“A Single Tear” and Chinese intellectuals under Mao.

Wu Ningkun is a Chinese intellectual who returned to China from the United States in 1951, only to face nearly three decades of persecution under Mao Zedong’s regime. Wu had initially been invited to contribute to the new China but became a target due to his Western education and past affiliations. His experiences included imprisonment, forced labor, and the trauma of the Cultural Revolution, which deeply affected his family. Throughout his suffering, Wu found solace in literature as a way to distance himself from the harshness of reality. His memoir, “A Single Tear,” documents his struggles and serves as a historical record of the intellectuals’ plight during this tumultuous period—an important account of the human spirit and its resilience.

I came, I suffered, I survived: A Single Tear and Chinese Intellectuals under Mao

By Hai Lun

This article was first published by the China Unofficial Archives.

For the original version of this essay, go to the publisher’s website here, where it is also available in Chinese.

Wu Ningkun was 30 years old and a third-year PhD student in American and English literature at the University of Chicago in 1951 when he received a cable from Beijing inviting him to return home. The People’s Republic of China, founded two years earlier, was calling for overseas Chinese like Wu to contribute their expertise to building the New China. A patriot who served as a translator for the American Flying Tigers during the Second World War, Wu happily accepted the invitation. What followed was close to three decades of near-unremitting persecution and hardship in Mao’s China, which he recounted in his 1993 memoir A Single Tear and summed up as “I came, I suffered, I survived.”

A Chinese version of A Single Tear, which Wu translated from English himself, came out in Taiwan in 2002. Although the book has never been published in Mainland China, scanned versions of it have circulated on the Internet, available to people interested in learning about the Mao era and equipped with the technology to circumvent the Great Firewall. Over time it acquired a sizable readership and became one of the best-known memoirs on intellectuals’ sufferings under Mao. Much of what Wu wrote about, chief among them the Cultural Revolution, still cannot be freely discussed in China. As the 60th anniversary of the outbreak of the event arrives this year, it is worth revisiting the book.

Even by the standards of the time, Wu suffered more than most. Because of his Western education and links to the Nationalist Army, Wu became a target for attack soon after his return. After brief stints teaching English in universities in Beijing and Tianjin, he was labeled an “ultra-rightist” during the Hundred Flowers campaign for the criticisms of the party he had been coaxed into giving by school authorities. He spent the next three years doing hard labor, away from his wife and small children, first in the notorious Xingkai Lake prison farm in the northeast, then in a prison near Beijing, where he nearly starved to death.

Upon his release in 1961, Wu was sent to Anhui University, where his wife was working at the time. Family life resumed, only briefly. Wu’s rightist label came back to haunt him when the Cultural Revolution broke out, condemning him to the “cow shed” — a term for makeshift holding cells for those the party deemed class enemies, where he was monitored constantly and forced to go through repeated self-criticisms. The family was scattered. His daughter, Emily Yimao Wu, who was eight years old when the Cultural Revolution started, later revealed in her memoir Feather in the Storm that she was raped twice in 1966 and 1967, once by a People’s Liberation Army soldier and once by a former colleague of her father’s.

Later sent down to the countryside with the rest of his family, Wu was not cleared of his ultra-rightist charge until 1979, after the end of the Cultural Revolution. By then nearly 60, Wu had lived as a class enemy for 22 years. Throughout his years of persecution, Wu felt himself “a thinking reed at the mercy of the whim of the socialist political wind.” A West-trained academic unacquainted with the ways of the Chinese Communist Party, Wu had no talent of drumming up past sins to satisfy his interrogators, nor was he good at performing contrition on demand.

When he was under pressure to confess, Wu had a way of recalling to himself lines from famous works of Western literature. To him, the mass hysteria at a struggle session was “full of sound of fury, signifying nothing,” as Shakespeare put it. He refused to acquiesce to the counterrevolutionary accusations leveled against him, for he stood by Lincoln’s words “To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards out of men.”

Later, Wu was sent away to a labor farm, where, trudging across icy plains with a bundle of chopped wood on his back, he fancied himself “part of the moving grove from Birnam wood advancing upon Macbeth besieged in his ‘Forbidden City’ of Dunsinane.”

Those literary references may strike western readers as pedantic and out of context, but they were crucial in helping Wu to mentally distance himself from his harrowing experiences. The ability to preserve an inner self, however at odds with its surroundings, proved critical to surviving Mao’s brutal campaigns. Thanks to it, Wu was able to resist succumbing to the anger and hopelessness that consumed many of his peers, whose tragic stories littered the book: Lucy Chao, a famous literary scholar and Wu’s colleague at Yenching University, developed schizophrenia after her husband, the archeologist Cheng Mengjia, was labeled a rightist. Jiang Nan, the wife of one of Wu’s colleagues at Anhui University, hanged herself after she was raped by workers in the countryside and refused abortion by local doctors.

Wu survived in the end, but he struggled to come to terms with his sufferings. Unlike the diehard revolutionaries who saw their tribulations under Mao as tests to their faiths, Wu, never a devout Communist, could not bring himself to that view. He knew his heart lay elsewhere. In the aftermath of the Hundred Flowers campaign, during which Wu suffered numerous rounds of attacks, he discovered his wife was pregnant with his second child.

“I was a family man now and I was not prepared to be made a martyr,” Wu thought to himself, “for my flesh was very weak.” In the end, Wu turned to writing. He wrote in the book’s prologue that documenting his experiences was his attempt to answer the question: “Have I suffered and survived in vain?”

This purpose shows in the meticulousness with which Wu recounted events dating back as long as half a century ago. His descriptions of repeated victimization between the 1950s and the 1970s, crowded with names and extended dialogues in direct quotes, could have been lifted directly out of his diary.

Compared to other noted memoirs of the period, such as Six Chapters from My Life ‘Downunder’ by Yang Jiang or In Search of My Homeland by Gao Ertai, A Single Tear seems less interested in sublimating painful memories than in historic record keeping. Wu wrote down all he could remember: He provided little contextual information, like the power dynamics in his workplaces or the backgrounds of his torturers, perhaps because the ostracism and isolation he faced meant he had little insight into those questions. But he took pains to record what he saw, like the deaths by starvation at Qinghe Prison or the Red Guards’ violence towards his colleagues at Anhui University, individual stories that would otherwise have been lost to history.

Wu showed that there was more to his experience than sheer brutality, though those respites tended to be fleeting. When Wu lived in an agricultural commune during the Cultural Revolution, he was delighted to discover that the peasant student assigned to watch him had a love for reading. The two bonded over late-night conversations about Lu Xun and The Dream of the Red Chamber. That soon made the student a target of attack himself, in a vitriolic struggle session Wu was forced to attend.

The handler was soon replaced by another peasant student, a soft-hearted orphan who never raised his voice at his charges. The orphan knew he “would never make a good revolutionary,” he confessed to Wu, when he teared up at the deaths of his favorite peach trees in the hands of villagers ordered to “dig up roots of capitalism.” Deemed lacking revolutionary spirit, the student was sent back to his rural commune while his more zealous classmates won promotions to urban work units.

A lasting source of solace and support in Wu’s life was his wife Li Yikai, whose narration of her own experience forms the basis of several chapters of the book. She met Wu when she took his class at Nankai University and married him after her graduation in 1954. More than once, it was Li’s resourcefulness and resolve that saved Wu from the abyss. During the Great Famine, when Wu was dying of malnutrition in state prison, Li tirelessly lobbied Wu’s former work unit to intervene on Wu’s behalf, eventually helping to secure his release. In 1973, when Wu was confined to the countryside during Mao’s initiative to have intellectuals “receive reeducation from peasants,” Li travelled across provinces to plead and wrangle with party bureaucrats for better treatments for her husband. Those efforts led to Wu’s return to the city and reinstatement to the ranks of university faculty.

Wu had come back to China expecting a career teaching Chaucer and Shakespeare in the ivory tower of Yenching University. Instead, revolutions and exiles took him to the frozen plains of Manchuria and the rural hamlets of eastern Anhui. They put him under the mercy of bullying workers and scheming peasants. It was a reeducation of a kind, and it nearly cost Wu his life.

But Wu knew better than to indulge in counterfactuals. Once, having just been released from a three-year imprisonment following the Hundred Flowers campaign, Wu was asked by his wife whether he regretted returning to China.

“I could have made no other choice than the one I did,” he said. “My decision was a natural outcome of my life, my dreams and illusions, my virtues and failings, and the chance of circumstance.”

Yet one cannot help but feel for Wu when, soon after shedding his rightist label in 1979, he had the chance to reunite with a friend from America who was visiting Beijing. The friend was Tsung-Dao Lee, a Chinese-American physicist who won the Nobel Prize in 1957. A native of Shanghai and contemporary of Wu’s at University of Chicago, Lee saw Wu off when he boarded the China-bound ship in 1951, saying that he personally would not consider returning home because he “did not want to have his brain washed.”

Twenty-eight years later, as Wu sat across the table from Lee in his Beijing hotel, the irony was hard swallow: Lee, “secure in the ‘imperialist fortress of America,’ was hailed as a patriot in Communist China” on his visit and “an honored guest of the state,” Wu thought to himself. Whereas he, “recalled to serve the motherland, was denounced as an enemy of the people and had survived labor camps, starvation, and proletarian dictatorship.”

When the book was published in the United States in 1993, its revelations angered authorities in Beijing, among them retired cadres at the University of International Relations, where Wu was labeled an ultra-rightist in 1957. The school suspended pensions for Wu and his wife and confiscated their apartment, rendering the elderly couple homeless. After two years of drifting, the couple permanently settled in a senior living facility in Reston, Virginia. There Wu seemed to finally find peace. “A simple one-bedroom was our paradise, a place to escape demoralizing worldly affairs,” he wrote in a self-published memoir in 2014. In retirement, he enjoyed visits from friends, former students and colleagues, and on several occasions, attackers from the past who came to apologize for their offenses.

When Wu passed away in 2019, his life story was little known inside Mainland China. Instead, he was best remembered as a translator of Western fiction, most notably The Great Gatsby. The book had been a piece of incriminating evidence in one of Wu’s earliest sessions, in which activist students at Yenching University accused him of using it to “corrupt the young minds of the New China.”

Decades later, when China opened up and its economy began to soar, it was to Wu’s masterful translation of the book that people turned to understand the possibilities and perils of untrammeled capitalism. Wu had his personal reasons for translating the book: Fitzgerald was deeply embedded in his time, Wu wrote in its epilogue, and yet he was able to coolly depict it in all its amorality. Having together been condemned to the ranks of class enemies, Wu felt he owed it to the chronicler of the Jazz Age to “rehabilitate him and give him back justice.”

Once, while accompanying his wife to a mass in Rockville, Maryland, Wu chanced upon F. Scott Fitzgerald’s grave. An unassuming headstone inscribed with the names of Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda stood on a small plot next to a street where cars zipped by. In front of it lay a ledger stone that bore the famous last line of The Great Gatsby. Wu lingered at the grave with his wife. He pointed at the sentence, and his wife spoke the words softly:

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Recommended archive:

Wu Ningkun: A Single Tear

中国民间档案馆 China Unofficial Archives is a reader-supported publication dedicated to digitizing and preserving censored, underground, and independent Chinese historical materials. It provides open-access books, magazines, and films covering topics often omitted by official narratives, such as the Great Famine and the Cultural Revolution.