ErTai Gao was born in 1935 in Jiangsu Province. He first got cross-ways with the authorities in China back in 1957, when Mao invited China’s intellectuals to express themselves freely and say what they really thought, or as Mao announced, “Let a hundred flowers bloom, a hundred ideas contend!” Just out of art school at the time, Gao concedes he was perhaps more than a little naïve; he thought Mao really did want to know what he thought, and so he told him.

Gao wrote and published an essay on politics and aesthetics titled “On Beauty,” in which he criticized socialist realism and argued that freedom was essential to the creation of beauty, and that beauty was an expression of freedom. The essay created quite a buzz in academic circles. Gao realized only too late that what Mao really wanted to know was who were the likely troublemakers, and so it was that for saying what he thought, Gao was promptly deemed a “rightist,” sentenced to “reform through labor,” and shipped off to dig ditches on the edge of the Gobi Desert, and likely starve to death.

His was an indeterminate sentence, meaning he could well have spent the rest of his life being reformed through labor. But that life probably wouldn’t have been all that long; close to three-fourths of his 2,000 fellow inmates died of disease and starvation during the time Gao was in the camp. He managed to survive long enough to be released after three years.

After his release, Gao spent the next several years in Dunhuang, also on the edge of the Gobi, at the Art Institute there, at first studying the Buddhist cave paintings in the Magao Grottos. After a couple years, though, the Cultural Revolution made its way even to remote Dunhuang, and Gao was once more deemed a "rightist," and demoted to janitor and still more reform through labor.

Despite such experiences, Gao had a hard time not saying what he thought, and so for the next 30 years in China, he was constantly in and out of trouble with the Party. During the Tiananmen protests, at a time when, for once, Gao was keeping his head down and mouth shut, he was arrested once again and thrown in prison, this time simply because the authorities assumed he had to be up to something. His wife had no idea where he was during that time, nor even if he was still alive.

On his release after six months, Gao and his wife decided that perhaps the prudent thing would be to clear out of China, and fast. They eventually escaped to Hong Kong, still under British control at the time, and a few months later made their way to the U.S., having been granted asylum. Fortunately for Gao and his wife, this was early in the Clinton administration, which was a bit more liberal in its approach to asylum-seekers than more recent administrations.

Translator: Robert Hammond Dorsett

Robert Dorsett studied Chinese at the Yale-in-China Program at the Chinese University in Hong Kong. He received an M.D. degree from the State University of New York and completed his training in pediatrics at Cornell. He also has an M.F.A. degree from New York University, where he subsequently taught creative writing.

Robert has translated many individual poems and essays from the Chinese. With David Pollard, he translated the memoirs of Gao Ertai, In Search of My Homeland: A Memoir of a Chinese Labor Camp (HarperCollins 2009). Stagnant Water is his second book of translations. In 2021, Crown Books released Robert’s latest translation, Selected Poems by Ai Qing by Ai Qing. Ai Qing was the father of the artist Ai Weiwei, who’s now living in exile. Ai Qing had at one time been a favorite of Mao, like Wen Yiduo. Unlike Wen, however, Ai Qing eventually ran afoul of the dictator and like Ertai Gao, was sentenced to hard labor in labor camp in a remote part of the country, along with his entire family. This is where Ai Weiwei grew up, in fact.

Robert has also published his own poetry in The Literary Review, Thea Kenyon Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. Formerly a senior physician at Kaiser Hospital Oakland, he now writes full time.

Translator: David Pollard

David Pollard is a veteran scholar of sinology and one of the most respected interpreters and translators of the Chinese essay. He was previously professor of Chinese at the University of London and professor of translation at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he coedited Renditions, the Chinese-English translation journal, with his wife, Eva Hung.

David has published widely in the fields of modern Chinese language and literature as well as translation studies. He is a major translator of Chinese classical and modern prose into English. His latest book, The Chinese Essay, is to date the only substantial anthology on the genre of Chinese sanwen, and also the only one that spans the Chinese classical and modern traditions.

From Chapter 6
“The Gate of Hell”

During the 1957 Anti-Rightist Movement, we teachers who had been denounced, so-called Rightist Elements, labored under supervision in the school grounds, waiting to be dealt with. Being without previous experience, we did not know what there was to fear, and in our rest periods we laughed and joked. Someone had brought along a copy of Selected Poems of Li Bai, and we used it to divine our future. The idea was you closed your eyes, opened the book and pointed at random, and the couplet you pointed to would predict what was in store for you. I didn’t believe in that stuff, but I played along. The couplet I pointed to was:

Since in this wide world he can find no kindred spirits,

Better to float off like the clouds to that fair land in the West.

Soon afterwards I was dismissed from public employment and sentenced to re-education through labor in the district of Jiuquan on the far western end of the Gansu Corridor, the old frontier region. A short, fat, florid-faced political cadre belonging to the school’s Party branch office, Zhang Zhengtai by name, escorted me there. He carried a bulging briefcase. I guessed it contained my dossier, but didn’t know what was written in it. Must be a hell of a lot, I thought. I was twenty-one that year, as daft as they come. I bought my own ticket, and boarded the west-bound train with him. On the journey I pictured myself as Chernyshevsky heading for Siberia, a martyr to truth.

On the morning of the third day we alighted at Jiuquan station, got in a car, and after a bumpy ride of more than half an hour, arrived in Jiuquan town. It was Gobi Desert all the way until the outskirts of the town, where the stony wastes gave way to fields, dressed in the depressing clothes of late autumn. The town streets were narrow and deeply rutted by cartwheels. Lining the roads were large numbers of towering old trees that emphasized the lowness of the houses. The houses were uniformly gray-yellow — “Few footfalls on the road, wind soughing in the poplars” — the bleakness of a frontier town. We ate a meal of dumplings in mutton broth in a small shop, after which Zhang Zhengtai commented, “First class, much more like the real thing than what you get in Lanzhou.” Those were the only words he spoke to me on our journey.

Round the corner was a newly built dark-gray building of three stories, the highest structure in town. On the gate into the compound there was a sign that read, “Gansu Management Bureau for Labor Reform: Jiuquan Department.” Two lines of people snaked along the walls of the big compound. One line of a hundred or so was all male, the other line of twenty to thirty was all female. Everyone was sitting on their belongings. No one spoke. Some policemen were walking back and forth across the empty middle space. Zhang handed me over to one of them, then went into the building with the briefcase under his arm. The policeman told me to tag on to the men’s line. I put my luggage on the ground and sat on it like the others.

A big dust-laden lorry pulled into the compound. The police ordered the men at the head of the queue to stand up, fall in, number off, and get on the lorry. They were taken away. We moved forward in turn. New people arrived in dribs and drabs, and filled in behind me. Before the dust stirred up by the lorry had completely settled, the queue had regained its original length. Zhang emerged at that point, his briefcase now flat, and walked straight out of the gate. Suddenly he turned back and walked up to me. He said: “Your train ticket. It’s no use to you, give it to me, I can get a refund.” He was off like a shot when I handed it over.

Before long another lorry loaded us up and jolted out of town. We passed through deserted fields and a few widely separated hamlets, and headed into the vast Great Gobi. The yellow clouds of dust the lorry churned up stretched far behind in an unbroken trail. Every trace of human habitation was rapidly lost to sight. The land-form of the Gobi Desert is an unvaried gravel plain: you drive for hundreds of miles, and it is all the same. It deadens you, makes you lose the concept of time and space. After we had driven for ages, the Gobi changed to saline and alkaline land. In this wilderness, a few light coffee-colored bogs showed up, and white salt drifts, and gray-green reeds. From time to time we came across one or two desert jujube trees, dreary gray, very like the reeds in color. The masculinity of the imposing and measureless Great Gobi was gone, and in its place a dead-and-alive limpness.

Eventually some bare plowed fields came into view, and at the same time we could see in the distance a square earth-built fortress with watch towers situated on the high ground, standing all by itself in the boundless wastes. Lit by the setting sun of late autumn, it looked just like a medieval castle.

The lorry stopped before the fortress. Some middle-aged men came out of the iron gate, yelled at us to get off the lorry, fall in and number off. Their tone was very fierce. The lorry left when we had numbered off. Then one by one they inspected our luggage and searched us, again with especial roughness. Cash, papers, watches, knives and scissors, matches, belts and shoelaces, plus the ropes we used to tie our baggage, all came in for confiscation. Holding up their trousers with one hand and carrying their hastily thrown together things with the other, those who had been searched went aside to repack. I hadn’t foreseen I would run into this kind of thing, and was caught completely unprepared. Besides books, notes and such things, I lost a diary that I had kept hidden all through the Anti-Rightist Movement.

The sun had long since gone down, and it was getting dark. The farm workforce dribbled back listlessly. Their contingents moved very slowly and in absolute silence. They did not enter the iron gate of the fortress. Two of our number were called inside, came out again carrying a wooden tub of something, and doled out a scoopful of the contents to everybody. For containers we used the bowls, pots, lunch tins or tea mugs we had brought with us; those without used their wash basins. We gulped down a supper — of what, we could not tell in the dark. Afterwards someone returned our ropes to us, ordered us to tie up our luggage, put it on our shoulders, form ranks, and set off.

There was a path across the wasteland. It gleamed white under the moon. Our luggage on our backs, one hand holding up our trousers, we walked a long long time. We got to our destination in the middle of the night. It consisted of rows of low mud-brick buildings. There were no frames in their window apertures, no doors in their doorways. A cold, bare and miserable place. Someone with a lantern led us into one of the buildings. We caught a whiff of rank body odor: There were men in there, sleeping on the ground. The one with the lantern shouted to them to get up and shift their bedding closer, so as to make room for us. After that he took back our ropes, retrieved his lantern, and left. Groping around in the dark, I found there was straw on the ground. I spread my bedding any old how. Hands cupping my head, I lay awake a long time.

One of the remarkable aspects of this memoir is that Gao himself is present but often in the background. He does not recount a heroic survival story of a man sustaining or resisting torture or brainwashing. We do learn of the unbearable daily labor, the starvation from inedible “goo,” the hog-tying of uncooperative prisoners. But Gao’s account is all the more powerful for not trying to be lurid or judgmental. His portraits of people — both those who have become cruel instruments of the system and those who struggled to remain humane within it — are vivid and moving. He maintains a generosity toward his fellow man that seems to come from suffering and detachment.

— Robert Faggen, The Los Angeles Times, January 3, 2010

The power of prison memoirs lies in their recounting of the unimaginable things people are willing to do to other people and, no less important, the ability of human beings to endure the worst kind of treatment and survive. These books inevitably recall Shakespeare: “The worst is not/So long as we can say ‘This is the worst.’”

We are all familiar with personal accounts of the Holocaust and the Gulag, less so with descriptions of the torture chamber that was Mao’s China. That is why Er Tai Gao’s spare, stoical remembrance, In Search of My Homeland: A Memoir of a Chinese Labor Camp, is a valuable contribution to the literature of the horrific 20th century.

Mr. Gao’s strategy was to write (to survive), producing tiny characters on whatever scraps of paper he could find. “While I wrote,” he says, “I was alive.” This was a dangerous, potentially fatal, undertaking, but he managed to hide his precious, life-threatening bundle of thoughts and impressions wherever he was sent. The result is this book.

— Barry Gewen, The New York Times, December 20, 2009

Pulitzer finalist and National Fiction Award and Book Award recipient Ha Jin says of Gao’s book: “Among numerous memoirs by Chinese authors, In Search of my Homeland stands out as an eloquent testimony to the violation and destruction of humanity. This revered scholar of aesthetic theories has written not only about his personal suffering in the remote labor camps and the political persecution he and his family experienced, but also about the fates of many common people. His style is fortified by concision, elegance, restraint, and depth. Each chapter here stands alone as a story and together they form a historical panorama of the Chinese society in the second half of the twentieth century. However, this is not just a book bearing historical witness; it is authentic literature.”

— Ha Jin, poet, essayist, and novelist. His most recent work is the novel A Song Everlasting.

China is not short of suffering but is short of art about that suffering. Gao Er Tai’s stories take us back into the mists of history, where we are able to see along with him the internal strife, the surrenders, the twists and turns as well as the resistance. We can also see the fragility and complexity of life along with bleeding details that make up great events of the time. His words burn with pure blue flame, detailed and straightforward, infused with the institutions of an artist and the wisdom of a philosopher. He once told me that he has to suppress a colossal anger when he writes, but I could not sense this at all. Clearly he possesses the profound skill to funnel his life’s fury into strings of words.

— Bei Dao, the author of several collections of poetry, essays, and fiction.