Prison Became Monk’s Crucible for Poetry : Dissent: In 25 years of Chinese detention, he composed 2,000 verses in his mind. He is writing them down after gaining U.S. asylum and being reunited with his order.

The Chinese monk writes each day in his cubicle at St. Andrew’s Priory, a Benedictine monastery in the stark desert hills south of Palmdale.

The monk’s writing hand is crippled, scarred, with permanently half-clenched fingers that grip the pen awkwardly. Outside Brother Peter’s window there are scenes of an oasis: Cows graze in a pasture; ducks glide on the monastery pond; the ringing of the chapel bell echoes in the San Gabriel Mountains, summoning black-clad monks to prayer.

But flowing relentlessly from Brother Peter’s pen are scenes of hell, images drawn from his 25 years as a political prisoner in Communist China. He was arrested in 1955 after the Communists shut down the original St. Andrew’s in China, which was founded by an order of Belgian monks in 1929. He spent years in solitary confinement and his arms and hands were damaged during excruciating months in tight handcuffs.

Brother Peter fought back with poetry. He composed thousands of poems in prison, defiant religious odes and denunciations of his captors. Denied writing materials, he engraved the verses in his memory through constant repetition.

“It is a way of staying sane,” said Father Eleutherius Winance, 81, who was Brother Peter’s philosophy teacher in China and who wrote a book about the Communist Chinese takeover and political persecution. “I knew a priest who was in the Nazi concentration camps. When he came out he could recite 5,000 verses in Ancient Greek. I knew another who composed a history of Belgium in his head.”

Father Eleutherius is now a writer, college professor and one of the half-dozen Belgian monks from the Chinese monastery who are among the 20 monks at the new St. Andrew’s. They belong to an order whose days of prayer, meditation and ministry are structured on the Rule of St. Benedict, a 1,500-year-old formula for life in a monastic community.

Since joining his brethren at St. Andrew’s six years ago, the 63-year-old Brother Peter has dedicated himself to writing and translating his brief, impassioned poems and a book of memoirs into English.

The writings are more than the result of Brother Peter’s efforts to mark time; they give voice to the struggles of thousands of victims of political and religious persecution in China and around the world. The words and the scars evoke an extraordinary odyssey that was both physical and spiritual.

“He is truly a holy man,” said Father Eleutherius, who for more than 25 years did not know whether Brother Peter was dead or alive. “He is highly motivated, and his motivation is religious. I admire him.”

Brother Peter’s given name is Zhou Bangjiu. He is diminutive, gentle and ethereally thin in his black habit. He spent a day recently discussing his life, taking pains to express himself precisely in English. He said the bloody repression in China during the past year shows the nation’s leaders suffer from the same malady of which his captors accused him repeatedly in prison.

“They are very obstinate,” he said. “Change is possible, but it will take time. . . . For myself, my duty and my responsibility was only to keep my faith, to remain faithful to the Lord. All the rest I entrusted to the merciful care of God himself.”

“Tight handcuffs come from heaven.”

--Nanchong Prison, 1960.

Zhou Bangjiu was born in 1926 in the Sichuan province in Western China. His father was a merchant who sold and repaired eyeglasses, a devout Catholic who was pleased when his son studied with the monks of St. Andrew’s in Chengdu and decided to join the order.

The young man became a novice monk in 1949, at the same time that the Chinese Communists were consolidating their power nationwide. The following years were increasingly tense for the monks of St. Andrew’s, as the party cracked down on those it perceived as enemies, including the Catholic Church.

In 1952, the local security forces shut down the monastery, converted it into a party headquarters and expelled the foreign monks from China. Brother Peter and another Chinese monk were not permitted to leave the country. Brother Peter returned home, helped his father with his business and awaited the crackdown he thought was inevitable.

On Nov. 7, 1955--he has a prodigious capacity for recalling dates--Brother Peter was arrested and placed in a detention center. The charges were standard fare: he was a “counterrevolutionary running dog” guilty of “unbridled slander” of the Communist Party and the national church it sponsored, according to his memoirs.

In his memoirs, Brother Peter expresses anguish over signing the “confession” provided him by authorities.

“When I recall what I did, even now, I still have a lingering fear, and I feel so deeply ashamed and regretful that I can find no place to hide myself.”

His shame became the foundation for a decision to resist at all costs, he said. He dissented during political “study groups” of prisoners, wrote a defense of the church and refused to take part in evening roll call.

As a result, officials ordered a group of prisoners to harangue him and bound him in tight handcuffs that remained on him day and night for a month. He says the agony only strengthened his resolve.

“It was a way to train my will,” Brother Peter said, demonstrating how he was forced to eat with his hands cuffed behind his back, stooped over a table. “Some prisoners tried to help, but the others laughed at me. I was very isolated.”

A tribunal sentenced Brother Peter to 20 years imprisonment. Because of his continuing “obstinacy” he was sent to a particularly tough prison labor camp in Nanchong known as the New Life Leather Shoe Factory. He said that on the registration form he wrote “arrested for no reason.”

Brother Peter said he was confronted in August, 1960, in a workshop by a prison official named Mr. Liu, who criticized his attitude. Mr. Liu became enraged and ordered Brother Peter placed in handcuffs and arm cuffs that were far tighter than before.

The next month almost killed the monk. His wounded right arm festered in the heat. Infection and sickness spread through his body. He was forced to stand during political meetings, his bonds prevented him from sleeping, he staggered in a daze, hounded by prisoners assigned to criticize him.

“However, this all became a graceful symphony of praise to God, almost a magnificent marching song, leading one soldier heavenwards. It would be hard to find better music than this in the world, music that, in the Chinese idiom, ‘resounded so sonorously as to stop the passing clouds.’ ”

--Memoirs,

St. Andrew’s Priory, 1986.

The handcuffs were removed and replaced by leg shackles. After spending some time in a prison clinic, Brother Peter was transferred to a unit for old or sick prisoners where life was not as harsh.

But he remained at ideological odds with his captors. In 1963, an official told him it was time for him to undertake a period of “self-examination.” In solitary confinement.

“In the beginning I thought I would have the chance to be martyred for the Lord,” he said. “Some prisoners died there.” And solitary was often a prelude to the firing squad.

There were rats and mosquitoes in the dark cell. He was fed rice and water. He later wrote verses about the heat, the cold, the smells. He imagined himself as Jonah in the belly of the whale. In his mind, the prison cell became a monastic cubicle, providing a spiritual existence “as sweet as honeyed wine.”

“It was a time to pray and meditate,” he said.

It was also a time for poetry. During the next two years he composed in his head a poem called “Song of Life,” a religious epic that he says contained 1,400 stanzas. That poem, one of his first, has faded from his memory.

Upon his release from solitary two years later, Brother Peter befriended a blind inmate who loaned him a book of the poetry of Communist leader Mao Zedong. The monk memorized Mao’s poems, written in the traditional spare Chinese style, and used the style as a model for his own. He relishes the irony of turning Mao’s propaganda weapon against Communism.

When a prisoner maligned the church at a political meeting in 1966, Brother Peter got up and recited a poem “about my allegiance to the Lord.”

He was punished with an additional five-year sentence. But at that point, he said, prison was not much worse than the conditions outside, in a society consumed by the terror of the Cultural Revolution, whose reverberations brought tension and new prisoners to the prison camp.

In 1971 he was transferred to another prison camp, where he would spend three years in solitary confinement. He composed hundreds of poems about prison life, religious themes and news from the outside world, such as the selection of Pope John Paul II.

During this time he managed to obtain a small notebook. In his cubicle at St. Andrew’s, Brother Peter moves almost furtively as he pulls that notebook, now yellowed, from his desk and displays the tiny Chinese characters, a personal code in which each symbol represented an entire poem.

“One word was enough to remember,” he said. “Only myself could understand.”

Mao’s death in 1976 and the reforms of Deng Xiaoping resulted in improved conditions at the camp. At the urging of a sympathetic prison official, Brother Peter wrote a letter in 1980 asking that his additional five-year sentence be revoked. His request was granted and he was released in 1981.

“I came to you, my prison, under a scorching sun,

Now I am leaving as the wind blows gently.

Since I have lived with you

for 11 winters, O prison,

I am sorry to say goodby to you, my friend!”

--Jinping Labor Reform Camp, 1971

Brother Peter traveled to the city of Suining and moved in with relatives, who he says were unsympathetic and critical of his religious convictions. He earned what money he could by setting up a stall where he wrote letters for people. His goal was to rejoin his brother monks.

Through former friends of the monastery, he learned that St. Andrew’s had been re-established in Southern California. He wrote to the monks, and efforts began to get him out of China.

As a political prisoner and a critic of the system, it was difficult for Brother Peter to win permission to travel.

“Everybody said it was impossible if you had been in the concentration camps,” said Father John Borgerding, prior of St. Andrew’s.

But the monks enlisted the aid of an Antelope Valley doctor, who exchanged letters with Brother Peter. With the doctor’s help, Brother Peter prepared an application for a visa asking for permission to obtain medical treatment for his hands and to visit relatives in the United States.

Brother Peter said he encountered several Chinese officials who were helpful. Borgerding believes a climate of increased goodwill after a 1983 visit to China by then-President Ronald Reagan played a role. And Father Eleutherius cites another factor: “Providence.”

In November, 1984, exit visa and passport in hand, Brother Peter left China. At first he did not recognize the elderly monks who came to pick him up at Los Angeles International Airport. The reunion was overwhelming.

Since then, Brother Peter has received political asylum. He has fallen into the simple rhythms of life at the monastery. The day begins at 6 a.m. with the first of five prayer services interspersed with work, study and meals. Silence is observed from 8:30 p.m. to 9 a.m. He works with the other monks in the upkeep of the monastery, which supports itself by selling ceramics and agricultural products and by collecting donations from guests and groups that use it for retreats.

But the bulk of his time is devoted to writing. The continuing process of retrieving an estimated 2,000 poems from his memory and translating the poems and prose with help of others has been arduous. He says he has written down about 600 of the prison poems.

The years of “holy struggle,” as he calls them, had a memorable reward in 1986, when he met Pope John Paul II in Rome and presented him with a copy of his manuscript.

“The Pope told me, ‘Pray for China,’ ” Brother Peter said.

Brother Peter hopes to publish his works, excerpts of which have already appeared in religious publications. And he wants to study theology in order to enter the priesthood.

He was asked whether there were times in prison when he doubted, when he did not understand why he had to suffer so much. He said there were.

“But when I considered it more and more, there was no problem,” he said. “God could not forsake someone who trusted him and fought for him.”

“The remaining poems

still sleep in my mind

On what day will they awaken from their dreams?”

--St. Andrew’s Priory, 1988.