Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China (12 page)

With the help of another friend, however, Hu did succeed in obtaining one official document from the records room of the Shanghai prosecutor’s office. Hu and his friend, a judicial officer from another jurisdiction, simply walked in and requested Lin Zhao’s case file. A moment later, the clerk returned with a thin folder containing several typewritten pages that were faded and illegible, and one thirteen-page handwritten report that was readable. It was titled “Excerpt from Materials to Increase Penalty in Lin Zhao Case.” Hu skimmed it and quickly recognized its significance. This was the report recommending that Lin Zhao be executed. His friend asked the clerk to photocopy it, and then they rushed out of the office, flush with excitement.

Hu studied the report carefully. It was dated December 5, 1966, and it accused Lin Zhao of “serious crimes” in prison, namely:

1. Insanely attacking, cursing, and slandering our great Chinese Communist Party and our great leader Chairman Mao…
   
2. Regarding the proletarian dictatorship and socialist system with extreme hostility and hatred…
   
3. Publicly shouting reactionary slogans, disrupting prison order, instigating other prisoners to rebel, and broadcasting threats to take revenge on behalf of executed counter-revolutionary criminals…
   
4. Persistently maintaining a reactionary stand, refusing to admit her crimes, resisting discipline and education, and defying reform…
   

The report detailed Lin Zhao’s behavior in prison, describing how she cut herself and used her blood to write “extremely reactionary and vicious” letters, essays, and diaries that contained “hundreds of thousands of words,” including one work with 180,000 words and another with 200,000. It also said she wrote slogans in blood on the prison walls and on her clothes, smeared blood on photos of Mao, and rallied the other prisoners and led them in shouting slogans of protest. The report concluded, “Labor Reform Bureau opinion: Our opinion is that prisoner Lin should be executed.” There was also a notation from a senior Shanghai police official, Wang Jian, dated three days later: “Agree to prosecute to increase penalty. Please consult and research with procuratorate and court, see what opinion they have.”

Later, Hu interviewed a man who had been held at the same prison as Lin Zhao and saw her not long before she was executed. He told Hu that everyone in the prison knew her because of her shouting and because the prison’s loudspeaker broadcasts often criticized her for resisting reeducation. When he last saw Lin Zhao, she had been moved from the general population to a cell on the building’s fifth floor, where she was the only prisoner. Sometimes he was told to take food to her, and he would see her sitting behind the iron bars. Her head was wrapped in a helmet that covered her entire face except her eyes. The prison made her wear it to muffle her voice.

A
S HE CONTINUED
gathering material, Hu began editing and putting together what he had. He kept only the tapes he was working on at home, hiding the rest with friends and relatives in case the police raided his apartment, and whenever he finished editing a new piece of the film, he made copies and hid those, too. Gradually, the documentary began to take shape. Hu titled the film
Searching for Lin Zhao’s Soul.
It was shot in color and opened with footage he took of himself talking about how he had set out to uncover who Lin Zhao was and what had happened to her. He built the movie around his quest and narrated it himself, but he let her friends and classmates do most of the talking. In between these interviews, Hu read excerpts from Lin Zhao’s poems, letters, and prison writings, letting the camera linger over her handwriting or on black-and-white photos of her, often with dramatic orchestral music in the background. Hu struggled with the volume of material he had collected and the complexity of the subject, which he suspected much of his audience would know nothing about. In the fall of 2003, he showed an early version to Cui Weiping, a well-known feminist critic and film professor in Beijing, and she liked it enough to invite a small group of scholars and filmmakers to a private screening in her home. It was the first time Hu had shown the film to a group of strangers, and he was nervous. Afterward, the audience discussed the movie. Cui and the historians in the room were impressed and praised it as a breakthrough, the first Chinese-made documentary to confront this hidden period in the nation’s past. But the documentary filmmakers in the audience disparaged the movie, saying that it was too emotional and that it wasn’t a real documentary. They argued that Hu had lionized Lin Zhao and produced a work of propaganda no better than the government’s films.

Hu was encouraged by the feedback, and he took the criticism to heart. He recognized that he was no longer objective about Lin Zhao, that his feelings had evolved from curiosity to obsession to something bordering on worship. When he managed to locate Lin Zhao’s ashes in a funeral hall in Shanghai, for example, he took a lock of hair that had not been destroyed in the cremation for safekeeping, because he worried her urn might be lost. Black-and-white snapshots of Lin Zhao decorated his editing studio, and he even painted a small portrait of her. One close friend admonished him, saying he was no longer researching Lin Zhao but falling in love with her, and Hu realized that his friend had a point. He had heard so many stories about Lin Zhao that he felt he knew her, and he could see why so many of the men in her life had fallen for her. He found her fiery personality alluring, and he admired the passion and grace of her writing. But it was more than that. He was also inspired by her courage, and her uncompromising sense of justice. It made him realize how uncommon these qualities were in Chinese society now, and he wondered whether the country was worse off for that.

Hu tried to keep his personal feelings in check as he continued editing his film. He adopted a less sentimental style and a more neutral tone, letting the drama of history speak for itself, and he also added material from new interviews. He was still worried about the state security agents, so he decided to burn the film to disc and begin circulating it. The documentary wasn’t done, and he included a disclaimer indicating it was still a work in progress and asking viewers not to distribute it, but he wanted at least some people to see it in case he were arrested. As he continued editing and the secret police still did not come, he distributed additional versions and began to believe he was engaged in a delicate, unspoken negotiation with the authorities. He imagined they had refrained from arresting him because he had not finished the film and formally released it for distribution, by selling it overseas, for example. If they arrested him, he thought, they would be drawing attention to what remained an underground film with a small audience. But if they didn’t arrest him, he could keep adding to the documentary and releasing new editions, and slowly he could build a larger audience.

As it happened,
Searching for Lin Zhao’s Soul
spread faster than Hu expected. Cui, the film professor, published an essay about it, and then in the spring of 2004, a professor at a university in Guangzhou invited him to screen it for her class as part of a weeklong series of documentaries she was showing. Later, the director of a fine arts museum in the city who attended that screening arranged for Hu to show it in the museum’s assembly hall before a crowd of three hundred. Word spread quickly after that, with invitations coming from colleges across the country. A few newspapers found ways to publish articles about the film, too, and then a publisher arranged to distribute the videodiscs along with a new textbook to hundreds of universities. Hu told every audience he spoke to that the film was unfinished, and he meant it, because the more people saw it, the more calls he received with leads to fresh material.

Sometimes, when Hu took questions from audiences, a few college students would challenge him, questioning his loyalty and accusing him of misinterpreting history. But the response was overwhelmingly positive. Older viewers often watched the film in tears and crowded around Hu afterward, thanking him for ensuring their experiences were not forgotten. Younger people also embraced the documentary, saying it opened their eyes to how much they didn’t know about their own country’s history and forced them to reevaluate everything they had been taught. Students transcribed the text of the film and posted it on the Internet, and there was a flurry of essays and Web sites memorializing Lin Zhao. Her sister returned to Shanghai again and arranged to put the ashes that Hu had located in a cemetery in Suzhou. Hundreds attended the ceremony, and others organized annual pilgrimages to the tomb. After five years of solitary research, Hu realized he had underestimated his nation’s willingness to confront the dark chapters of its past.

The state security agents eventually came out of the shadows and knocked on Hu’s door. It was 2005, and his film was an underground success. The agents were younger than he expected, and polite, and they said they had come just to talk. One of them said that Hu was quite famous now, and they could no longer “look after” him. The other told him that there were many stories like Lin Zhao’s across the country. He said people like Lin Zhao were victims of “an error of the Left” and there was no use talking about them now because no one would ever be held responsible. Then he asked Hu why his films always dwelled on the negative, and why he never made any positive documentaries about China.

Hu replied that he believed it was a documentary filmmaker’s duty to look at society critically. He said there were hundreds of television stations in China and they were always broadcasting “positive” stories that glorified “advanced” party members. He asked the agent if he liked to watch those reports. The agent acknowledged that he did not, but pressed Hu again: Didn’t he think there had been progress since Lin Zhao’s era? Yes, Hu replied. If he had made a film like this during the Cultural Revolution, he would have been shot. If he had done it a decade ago, he might have been followed and arrested. “But now you come to my front door and we can talk to each other like friends,” Hu said. “You have been very lenient with me, and this is progress.” The agent couldn’t help but agree.

A
FEW YEARS LATER,
I heard Hu Jie was in Beijing again and arranged to meet him at a coffee shop not far from the city’s Second Ring Road. He had asked me not to write about him in the
Washington Post;
he was afraid such publicity might anger the authorities. But I was still following his work, because he had agreed to let me tell his story after my assignment in China ended. That afternoon, he arrived at the coffee shop more than a half hour late, looking haggard in a dark t-shirt with a canvas camera bag slung over his shoulder. He mumbled something about the city’s traffic, which had grown progressively worse in recent years, and he seemed distracted as he settled into our booth. He said he had been busy with several new documentaries, almost all of which explored politically sensitive subjects, but one project had proved particularly challenging. It was the one that had brought him back to Beijing.

The film was another attempt to illuminate a dark chapter in China’s history, he said, but instead of the Anti-Rightist Campaign, its focus was the Cultural Revolution. For more than a year, he had been quietly interviewing an eighty-five-year-old scholar of modern history at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences named Wang Jingyao. Wang’s late wife, Bian Zhongyun, had been a vice principal at one of the city’s most prestigious secondary schools, the Girls’ Middle School at Beijing Normal University. When the Cultural Revolution began, students at the school had answered Mao’s call to root out hidden enemies of socialism and accused Bian of being a counterrevolutionary. Weeks of denunciation meetings followed and ended in tragedy on August 5, 1966, when a group of tenth-grade girls paraded Bian and four other administrators around the school grounds, kicking and beating them with nail-spiked clubs. After hours of torture, Bian collapsed and was dumped in a garbage cart. She was forty-eight, and one of the first people to die in the Cultural Revolution. Devastated by his wife’s murder, Wang went to the morgue the next day with a folding camera and photographed her body. In the black-and-white pictures, Bian is laid out on the concrete floor, her face swollen and bruised, her hair tangled and caked in blood, her clothes torn and soiled. In other shots, the clothes have been removed, and bruises are visible all over her body. Wang told Hu he took the photos “to record the truth of history,” and he kept them secret for decades. Now he wanted Hu to use them in a film to ensure his wife’s death would not be forgotten.

But Hu was having trouble with the documentary. Almost all the former students and teachers he located had refused to talk to him. He tracked down one teacher who had risked persecution after the murder by sending Wang an anonymous condolence letter, but even she refused to be interviewed. She was seventy-five now, and nearly forty years had passed, but she told Hu it was still too soon to discuss what happened. Forced to work with limited material, Hu began building the film around Wang’s photos, and he had just screened the latest version for him. But Wang was not satisfied. He wanted Hu to make it even tougher, perhaps by including his suspicion the authorities never fully investigated his wife’s death because so many of the girls at the school were the children of senior leaders, including Deng Xiaoping and the former president, Liu Shaoqi. Hu sighed as he discussed the situation. The Cultural Revolution evoked such intense and conflicting emotions. So many people were unwilling to discuss it, which made it difficult for him to gather material, yet Wang was determined to force society to confront his wife’s death, and he insisted Hu keep working on the film until it was powerful enough to achieve that goal.

It took Hu another year to finish the documentary, which he titled
Though I Am Gone.
Because he focused tightly on Wang and the story of his wife’s death, the movie seemed even more disturbing and emotionally raw than the Lin Zhao film. Hu shot it almost entirely in black and white, and in the most compelling scene, Wang unpacks a suitcase containing the soiled and bloodied clothes that his wife was wearing when she died. Hu was proud of the work, and in the spring of 2007 he submitted it to a prestigious film festival in southwest China. A week before the festival was scheduled to open, though, the government intervened. It didn’t just block the documentary from being shown. It canceled the entire film festival.