Gao threw himself into the task with all his strength, seeing it as his chance to survive. He painted portraits of healthy peasants and wise officials, which earned him recognition from the Party. Gao was allowed to stay in Lanzhou and complete more work until the summer of 1960. By this time, so many prisoners had starved to death at Jiabiangou that the camp was on the verge of closure. Gao was ordered to report to another camp, where he was tough but able to survive. He was held for two years and then released.
The day after his release, Gao, then 26, walked through famine-ravaged villages in torn clothes and with only a sleeping bag, pondering his future as a convicted rightist, a status that made him a permanent outsider in Mao’s China. In his essay “Toward Life,” which has circulated on social media in recent years, he recalls: “I knew that going to school was out of the question. I would have been lucky if I could find a corner far away from people and spend my days in peace, but in this China made up entirely of communes and soldiers, that wish was an illusion.”
“After a while,” Gao continues, “I thought of that tiny oasis in the vast desert, the Mogao Caves in Dunhuang.” The importance of the caves to art history can hardly be overstated. There are about 700 of them, filled with Buddhist frescoes that fuse Chinese, Western, Indian and Central Asian cultures from the fourth to the fourteenth centuries. Gao made his way to Dunhuang via Gansu in the hope of studying the caves. He applied for a position at the research institute in Dunhuang; the director overrode concerns about Gao’s political reliability and hired him. Thus, Gao found himself in one of China’s most famous cultural sites – comparable to the Forbidden City in Beijing – just as it was about to be devalued by the Cultural Revolution.
When the institute was established in 1966, the institute’s leaders were beaten and tortured. “Overnight,” Gao later wrote, “these gentle, reserved people turned into wild beasts, jumping and screaming wildly, suddenly singing at the top of their lungs, suddenly bursting into tears, beating themselves, getting up at midnight and shouting ‘Long Life’ or beating gongs and drums to spread the thoughts of the ‘Great Man.'” Throughout the Mogao Caves area, only the icons of Buddha and Bodhisattvas maintained their dignity and self-control.
Gao had to spend his days hiking up the rock face and sweeping sand out of the caves. Previously, he had scoured the frescoes for information about life in medieval China. He had noticed depictions of farming, sericulture, weaving, building, hunting, weddings, funerals, begging, battles and martial arts. Now he wrote: “Standing in front of the walls in these tiny stone caves, I had a feeling of openness. It was a pity when it got dark and I had to go back outside, along with the others who were dragged out to confess before the icon of Chairman Mao, to sing propaganda songs, to listen to exhortations, to denounce and criticize each other, and to engage in self-accusation and self-criticism. And just like the ghosts created by Dante, who bit, gnawed and tore each other apart, we had nowhere to hide. There were walls everywhere.”
Mao died in 1976 and reformers took over the party. Two years later, Gao was officially rehabilitated and was able to leave his exile in northwest China. He moved to Beijing, where he worked at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and soon met Pu, who worked for the Capital Museum’s Fine Arts Office. 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 magazine called New Enlightenment. The essays were a direct criticism of the regime, for Marx wrote that alienation was something that occurred in capitalist societies, which meant that it should not occur in a communist state. Two years later, the authorities arrested him on charges that his writings had inspired the student demonstrations centered on Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
The arrest was a shock, he told me. “There was a lot of work going on at Sichuan Normal University on June 4 – the day the protests were violently suppressed – but I didn’t participate,” he said. “I didn’t know what was happening, but I was arrested anyway.”
Gao spent more than four months in prison. After his release in 1990, he sought a way out of China. Two years later, he and Pu escaped as part of a Hong Kong-based program to expel dissidents from China, known as Operation Yellow Bird.
Gao and Pu spent several years in New York and New Jersey in the Chinese dissident community that had sprung up in the United States after the Tiananmen Square massacre. But the couple never felt comfortable in the exile scene. Gao recalled hating the petty squabbles that prevailed there. In 2003, he won a scholarship to the University of Nevada. The couple has not left the state since.
Gao finished “Searching for My Homeland” in Las Vegas, but had begun it decades earlier. He had always kept a diary, although at times copies were confiscated and destroyed. Later he made notes on scraps of paper that he rolled or folded and then hid in the lining of the cotton-lined winter jackets that used to be ubiquitous in northern China. Gao still keeps these notes in a large photo album that he decided to show us. The writing is small and precise, with correction 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 1980s, his works on aesthetics, including those from the 1950s, were reprinted, and they seem to be viewed as unproblematic today. In 2021, they were reprinted again by the Beijing Publishing Group, one of the country’s largest publishers. The company also reprinted one of Gao’s collections of essays.
Yet although the works that nearly cost Gao his life in the 1950s are now widely available, his memoirs have had a more troubled history. The first two parts of “Looking for My Homeland” were published in China in 2004, with an essay on his father’s death at the hands of the Communists removed. A third part, dealing mainly with the 1980s, particularly Gao’s imprisonment after the Tiananmen massacre, was never fully published in China. The uncensored book, published in Taiwan in 2009, contains 63 essays. Two later essays were removed from a version printed on the mainland in 2011 and 2014.
Unfortunately, the cuts were much worse in the 2009 English translation of the book; only about half of the essays are included in a version published by HarperCollins. The first section, about Gao’s youth and his experiences during the Japanese invasion of China, including a gruesome account of the Communist assassination of his father, was omitted 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 represent 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 resonates with Chinese people is in part thanks to the rise of independent Chinese historians who have kept the Mao-era famines and camps alive in the popular consciousness, even as that generation’s witnesses have died and the government has tried to erase the memory. Writer Yang Xianhui, underground filmmakers Hu Jie and Ai Xiaoming, and Paris-based film director Wang Bing, among others, have helped make the name Jiabiangou part of Chinese slang, and that, in turn, has fueled interest in Gao’s essays.
“People say things like, ‘Sooner or later, they’ll take you to Jiabiangou.’ That’s like saying you’re going to the Gulag,” Chengdu-based blogger Zhang Feng, who was recently a visiting lecturer at Columbia University, told me. “For today’s young people, these things are quite old, but due to various restrictions” – particularly the harsh COVID Lockdowns – “people are curious about it.”
