1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows: A Memoir

by Weiwei Ai

Memories were a burden, and it was best to be done with them; soon people lost not only the will but the power to remember. When yesterday, today, and tomorrow merge into an indistinguishable blur, memory—apart from being potentially dangerous—has very little meaning at all.

Many were members of the stigmatized “Five Black Categories”—landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements, and rightists.

In 1910, the year my father was born, my grandfather had just turned twenty-one. The Qing dynasty was nearing the end of its 266-year rule, while in Russia the fall of the czars and the advent of the Soviet regime were just seven years away. It was the year that Tolstoy and Mark Twain died, the year that Edison invented talkies in faraway New Jersey. In Xiangtan, in Hunan, seventeen-year-old Mao Zedong was still in school; his first wife, selected for him by his parents in an arranged marriage, died a month before my father was born. But Fantianjiang, like so many other Chinese villages, slumbered on, unremarkable and anonymous.

One afternoon, while playing hide-and-seek, we looked through a crack in the locked warehouse door and saw two feet dangling in the air, and at the same time smelled the reek of insecticide: a middle-aged man was hanging from the rafters. Some said he had hanged himself, and others said he had been strung up after dying from a beating. The cause of such a death, the responsibility for such a death—these were not issues that would warrant an investigation. If someone died while in custody, it was written off as “committing suicide for fear of punishment” and “separating oneself from the people.” It saved the cost of an executioner’s bullet.

Every time we were ostracized and rejected, my perspective on society shifted accordingly. The estrangement and hostility that we encountered from the people around us instilled in me a clear awareness of who I was, and it shaped my judgment about how social positions are defined.

A poet, he argued, is different from somebody who simply writes poetry. A poet is loyal to his own experience and does not write about things outside his own understanding, whereas somebody who writes poetry simply puts together sentences, whose words he arranges in separate lines. Without fresh colors, without luster, without images, he asked, where is a poem’s artistic life?

These positive-sounding declarations obscured a more complex reality: as a young man, Mao had tried unsuccessfully to get a job at Peking University Library, likely fueling the prejudice against academics that we can see in his later words and deeds.

Newspapers, on the other hand, were never to be seen, for the simple reason that every page would have Mao’s name and a few quotations of his printed on it, and if you wiped your ass with a piece of the paper, there would be no safe place to get rid of it. If discovered, such an act of sacrilege would be reported and the incriminating evidence put on display, proof of another grave “counterrevolutionary incident.” No one was prepared to risk this.

Father accepted his lot stoically. As he put it, earlier in life he’d had no idea who cleaned toilets for him, and so it wasn’t unreasonable to expect him now to do cleaning for others. It was an outlook that reflected his tolerance, generosity of spirit, and commitment to equity. Although he loathed superstition, intimidation, and cruelty in any form, while never abandoning the principles of honesty and decency, he was able to adapt to circumstances. I have to admit I lack that level of forbearance.

Before long, however, an increasingly harsh “Rectification Movement” rendered up its first victims. It sought to impose a high level of ideological unity and compliance by employing self-scrutiny and mutual surveillance—coercive methods that would become standard practice within the party.

The CCP’s intelligence services made it known that within the party “spies were as common as hempseeds” and asked that party members rescue those people who “consciously or unconsciously” were serving the enemy. Personal histories were scrutinized for the slightest traces of suspicious activity, and almost everyone faced grueling questioning; people were held in isolation, threatened, or tortured, forced to criticize themselves and denounce others. Out of the thirty thousand functionaries and students in Yan’an, at least half were accused of being spies.

Ideological cleansing, I would note, exists not only under totalitarian regimes—it is present also, in a different form, in liberal Western democracies. Under the influence of politically correct extremism, individual thought and expression are too often curbed and too often replaced by empty political slogans. It is not hard to find examples today of people saying and doing things they don’t believe in, simply to fall in line with the prevailing narrative and make a superficial public statement.

When ordered to write “confessional” materials, he would pace back and forth in the cave, in an agony of indecision. Some of his colleagues found the pressure too much to bear and resorted to suicide. For them, putting an end to life was the only way of bringing the humiliation to a halt.

Historically, social change in China has always involved land, and the twentieth-century Chinese revolution was in essence a peasant revolution. In 1949, 80 percent of the population were peasants, and the peasants became the revolution’s greatest strength. Land reform eliminated the local gentry class that had existed since the earliest days of the imperial era.

“ox demons and snake spirits”

In the early stage of the Cultural Revolution, the stated goal was to “smash the four olds”—old ideas, old culture, old customs, old habits—and replace them all with Mao Zedong Thought. Ever since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, political movements had grown ever more fierce, but the Cultural Revolution was hailed as being “without precedent in history,” an event that would touch the soul of every person alive. The denunciation meetings were just the start of the myriad humiliations to which Father and others like him were subjected.

At the denunciation meetings, the Five Black Category elements would all be made to wear black, and Father would sometimes need to borrow someone else’s black jacket—even if it was a very tight fit—in order to play his part properly.

Since Father’s vision was deteriorating, he had started to use a magnifying glass for reading. Once, before a sentencing rally, a security officer burst in, grabbed the magnifying glass, and then climbed a ladder up onto the roof of the auditorium, where, peering through the glass, he scanned the horizon for any sign of hostile activity, such as a pending attack by some rival militant faction. That image of a man trying to use a magnifying glass as a telescope has always stayed in my mind as an example of the ignorance and folly of the Cultural Revolution years.

All that talk, then, of encouraging candid discussion turned out to have been a premeditated effort to “tempt the snake out if its den.” During the April forum, some had said what was really on their minds, and Mao now concluded that they were seeking power. Increasingly, he defined the threat posed by “rightists” in ominous terms: “The contradiction between bourgeois rightists and the people is an adversarial, irresolvable, live-or-die contradiction.” Insecurity and resentment drove Mao to dehumanize his critics in a grotesque fashion: “Now a whole bunch of fish have floated to the surface. Not just any old fish—they look like sharks, they’ve got sharp teeth, and they like to bite people.”

In a conversation with his wife, Jiang Qing, Mao Zedong shared his expectations for the Cultural Revolution. Society needed to be thrown into chaos, he said, before it could be properly governed. Every seven or eight years, a movement of this kind would be needed, to draw the “ox demons and snake spirits” out of their dens, in keeping with their class nature. The Cultural Revolution would be a war exercise on a national scale, in which leftists, rightists, and vacillating fence-sitters would all receive their proper due.

“Be ready to lose your life, and dare to pull the emperor off his horse,” he exhorted them, the emperor in question not being himself, of course, but rather the bureaucratic establishment that Mao saw as his adversary.

On August 23, 1966, Ai Qing’s old friend, the author Lao She, and a number of other writers were taken by Red Guards to Beijing’s old Temple of Confucius. There they were harangued and beaten viciously. The following morning, Lao She’s body was found floating in a lake not far away. On that same day, Li Da, president of Wuhan University, was tortured to death; ten days later, Fu Lei, celebrated translator of Voltaire and Balzac, and his wife, Zhu Meifu, hanged themselves in their house in Shanghai. The red terror had begun.

In a conversation with a foreign visitor in September 1973, Mao Zedong, then about to turn eighty, made a revealing comment, comparing himself to China’s first emperor, Qin Shihuang. Qin Shihuang is typically seen in a negative light, as a ruthless despot, but Mao talked of him favorably, reserving his criticisms for Confucius instead. To him, Confucian moderation had little appeal—the concentration of power in the hands of a supreme leader was what mattered. Mao urged the party to study history, to critique Confucius and the Confucian tradition. This initiative, consistent with Mao’s long-standing orientation toward ideological struggle, was designed to counteract more pragmatic elements within the Communist Party.

If I were ever to understand it fully, that knowledge would surely disappear to nothing in an instant.

When you are forgotten by the world, it’s easy to adopt a devil-may-care attitude.

Art is always an event—no matter how you see it, it’s bound to have a beginning and an end.

But the conventional path of accumulating assets, getting a degree, securing an American passport—none of that interested me. What I wanted was for people to leave me alone, for I was in no mood to change my ways. At this point I was taking nihilism to extreme lengths, and it was the very confusion of my life that gave me a sense of my own existence.

In late December 1984, at a poetry gathering in St. Mark’s Church, a heavily bearded Allen Ginsberg, dressed in a dark suit, read his poetry on the rostrum while a crowd listened keenly below. He was talking about the trip he had just made to China: I learned that the Great Leap Forward caused millions of families to starve, that the Anti-Rightist Campaign against bourgeois “Stinkers” sent revolutionary poets to shovel shit in Xinjiang Province a decade before the Cultural Revolution drove countless millions of readers to cold huts and starvation in the countryside Northwest.

The United States likes to think of itself as a melting pot, but it’s more like a vat of sulfuric acid, dissolving variety without a qualm.

For him to converse with someone from a Communist country was a cherished pleasure, because it allowed him to fantasize about the difficulties and miseries of our lives.

Marches to Tiananmen Square by university students mourning Hu Yaobang soon developed into demonstrations demanding that the government address inflation, unemployment, and corruption and uphold media freedoms, democratic processes, and freedom of assembly.

In the early morning of June 4, soldiers armed with assault rifles and live ammunition, supported by armored vehicles and tanks, shot their way along Chang’an Avenue, the main approach road to the square, taking hundreds of innocent lives and leaving a trail of crushed bicycles and burned-out buses in their wake. Beijing residents had never imagined that the army would open fire on students peacefully petitioning for policy change. The legitimacy of the Chinese regime, undermined so often by one blunder after another, crumbled to dust in the slaughter. But state violence did not loosen the rulers’ hold on power. On the contrary, now they simply gripped their weapons all the more tightly.

To conventional culture, I said, art should be a nail in the eye, a spike in the flesh, gravel in the shoe: the reason why art cannot be ignored is that it destabilizes what seems settled and secure.

Young people in China today have no knowledge at all of the student protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989, and if they knew they might not even care, for they learn submission before they have developed an ability to raise doubts and challenge assumptions.

I was not worried that China’s future would turn out as he imagined, nor would I have minded if it did.

But tourist attractions always irritate me, and soon I was bored with it all.

The pillaging of wealth from land vastly outweighs other forms of capital accumulation in China. The way it works is this: Local governments first forcibly buy back land-use authority from farmers at a low price, then sell the land at a high price to developers. With property in hand, developers can easily get a bank loan, and before they have even broken ground they can begin to sell off houses that exist only in blueprints. This conjuring trick would make anyone wild with joy: the money comes so readily, it’s like passing wads of cash from your left hand to your right. Every pore of China’s reforms is saturated with fraud and corruption, and this is just one of many abuses.

When basic construction was completed, the interior of the house was completely bare, with exposed brick walls just like on the outside. At this point, in defiance of the prevailing custom of dolling houses up with all kinds of ersatz Western flavor, I decided to dispense with interior decoration. “You mean we stop here?” the builders asked, in total disbelief. So as to save myself the trouble of explaining, I told them the money had run out.

Civil society poses a challenge to autocracy, and therefore, in the eyes of our rulers, it is an object of fear. The Chinese government, accordingly, seeks to erase individual space, suppress free expression, and distort our memory. 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. As time went on, the program’s internet monitoring expanded to include tracking, interrupting, resetting, and censoring of individuals’ internet activity, as well as the tapping of telephone calls, Bluetooth transmissions, and wireless internet communications. Filter software was also introduced, directly intruding into users’ desktops and files, and software companies were required to make available records of social media communications and scanned documents.

Now, three years after Sun’s death, another event triggered renewed online debate about social justice. In May 2006, a laptop belonging to Zhong Nanshan, a spokesperson for the medical profession in China, was stolen in Guangzhou. Zhong was so outraged that he appealed for a reinstatement of the detention system, arguing, “When designing the legal system, what kind of person should we prioritize? We should design the system so that it operates in the interests of good people and not bad people: leniency to enemies means cruelty to the people.” Seizing on this fallacious argument, I reopened the debate on the detention system. Intellectuals like Zhong were serving as defenders of this inhumane system, abandoning principles and standing on the side of power, as they so often did. On my blog I asked: “If a community denies the facts and covers up mistakes, is there any chance it will improve itself? On what sort of foundation is today’s political life built?” When these words were read and reposted hundreds of thousands of times, in a matter of hours, I knew I had touched a sensitive spot. At the time I had no idea that in 2020 Zhong Nanshan would become mired in controversy once again when he was accused of involvement in the cover-up of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan.

To me, art is in a dynamic relationship with reality, with our way of life and attitude to life, and it should not be placed in a separate compartment. I have no interest in art that tries to keep itself distinct from reality.

In China’s oppressive political environment, it’s easy to lose the capacity for empathy and end up inflicting pain on others. With that in mind, I made a documentary, entitled San Hua, about the cat-meat-and-cat-trading industry and efforts to protect cats from abuse. I made the film available online, hoping to prompt frank discussion, the precondition for an effective response to ignorance and callousness.

“When a state restricts a citizen’s movements,” I wrote, “this means it has become a prison…Never love a person or a country that you don’t have the freedom to leave.”

She had given birth to him while hiding in a relative’s home; when this was discovered, the family received a huge fine and their house was demolished.

Tolerating the distortion of history is the first step toward tolerating humiliation in real life.

On December 16, 2014, Ai Lao wrote for me, in Chinese characters, “Heart calm and good.” It was an aphorism of his own invention: If the heart is calm, you’ll do things well. “I find that bad people are all strong,” Ai Lao said. “They need to be strong to do bad things. And so, if you want to be stronger, you need to do some bad things—but not too many, otherwise you’ll become a bad person yourself.” Wang Fen told him, “Your dad says there’s nothing perfect in the world. What do you think?” “Yes, there is,” Ai Lao said. “Life is perfect.” “Don’t always keep thinking about things being fair or unfair,” he added. “Sometimes, what’s unfair is fair. For example, if you get something that someone else doesn’t have—that’s not necessarily unfair, because maybe he already has more stuff than you.”

I am reminded of lines my father wrote after visiting the ruins of an ancient Silk Road city in Xinjiang: 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

A sense of belonging is central to one’s identity, for only with it can one find a spiritual refuge: as the Chinese saying has it, “It’s once you’re settled that you can get on with life.” Without a sense of belonging, my language lost, I feel on edge and unsure about things, facing an equally anxious world.

Although China grows more powerful, its moral decay simply spreads anxiety and uncertainty in the world.

Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, 1995, three black-and-white photographs.