Kang Zhengguo (康正果), a poet and student of literature, loved to write. The watchful guardians of the Chinese Communist Party made sure he got plenty of practice. His favorite forms were the lyric poem and the diary. Theirs was the confession, and Kang turned them out by the dozen throughout his life, expiating one supposed crime after another by denouncing himself as a reactionary element, a deviationist and whatever else was on the political menu that day.
Despite the constant practice, Kang never learned his lesson. Late in Confessions, his remarkable memoir about growing up in Mao's China, he makes the most damning admission of all.
"I am incapable of saying what people want to hear," he writes. "In fact I regard it as my personal mission to speak the opposite." In other words, the party was right about him all along. "I am a reactionary in this sense," he explains, "and this concept has informed my behavior all my life."
Dreamy, lazy, romantic, stubborn and impulsive, Kang spelled trouble from the start. He was not a dissident in the normal sense but a determined individualist and a goof-off, seemingly intent on working against his own best interests, which is what make his memoirs such a mesmerizing read.
In the United States, Kang might have been a beatnik, a slacker or a nerd. In China, his lofty contempt for political orthodoxy and his inability to adapt put him on a collision course with the authorities and set him on the wobbly life path recorded so evocatively in Confessions.
Kang, now in his early 60s, compiled an extraordinary resume in his checkered career. A resident of Xian, a provincial capital in China's central plains, he enrolled in the literature department of the local university and immediately attracted the wrong kind of attention. A politically attuned professor spotted him carrying a biography of Napoleon.
"He insinuated that my interest in Napoleon implied that I cherished dubious political ambitions, which he was duty-bound to bring to light," Kang writes.
Expulsion for this and other microscopic offenses soon followed. Kang, loath to burden his family, signed on as a confined laborer at a brickyard. His outlook was optimistic and romantic. "All in all, it would be a rare opportunity for me to get a glimpse of the lowest rungs of society," he writes with characteristic elan.
He gets his glimpse, and it is no fun at all. Unremitting labor, prison-like conditions and the company of convict laborers depress him. "The place was simply a viper's pit and completely lacked the Robin Hood types and thrilling adventures that my favorite prison novels had led me to expect," he writes.
Then he joined the dregs himself.
In one of many foolish moments described in the book, Kang, having read denunciations of the novel Dr Zhivago, decided he had to read it. He sent off a letter in Russian to the Moscow University Library requesting a copy.
A three-year prison sentence ensued. After his release, he moved to a small village and, after arranging to be adopted by an old bachelor, joined a peasant commune and tried his hand at tilling the soil. The experiment, which lasted for years, was not a success. "I was a substandard peasant," he admits.
Like a character in a picaresque novel, Kang stumbles from one misadventure to the next, his big mouth and relaxed habits ensuring disaster at every turn. City, country, prison -- he covers it all. The confessions pile up, his dossier swells, and even China begins to look too small to accommodate him. All he wants, really, is a quiet place to curl up and read a book, and a few notebooks to write in. The party will not allow it.
Kang serves as an extraordinary guide through an extraordinary period of Chinese history. He lives through the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the thaw following Mao's death, the growing democracy movement of the 1980s and the crackdown after the protests in Tiananmen Square.
The great events are expressed in personal terms, and they are colored by Kang's unusual sensibility. He suffers, but he sees himself more often than not as a comic figure and the repressive machinery of the Chinese state as a tangle of absurdities.
His tone is sardonic, wry, urbane. He relishes the particulars of his often horrific circumstances, the details of rural life and, above all, the strange contradictions of his society. Even at the height of the Cultural Revolution, small social spaces opened up, allowing people to breathe. An act of kindness here, a sneaky bit of deception there, and the inevitable inefficiencies and human weaknesses of those in charge contribute to an unusually complex picture of life in China in its most repressive period.
Simply as a documentary record of daily life in China, Confessions is a rewarding read, but Kang, a gifted stylist (well served by his translator, Susan Wilf), has transmuted his struggles into a literary work of high distinction.
And it has a happy ending too. In the 1970s Kang returned to school, found a job as a university teacher and, after his work on classical Chinese poetry reached an academic audience in the US was invited to teach Chinese at Yale.
Needless to say, Kang, even after landing on his feet in the US, bringing his wife and children with him, manages to trip up one more time. Although he is well into middle age, and the new China is swept up in a quasi-capitalist economic boom, the party is not quite finished with him, and old habits die hard, as he discovers on a last trip home.
There is always time, apparently, for one more confession.
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