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In 1957, 22-year-old Er Gao argued in an essay ("On Beauty") that the nature of what is beautiful is both subjective and individual. However, the Party believed beauty is objective and collective. In 1956, Mao's 'Hundred Flowers Campaign' had encouraged commentary and critiques by Chinese intellectuals and artists, and Gao took the encouragements at face value. As a result, in February 1957 published his essay on the topic in a nationally distributed magazine. The essay prompted national debate and he was sent to a labor camp in China's harsh western desert for 're-education.' (Because there's no certainty how long "remolding" those thoughts can take, the length of detention for Gao and others was at the whim of the government and the party.) There, about 90% of his fellow prisoners died due to the combination of cold, malnutrition, heavy labor, lack of hope.

The work was basically meaningless - digging ditches across the desert to drain the salt from the land. The ditches were about 16' wide at top, 1' at the bottom, and 7'-16' deep, spaced roughly every one-third of a mile. The day began with breakfast under starlight; workers were lucky to receive water at noon. After a day of digging, workers returned for a moonlit dinner and small group sessions of informing on each other. When Gao returned to the camp area years later, Gao found the desert had mostly filled them back in.

Gao was one of the lucky ones, possibly because there was a need for painters at the time, and was released in 1962. Gao then found work with an institute studying the extensive Buddhist artwork in the nearby Dunhuang Magao Caves; in his private time, Gao used his freedom of thought to ponder the meaning of his work and existence. The year 1966 brought the Cultural Revolution, and Gao was among those at the institute "dragged out for 'struggle and criticism.'" He was reassigned as a janitor and laborer at the site and subject to daily criticism sessions. Much of his writing was lost and used against him. Gao was hardly the only one - nearly half the staff at his institution were sent to the detention area. Gao's hard labor ended again in 1972, and he was declared rehabilitated later. However, the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising brought trouble again for Gao - he wasn't involved, but was rounded up as being 'one of the usual suspects.'

Gao's book is somewhat disjointed, probably because some of what he wrote has been lost, and the fact that it originally had been written on scraps of paper (sometimes cigarette wrapping papers) hidden from authorities; it also does not focus on the brutality of the labor, beatings and starvation that he and his fellow re-hab inmates incurred, but on how the individuals changed - typically becoming raving supporters of Party thought.

After two more imprisonments, Gao escaped to Hong Kong and then the U.S., to Las Vegas.

Bottom Line: Mr. Gao has seen and endured far more than most, and deserves great respect. However, I found Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" about a similar situation in Russia much more compelling.

I heard great things about this book so my expectations were maybe too high.
Good descriptions on the life in a labor camp, but nothing beyond this. Difficult to follow the flow from chapter to chapter making it a difficult read.