1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows: A Memoir

by Weiwei Ai

On April 3, 2011, as I was about to fly out of Beijing’s Capital Airport, a swarm of plainclothes police descended on me, and for the next eighty-one days I disappeared into a black hole.

During our five years in Little Siberia, Father did not rest one single day. He knew better than anyone that if he were ever to take time off, the next day he would have to do twice as much work. Even in the coldest winter weather, when the temperature dropped to minus twenty-two degrees Fahrenheit, Father’s clothes would be so soaked with sweat after his exertions that every evening he had to hang them up to dry.

In the years that followed, intellectuals would face increasing pressure to conform, leading ultimately to the Anti-Rightist Campaign in 1957, which marked the end of intellectuals as a force in society. From that time on, Chinese intellectuals were confined to a marginal position, and they have been there ever since.

Under the pressure to conform, everyone sank into an ideological swamp of “criticism” and “self-criticism.” My father repeatedly wrote self-critiques, and when controls on thought and expression rose to the level of threatening his very survival, he, like others, wrote an essay denouncing Wang Shiwei, the author of “Wild Lilies,” taking a public stand that went against his inner convictions.

In June 1942, Wang Shiwei was labeled a member of a so-called Five Member Anti-Party Clique, expelled from the Communist Party, and imprisoned on a charge of being a counterrevolutionary Trotskyist spy. He would be executed in 1947.

“let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend.”

In that terrible era, political life was one’s primary life; without it, there was no point in living.

550,000 intellectuals would now be subjected to “reform through labor.” Twenty years later, when they finally received “rehabilitation,” only 100,000 would still be alive. By then, dissidence was all but dead.

From 1959 to 1961, China was in the grip of a disastrous famine, and tens of millions of people starved to death.

From the founding of the new regime to the death of Mao Zedong, in 1976, China experienced more than fifty political campaigns, each more violent than the one before it. The Cultural Revolution plunged the nation deeply into the realm of fantasy and delusion.

Allen reminded me of my father, for both were boys who never grew up. To them, the world was what found sanctuary in their consciousness, and when they died, that piece of the world perished, too.

Violence, so deeply rooted in American life that you could never escape it, reflected the profound flaws built into the country’s social fabric.

At four o’clock on the morning of May 5, 1996, my father’s heart stopped beating,

Already, in September 2003, China had launched the Golden Shield Project, a Ministry of Public Security information-gathering program with tools for internet monitoring that included speech recognition, automatic listening, remote monitoring, and facial recognition technology.

I was facing a fragile regime,

“Reject cynicism, reject cooperation, refuse to be intimidated, refuse to ‘drink tea’ ”—such

People asked me, How do you dare say those things on your blog? My answer was: If I don’t say them, it will put me in an even more dangerous situation. But if I say them, change might occur. To speak is better than not to speak: if everyone spoke, this society would have transformed itself long ago. Change happens when every citizen says what he or she wants to say; one person’s silence exposes another to danger.

I had attracted the attention of society not because of my reputation as an artist but because of my online presence.

“What makes one despair,” I tweeted at 11:54, “is that they reject any discussion, for they’ve already formed their own view on life: ‘There’s nothing I can do.’ And so they are capable of anything.”

Sometimes friends ask me how to make a documentary. There are three cardinal rules, I tell them: start filming, keep filming, and never stop filming.

“If in a pitch-dark room I find a single candle,” I said, “I will light that candle. I have no choice.” No matter how the government tried to shut me down, I would always seek to make my voice heard.

Never love a person or a country that you don’t have the freedom to leave.”

in a Communist system, to be constantly under observation is the normal state of existence.

Surveillance State

To reduce the pressure, I set about establishing a studio in Berlin. But I had no plans to move abroad for good—in my mind, China’s alien regime was the one that needed to get up and leave.

The full name for state security is Domestic Security Protection; its operations are veiled in secrecy. Because “state security” (guóbǎo, 国保) in Chinese sounds just the same as “national treasure” (国宝), online you’ll see its agents referred to as “pandas.”

He asked what I was planning to say in my statement in court. I thought for a moment. “I am standing here to defend human dignity, and I will continue on that path with dignity.” He smirked at the stiffness of this declaration. “This is what you should say: ‘I admit my guilt and submit to punishment.’

Even in the grimmest of circumstances, individuals can retain the power to be human, and society is shaped by the actions of countless individuals. People have their own sense of right and wrong, one that cannot be entirely replaced by authoritarian principles.

Here, practically everything apart from breathing was prohibited, and living didn’t seem much different from being dead.

I told Xu, unnatural death takes many forms, and if a government is chosen by the people, then it will die whatever way the people want it to.

stupidity and falsehood had come to frame my life,

I was constantly aware of my enemies’ presence just outside the gate,

I simply lived for the moment.

“Fools have their own rhythm. What I mean is, even if someone’s a fool, you should let him do his thing. Bad guys have their own rhythm, I’ve noticed.”

In some ways I was pessimistic, because I was living in an era when it was enormously difficult to effect even the smallest change. In other ways, I was optimistic, for the individual’s yearning for freedom can never be repressed—it always finds expression in one form or another.

Having a real—and powerful—adversary was my good fortune, making freedom all the more tangible—freedom comes from all the sacrifices you make to achieve it. Limitations come only from a fear inside the heart, and art is the antidote to fear.

You have to wonder why these organizations insist on traveling so far to seek their own humiliation. But in a perverse way, dictatorship in China has served as a perfect partner for the free world, doing things that the West cannot do, and the occasional humiliation is seen as an acceptable price to pay if it enables continued glory and prosperity for the Western partner.

Of course, we should have no great illusions But we do hope one day people will think of us The same way they think of those remote ancestors Who wrestled with huge wild beasts And on their faces will appear an easy, open smile Perhaps a little too serene But I am perfectly willing To die for such a smile.

The wind blows westward The water flows eastward I stand here Remembering this lovely scene Three years ago When I was still a little kid I was already smart Goodbye, nation.

Of a thousand years of joys and sorrows Not a trace can be found You who are living, live the best life you can Don’t count on the earth to preserve memory

Can a civilization that is built on the misfortune of others carry on forever?

Self-expression is central to human existence. Without the sound of human voices, without warmth and color in our lives, without attentive glances, Earth is just an insensate rock suspended in space.

Carol Stream 22jun22 glauber