IN SEARCH OF MY HOMELAND

A grim, thoughtfully composed memoir by an artist and former Chinese academic who spent two decades on and off as a labor-camp prisoner of Mao’s oppressive regime.

In 1955, Gao was one of a large group of eager, well-indoctrinated college graduates of China’s communist system sent to the newly developing northwest region of Lanzhou to teach middle-school students. He ended up teaching art to 1,000 students, 16 classes per week, his responsibilities so heavy that, he writes, “I became a machine.” Feeling “rebuked, oppressed, and rebellious,” in 1956 the author composed a free-thinking, idealistic treatise on aesthetics, “On Beauty” (included here), which was published in an academic journal and earned the disdain of his supervisors. Branded a “rightist,” Gao was sent to the remote district of Jiuquan for “re-education through labor.” Essentially incarcerated on a prison farm, he dug ditches all day to drain the salts from the barren plain, and in the evenings attended meetings where the prisoners were forced to participate in self-analysis and inform on others. Gao provides personal anecdotes of his time at the camp, as well as studies of fellow prisoners. In “Storm,” he recalls a ferocious wind storm that covered the prisoners like “clay statues” and made time seem suddenly solid, like a stone wall. In other chapters, he reminisces about those sympathetic to his plight, as well as an unlikely friendship with a driver who relished beating prisoners with impunity. Released from the camp in 1962, Gao worked on art research in the “world-famous treasure house, Mogao Caves” in Dunhuang, but was denounced again during the Cultural Revolution. He and many fellow rightists were “rehabilitated” in 1978, but Gao was imprisoned once again in 1989 for his inflammatory writings. Thankfully he and his wife escaped in 1992 and now live in exile in Las Vegas.

A lucky survivor shares a rare look into China’s deeply scarring communist system.