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Cultural Revolution, Memory and Shame (1988)

In 1988 the Chinese writer Shi Tiesheng wrote an essay called "Wenge jikui" on "remembering my guilt" from the Cultural Revolution. In it Shi recalls an incident in the late 1960s, when he made a hand-written copy of a piece of "counterrevolutionary" underground fiction that someone else, a friend he refers to as "B," had given him. He recounts how the version in his handwriting was discovered by Public Security when a third friend, friend "C" took the story to read at school. Shi faced the terrible dilemma of whether to divulge the name of the person who gave him the original. He remembers with regret that he did eventually confess his source, but on one crucial point memory fails him: he cannot remember whether his confession came before or after he knew that the police had already discovered the crucial facts from another witness anyway. Thus he concludes his written account of memory with two alternate endings:

Originally I wanted to set down these events exactly as they happened. But memory's sieve has already let some of the reasons for guilt and shame slip away. Having written to this point, I stopped for two days to scour my memory, which produced the following two different versions of what happened next. It has been many years since I last saw B, and it seems awkward to go ask him to check facts only for this essay, so why don't I just write down the two versions as I remember them?

The more likely version is this: During those days when I felt intensely agitated, and was unable to think of any way out, B came and said to me, "If they come for you, just tell them the truth--that I was the one who gave you the manuscript." When I heard him say this, I didn't clearly say that I agreed, but also said nothing to oppose the idea. While worry still loomed, deep inside I felt a wave of relief.

After considerable pause, I just said, "Then what'll you do?"

"I'll just take the blame myself," B answered. He hurried off, and the guilt sprouted in my heart from that moment. Although I sensed immedaitely that I would likely carry its burden for the rest of my life, I was too panic-stricken to consider choosing differently, and felt, moreover, that I had been saved.

The second version is this: B came and said to me, "If the police come lookng for you, just tell them the truth, that I was the one who gave you the manuscript. C has already told everything anyway." When I heard this, I felt a wave of relief.

C had indeed caved in during the third day of interrogation in solitary confinement; she had told all. But was it B who told me this? Or someone else, at some later time? I hope it was the former, but this very hope is strong evidence that it was probably the latter because the sieve that is memory not only allows inconvenient details to leak out, but also lets self-protecting details seep in. I never did blame C--but also never made a special point that I was not blaming C. I think my subconscious was telling me a truth: that really there was no difference between C and me. In sum, whichever memory is accurate, that wave of relief I felt at what B said tells all. This is the main point I want to get down on paper."

Credit: Excerpted from Cultural Revolution, Memory and Shame.Translated by Mary Jacob and Perry Link. Originally published in Dongfang Jishi, No.1, 1989.

Biography:

Short-story writer and essayist Shi Tiesheng was born in Beijing in 1951. One of the early policies of the Cultural Revolution sent Shi to a rural life, along with millions of other urban middleschoolers. During 1969-1972, Shi lived in Qingpingwan, a small isolated village on the barren breast of the ancient Loess Plateau in northwestern China. Since the age of 21, Shi Tiesheng has been paralyzed. The best known among Shi Tiesheng's stories are Nainai de Xingxing (Granny's Star), which won the National Excellent Short Story Prize of 1984 and Laowu Xiaoji (Something About the Old House), a 1995-96 Lu Xun Literary Price winner. Many critics have considered I and the Temple of Earth as one of the best Chinese prose essays of the 20th century.

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