"The worst is not / So long as we can say "This is the worst". Shakespeare.
"We are all familiar with personal accounts of the Holocaust and the Gulag, less so with descriptions of the torture chamber that was Mao's China. That is why Er Tai Gao's spare, stoical remembrance, "In Search of My Homeland : A Memoir of a Chinese Labor Camp", is a valuable contribution to the literature of the horrific 20th century. As a naïve art instructor in the provincial ciy of Lanzhou in north-central China, Mr. Gao made the mistake of writing an essay titled "On Beauty". The piece is included in this book and, reading it, one is amazed that it was allowed to be published in a totalitarian Communist state. It is an attack on materialist aesthetics and an argument for the centrality of subjectivity - that is, freedom - to the creation of art ... Mr. Gao was labeled a "rightist" and sent to a re-education camp, Jiabiangou Farm, in the Gobi Desert. "One moment of fame" he writes, "turned into 20 years of misfortune" ... The days didn't end when the sun went down. In the evenings prisoners had to attend meetings at which they confessed their errors and informed on others. To show the effectiveness of their re-education, they were forced to smile all the time, which required sustained concentration and effort. " Because the smile bore evidence of this strenuous effort", Mr. Gao says, "it also sometimes resembled crying". Extrait of International Herald Tribune, wednesday, december 23....
Se non stai all'aria aperto, se non muove un poco, se non vai con noi, per stare soltanto a mangiare e fumare spesso, magari c'è come nel lavoro forzato, col sorriso obligato, Je chante avec toi liberté
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In Search of My Homeland: A Memoir of a Chinese Labor ... by Er Tai Gao, translated by Robert Dorsett and David Pollard, 21 december 2009.
