable. He was held for two years, and then released.
The day after his release, Gao, who was twenty-six years old, wearing torn clothes and possessing only a bedroll, walked through villages devastated by the famine. He pondered his future as a convicted Rightist, a status that made him a permanent outcast in Mao’s China. In his essay “Toward Life,” which has circulated in recent years on social media, he recalls, “I knew attending school was out of the question. I’d be lucky to find some corner far away from people and quietly pass my days, but in this China, which was entirely made up of communes and soldiers, this wish was an illusion.”
“After a while,” Gao continues, “I thought about the tiny oasis in the vast desert, the Mogao Caves in Dunhuang.” It is hard to overstate the caves’ importance in art history. There are some seven hundred of them, filled with Buddhist frescoes that meld Chinese, Western, Indian, and Central Asian cultures, from the fourth century to the fourteenth. Gao made his way across Gansu to Dunhuang, hoping to study the caves. He applied for a job at the Dunhuang research institute; the director overrode concerns about Gao’s political reliability and hired him. That put Gao in one of the most famous cultural sites in China—comparable in importance to Beijing’s Forbidden City—just as it was about to be debased by the Cultural Revolution.
When that was launched, in 1966, the leaders of the institute were beaten and tortured. “Overnight,” Gao later wrote, “those gentle, reserved people turned into fierce beasts and violently leaped and hollered, suddenly sang at the tops of their voices, suddenly burst into tears, slapped themselves, rose at midnight and yelled ‘Long life,’ or banged gongs and drums to disseminate the thoughts of the ‘Great Man.’ ” In the whole Mogao Caves area, only the icons of Buddha and bodhisattvas maintained their dignity and self-possession.
Gao was relegated to spending his days hiking the cliff face and sweeping sand out of the caves. Previously, he had scoured the frescoes for information on life in medieval China. He had noted depictions of farming, silkworm cultivation, weaving, building, hunting, marriages, funerals, begging, butchery, and martial arts. Now, he wrote, “Facing the walls in these tiny stone caves, I had a sense of openness. It was a pity when it got dark and I had to return to the outside, along with those others dragged out to make confessions before the icon of Chairman Mao, sing propaganda songs, listen to exhortations, denounce and criticize one another, and make self-denunciations and self-criticisms. And just like the ghosts penned by Dante that bit, gnawed, and tore one another, we had nowhere to hide. Walls were everywhere.”
Mao died in 1976, and reformers took over the Party. Two years later, Gao was formally exonerated and was able to leave his exile in northwestern China. He moved to Beijing, where he worked at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and met Pu, who was working for the Capital Museum’s fine-arts office, soon afterward. They later moved to Chengdu, where they both taught at Sichuan Normal University; they married in 1987. Gao began writing philosophical texts on the Marxist concept of alienation for a literary journal called New Enlightenment. The essays were a direct critique of the regime because Marx wrote of alienation as something that happened in capitalist societies, meaning it should not occur in a Communist state. Two years later, authorities arrested him on charges that his writing had helped inspire the student demonstrations that centered on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.
The arrest was a shock, he told me.“Sichuan Normal University had a lot of activity during June 4th”—the day the protests were violently suppressed—“but I didn’t participate,” he said. “I didn’t know what was happening, but I was still arrested.”
Gao was imprisoned for more than four months. Once he was released, in 1990, he began to search for a way out of China. Two years later, he and Pu fled as part of a Hong Kong-based program to spirit dissidents out of China, known as Operation Yellow Bird.
Gao and Pu spent some years in New York and New Jersey among the Chinese-dissident community that had sprung up in the U.S. after the Tiananmen Square massacre. But the couple never felt entirely comfortable in the exile scene. Gao recalled that he hated the petty spats that plagued it. In 2003, he was given a fellowship at the University of Nevada. The couple hasn’t left the state since.
Gao finished “In Search of My Homeland” in Las Vegas but had begun it decades earlier. He had always kept a diary, although at times versions of it had been confiscated and destroyed. Later, he kept notes on scraps of paper, which he rolled or folded and then hid in the lining of the cotton-padded winter jackets that used to be ubiquitous in northern China. Gao still keeps these notes in a large photo album that he brought out to show us. The writing is small and precise, with copy-editing marks that show that Gao was already trying to refine his thoughts.
Gao’s publishing history reflects the complexity of censorship in China. In the eighties, his works on aesthetics, including the ones from the fifties were reprinted, and they now seem to have been deemed unproblematic. In 2021, they were reprinted again by Beijing Publishing Group, one of the country’s largest publishers. The company also reprinted one of Gao’s essay collections.
But, though the works that almost got Gao killed in the fifties are now widely available, his memoirs have had a more difficult history. The first two sections of “In Search of My Homeland” were published in China in 2004, with one essay, about his father’s death at the hands of the Communists, removed. A third section, which mostly deals with the eighties, especially Gao’s detention after the Tiananmen massacre, has never been published in full in China. The uncensored book, which was published in Taiwan in 2009, has sixty-three essays. A version that was printed on the mainland in 2011 and 2014 has two later essays excised.
Sadly, the book was cut far more grievously when it was translated into English, in 2009; only about half of the essays appear in a version published by HarperCollins. The first section, on Gao’s youth and his experiences during Japan’s invasion of China, including a horrific recounting of how his father was killed by the Communists, was left out entirely, as was the entire third section. What remains are Gao’s experiences in Jiabiangou and Dunhuang, which are valuable accounts of the Mao era, but in some ways a cliché: Chinese literature as prison literature. None of Gao’s other books have been translated into English.
That “In Search of My Homeland” still speaks to Chinese people is due in part to the rise of independent Chinese historians, who have kept the famines and the camps of the Mao era alive in the popular consciousness, even as witnesses to that generation have died and the government has tried to erase the memory. The writer Yang Xianhui, the underground filmmakers Hu Jie and Ai Xiaoming, and the Paris-based film director Wang Bing, among others, have helped the name Jiabiangou become part of Chinese slang. And that, in turn, has fed interest in Gao’s essays.
“People say things like ‘Sooner or later, they’ll take you to Jiabiangou.’ It’s like saying you’re going to the Gulag,” the Chengdu-based blogger Zhang Feng, who was recently a visiting scholar at Columbia University, told me. “These things are quite ancient to today’s young people, but due to various restrictions”—especially the harsh COVID lockdowns—“people are curious about them.”
