Novelist Relives Labor Camp Nightmare

Like Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who turned long years as a political prisoner in the Soviet Union into his most powerful work, Chinese novelist Zhang Xianliang relives the ordeal of 22 years spent in labor camps.

Zhang’s best-known book in the West, the semi-autobiographical “Half of Man Is Woman,” is about a young man sent to prison in China for 20 years for writing a poem. Living under watchful eyes of prison guards he is at nearly 40 still a virgin.

To his horror he finds himself impotent when he manages to marry a fellow inmate. “That was me at a certain point of my experience in the camps,” Zhang said.

Zhang was consigned to hard labor at the age of 21 for writing a poem the authorities disapproved of. He emerged from the camps at 43 with a wellspring of images of an Orwellian nightmare.

“All the sorrow in that book was about me, but none of the happiness was about me,” he said.

The novel’s protagonist becomes infatuated with a sensuous woman prisoner, but must wait years until political conditions allow them to converse. He is bitterly disappointed by her venality but marries her nonetheless.

Published in 1985, the book’s sexually explicit passages created a sensation in China, where puritan values in literature still prevail.

China’s artists and writers have been the target of waves of persecution campaigns since the communist takeover in 1949. Zhang was swept up in a major one in 1957.

“They labelled me a rightist-deviationist because I wrote about my feelings about myself, my people and my country,” said Zhang.

“To this day, I do not know what is a rightist or a leftist,” he added.

He was exiled from his home in Nanjing, the graceful old capital in China’s southeast, to the desert wastes of Ningxia in the remote north.

After his release, Zhang sought refuge from politics by staying in Yinchuan to the south of the two labor camps where he once toiled.

The pace of life in the tree-shaded city appears slow and relaxed compared with Beijing, where security remains tight after martial law was lifted last January.

Thanks to its large Muslim minority, Yinchuan has a Middle Eastern air with many mosques and Islamic restaurants.

“The good thing is, it’s far from Beijing.” Living in the Chinese capital left one too open to scrutiny, Zhang said.

From his less exposed vantage point, Zhang continues to write about the anguish of lost freedom and his sadness at the craven deeds men sometimes commit to survive.

His current work, as yet untitled, is about starvation in labor camps during the 1960s. “It’s more about the sad state of China’s intellectuals than physical starvation,” he says.

Artists and writers are again under siege as Beijing continues its crackdown on dissent, one year after the bloody suppression of pro-democracy protests.

Several prominent editors and journalists have been dismissed from their jobs and government-orchestrated orthodoxy is the order of the day.

Zhang has seen it all, in his youth lost in prison camps from 1957 to 1979. “I was never able to write in all those years. How could I? I was watched constantly,” he said.

“I kept my sanity during those years because I believed things would someday get better,” he said. “But I still dream about those days a lot, even though I try not to think about them all the time.”

He confronts his nightmare past by writing about it. “It is my catharsis,” he says.

But he is understandably wary about going out on a limb, knowing what it cost him in the past.

Zhang, now 53 and owlish in large-framed glasses, married at the age of 44, a year after he emerged from prison. He has a 9-year-old son.

Zhang said he made $4,250 as a flat fee for “Half of Man Is Woman,” hardly a princely sum compared with what successful writers in the West can expect.

Chinese authors do not earn royalties, so even large sales do not benefit them, he said.

“But if one gets the Nobel Prize, at least one’s reputation is helped,” he said with a laugh.