Confessions Quotes

“Selalu ada cadangan untuk masa sulit dalam diri manusia yang dapat mereka peras keluar saat diperlukan. Seperti tetes terakhir pelembab di dalam gabus.”
― Kang Zhengguo, Confessions: An Innocent Life in Communist China

“Nenek moyang kami mengembangkan konsep tata cara makan, sebagai tanda khusus perilaku manusia beradab”
― Kang Zhengguo, Confessions: An Innocent Life in Communist China

“Jika penjara adalah ajang darmawisata, semua orang pasti ingin ke sini. Sedikit lapar dan derita akan mengajarkanmu siapa pemimpinnya”
― Kang Zhengguo, Confessions: An Innocent Life in Communist China

“From then until the day he died, Pa never enjoyed a day of peace. I hated watching what they did to him at struggle sessions. The cadres chose two of us family members and made us escort him onto the stage. We couldn’t refuse, or we’d be in the same boat as he was. We had to stand on either side of him and twist his elbows behind his back, and then we had to take him onstage when the cadre told us to. They hung a placard around his neck and made him stand with his head shoved down so low that his waist was bent at a ninety-degree angle. Then the village toughs came prancing out and beat him up. Pa kept saying that he’d been better off in the labor camps and would rather have had a longer sentence than come home to this. “They’re trying to do me in,” he’d mutter. “I’m not long for this world.”
― Kang Zhengguo, Confessions: An Innocent Life in Communist China

“I lacked his desperate courage. I had developed an ordinary prisoner’s mentality, constantly pursuing small creature comforts and counting the days until my release. Obsessed with avoiding hunger and fatigue, all I aspired to was an extra morsel of food, a light day’s work, or warm clothing, any one of which was enough to make me ecstatic. Gradually I had stopped caring how degraded my existence was.”
― Kang Zhengguo, Confessions: An Innocent Life in Communist China