Illustration by Anderson X. Lee
At midnight, Zhou-Nan lay motionless on the cold cement floor. He couldn’t move. Even the slightest shift sent sharp pains coursing through his battered body. Blood seeped from his wounds. Dehydration and weakness clouded his consciousness. Gradually, he became aware of the dryness in his mouth and heard the growl of his empty stomach. He couldn’t recall when he last ate or drank anything, nor could he determine how long he had been lying there.
He must have fainted.
Since the onset of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution two years ago, Zhou-Nan had been targeted for denunciation and constant struggle sessions. The corridor walls outside his dormitory, and even the space above his bunk, were plastered with big-character posters—saturated with slander, baseless accusations. He had endured it all: the fists and kicks, the wooden clubs and military belts, the jet-plane posture. There was little left of his body they hadn’t attempted to break.
At some point during his coma, amid the unbearable heat of the day, he would hear the gongs, the shouting of slogans and the loud music played by the military band from the street. That must be why he was left alone…
* * *
Summer, 1968. Wutopan City steamed with the Long River’s humidity. Liberation Avenue was packed with thousands of Red Guards—middle school and university students, along with factory workers who called themselves Revolutionary Rebels. They marched to celebrate the triumph of the Cultural Revolution, waving red flags and hand-painted placards bearing slogans.
In the front rows, red flags, the colour of blood, fluttered under the scorching mid-July sun. At their centre rose a massive portrait of the Great Leader in his grass-green military uniform, one arm raised in greeting. A crimson cloth Red Guard armband circled his right sleeve. The yellow characters, “Red Guard,” were printed in the Great Leader’s own handwriting.
At the heart of the parade, horizontal placards proclaimed: “Long Live the Victory of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution!” Beneath the towering flags, the Great Leader’s portrait, and the placards, the Red Guards in army uniforms marched with fervour, alongside the Revolutionary Rebels. Their arms rose in perfect unison, clutching their little red books—collections of the Great Leader’s quotations—as if holding sacred truth. They radiated fighting spirit, unwavering loyalty and a willingness to die—for the Great Leader, of course.
A red-draped van moved slowly alongside the parade, its large loudspeaker broadcasting the popular revolutionary song “Sailing the Seas Depends on the Helmsman,” performed by a military band.
The parade drew a large crowd—men, women, children, grandmas and grandpas—gathered along the curb to watch. A lean, middle-aged ice pop vendor lost his footing and slipped into a muddy ditch, where foul-smelling scum frothed with ugly foam. He cursed as he scrambled to his feet. A group of Red Guards heard him. One of them kicked the back of his knees without warning. The man’s knees buckled, and he tumbled into the ditch again. They laughed so hard they were breathless. The one who had kicked him, broad and bullish, seized him by the collar and yelled, “How dare you curse the Cultural Revolution? Get lost! And don’t let us hear you again!”
Behind them, waves of slogans rang out, led by a fierce female voice:
“Long live the victory of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution!”
“Down with the Cow Demons and Snake Spirits!”
Then came ten so-called “Cow Demons and Snake Spirits”—eight men and two women, in their fifties to seventies—parading before the crowd like captured animals. Each wore a tall dunce cap and bore a wooden board, hung by a thin iron wire, around their necks. A sheet of white paper was pasted to the board, listing their names and alleged crimes in bold, black brushstrokes. The wire cut into their skin, drawing blood that mingled with sweat and trickled down their chests. Their names had been slashed out in thick ink strokes, as if to erase their existence. The charges read: “Bourgeois Reactionary Academic Authority,” “Capitalist Roader,” “Spy,” “Traitor”—or simply, “Cow Demon and Snake Spirit,” a catch-all label for all those accused.
The crowds lining the road jeered and spat as the accused passed by. Slogans thundered again, rumbling through loudspeakers and human throats alike: “Leniency for confession! Severity for resistance!” The fierce female voice leading the slogans allowed for no leniency, only severity.
One of the elderly men, charged as a “Bourgeois Reactionary Academic Authority,” collapsed in the heat. From the crowd, an eight-year-old boy cried, “Grandpa!” and rushed toward the elderly man.
Several Red Guards seized the fallen man and dragged him to the roadside. They shoved his name board into the boy’s hands and barked, “Gouzaizi (son of a dog/reactionary offspring)! Carry this and march for your counterrevolutionary grandpa!”
A man labelled “Capitalist Roader,” in his fifties, stepped forward. “He’s just a child! How can you treat a child like this?” he protested.
A Red Guard responded with a full swing of his military belt, the brass buckle striking the man’s head. “I’ll show you how!” he shouted, veins bulging with rage.
The man crumpled onto the concrete like a slaughtered goat, clutching his head. Blood streamed through his fingers as they dragged him to the roadside. For a moment, the crowd fell silent as the man lay crumpled on the dirt road. From the plane trees overhead, the summer cicadas shrieked like a discordant requiem. Then, expressions of righteous hatred toward a class enemy resumed on the spectators’ faces. A middle-aged woman spat, “How dare he!” Her eyes blazed with contempt.
An elderly worker stepped forward and knelt beside the injured man. His faded factory uniform, once blue, had been washed nearly white. Without hesitation, he removed the worn uniform and wrapped it around the man’s wound, exposing his own weathered, once-muscular frame to the blistering sun.
The Red Guards halted the parade; they decided that the “Cow Demons and Snake Spirits” needed discipline. The victims were forced into the infamous “Jet-Plane” position—a symbolic act of bowing one’s head and admitting guilt. The Red Guards yanked the victims’ arms behind them and pressed their necks downward, ordering them to maintain this pose for an hour—a brief display by struggle session standards. Were it not for the parade’s schedule, they would have remained in that position for half the day, baking under a sun as merciless as the slogans that roared through the rally.
“Leniency for confession! Severity for resistance!”
“Down with Cow Demons and Snake Spirits!”
Gongs and cheers…
* * *
Zhou-Nan lay in the sculpture classroom at the Provincial Institute of Fine Arts, a large studio on the third floor, where he had sculpted Prometheus, using a photograph his father had brought home of the statue in the Louvre. As a teenager, Zhou-Nan had begun with clay, then turned to marble after entering the Institute. The professor noted that his Prometheus carried the spirit of a defiant young Chinese intellectual.
Sounds of distress wafted from the classroom next door.
The classroom was an iron box reeking of rotting fish. It had become a torture chamber for students, teachers, anyone branded “Cow Demon and Snake Spirit” or “Black Gang”— enemies of the Great Leader’s political line. Mould fed on blood soaked into the walls. The stench was suffocating.
Claw-like clouds partially concealed the full moon.
He could not piece together what had transpired over the past few days. Where had he been before waking in the classroom? He remembered only fragments: his classmates—now Red Guards—storming into his dorm. They shoved him inside a burlap sack, kicked him, laughed. Their laughter—shrill and distorted—bubbled like noise underwater.
They dragged him out and demanded a confession.
“What crime?” he said.
They answered with cudgels, boots and the crack of leather belts.
* * *
Moonlight cascaded over him like a waterfall.
“Water—” Zhou-Nan opened his mouth as if to drink the milky moonlight.
Before he slipped into a coma-like sleep, a wave of slogans echoed in his mind. They were shouted in the unified voices of hundreds of Red Guards and revolutionary masses, led by a high-pitched female voice:
“Down with the Cow Demons and Snake Spirits!”
“Down with Black Gang Peng Zhou-Nan!”
“Peng Zhou-Nan will perish if he refuses to surrender!”
Day and night, struggle meetings delivered the same rituals: slogans, denunciations, beatings, and shame.
The female voice leading the slogans belonged to Zhou-Nan’s girlfriend, his classmate Lu Xiao-Ya, nicknamed “Kitty,” as she had once been coquettish like a cat. As the sound of the slogans echoed in Zhou-Nan’s mind, a memory surfaced—of the struggle meeting where, to everyone’s astonishment, Kitty emerged as the fiercest denouncer.
At a denunciation rally in the Workers’ Stadium, before ten thousand Red Guards and revolutionary masses, Zhou-Nan and twelve others of the “Black Gang” were condemned. Kitty spoke as the Red Guards’ representative, delivering her denunciation:
“I saw Peng Zhou-Nan making the ‘Prometheus Bound’ sculpture while everyone else was crafting sculptures of workers, peasants and soldiers. ‘Why Prometheus?’ I asked him. ‘Aren’t you worried about being rejected?’ He replied that he wouldn’t want to attend an art institute that only produces sculptures of workers, peasants and soldiers. He had no feelings for the proletariat! His mind is filled with corrupt bourgeois ideas!”
Kitty ended her fervent denunciation with a popular political catchphrase:
“Peng Zhou-Nan and the Black Gang seek to restore capitalism and drag us back to the dark, oppressive old society, where the proletariat suffered terribly before liberation. Therefore, they must be condemned!”
She sounded as though she believed every word she said. Did she remember Zhou-Nan’s friends laughing as they mimicked his slight stuttering manner while confessing his love for her? They made such a romantic couple. Their classmates used to tease her, “Hey Kitty, where is your Romeo?”
On stage, Zhou-Nan’s arms were twisted high behind his back. The Red Guards, once his basketball teammates, forced his head down into the punishing “jet plane” pose.
Kitty stepped forward, the bottle of black ink trembling in her hand. Zhou-Nan met her eyes and, for a moment, glimpsed the girl he once knew. The stadium thundered with slogans, yet the noise faded into oblivion as he remembered the day she leaned over his shoulder, watching him carve her name into marble with youthful devotion. That tenderness belonged to another life. Now she stood before him as his accuser, and he understood there was no turning back.
“Down with the Black Gang!” the crowd roared, as the Red Guard leader’s stare cut through her. Kitty lifted the ink bottle, her hand unsteady.
“Peng Zhou-Nan, you led me astray from the Great Leader’s path,” she said, her voice cracking. It was a line she must have heard a hundred times before, now spoken as if she believed it.
“Today, I draw a line between us!”
The ink poured—thick, cold, black. It streamed through his hair, across his face, and down his neck, staining his white shirt like dried blood. Zhou-Nan said nothing; the ink dripped to the floor, pooling silently at his feet.
Kitty stepped back, still clutching the empty bottle. Her hand wouldn’t stop shaking.
The crowd erupted: “Down with Cow Demons and Snake Spirits!”
* * *
In the soft glow of the full moon, the waves of slogans echoed like a damaged soundtrack twisting in Zhou-Nan’s mind.
“Zhou-Nan, Zhou-Nan!” A whisper drifted into his ears—soft, persistent.
Zhou-Nan stirred. Slowly, he opened his eyes.
There, beside him, sat Zi-Ang, his junior high classmate, a member of his Superman Club. He looked unchanged—young, slim, yet without worldly care, like an immortal. His eyes flickered behind thick glasses.
“Zi-Ang!” Zhou Nan croaked. He reached for his friend, but his fingers passed through air. Zi-Ang was there, and yet not.
“Why are you here?” Zhou-Nan whispered. “You died… they said—”
“I am where you no longer suffer, and you are free.”
“Are you… are you a ghost? Or, are you still writing poems?”
Zi-Ang smiled, the corners of his mouth tinged with sadness.
Zhou Nan’s heart ached. He wanted to pour out everything—the struggle meetings, the accusations, the jet-plane posture, Kitty’s betrayal… But Zi-Ang already knew.
“You remember our club?” Zhou Nan murmured. “The Superman Club? You wrote poems about a world of beauty and love where hatred didn’t exist…”
“And you sculpted Prometheus—before they chained you like him.” Zi-Ang’s voice drifted through the darkness, resonating like distant music.
“I want to come with you,” Zhou-Nan said. “To the land of beauty and freedom we always dreamed of.”
Zi-Ang’s eyes shimmered. “Not yet,” he said. “There is still fire in you, Zhou-Nan. Even in this darkness.” His form faded—first his outline, then his glasses, until only his eyes remained, glowing like distant stars.
“Zi-Ang, wait—”
But he was gone.
The room fell silent again, save for Zhou-Nan’s ragged breathing—and the echo of an unfinished poem.
* * *
Zhou-Nan stirred, then sank once more into a heavy, dreamless sleep. Hours passed. And just before waking, a dream came.
In the dream, he saw a silhouette—he thought it was Kitty—sitting with her back to him, her face hidden in shadow.
“Ki-Ki-Kitty, are you okay? Ki-Kitty, I… I’m not with the Black Gang,” he stammered.
“No, you are not, neither am I!” The silhouette turned. It wasn’t Kitty. It was Shao-Bai, a talented painter, who had been Zhou-Nan’s classmate since elementary school. Shao-Bai was accused of belonging to the Black Gang. He was detained, tortured and disappeared.
“Shao—Shao-Bai!” Zhou-Nan cried, tears streaming down his face. Shao-Bai gripped his hands and said, “Don’t believe a word they say! They are just puppets! They don’t know what they are doing. We are not the ‘Black Gang,’ and we’ve committed no crime. Independent thought isn’t a crime. Free artistic expression isn’t a crime. What they’re doing—that’s the crime!”
His voice trembled with fury,
“Who are these so-called ‘revolutionary masses?’ Brainless worms. Fanatics. Brutal, self-serving opportunists. Thugs! They rise like scum on a ditch of stagnant water. Frothing filth that lasts for a time, but just foam, just filth!”
Shao-Bai went on,
“And I remember how much you loved those trips to the countryside in high school—to help the peasants with the harvest. You worked harder than any of us, eating from the same pot: cornmeal porridge and boiled cabbage. While the rest of us grumbled that the food was fit for pigs, you laughed and chatted with the peasants, as if you truly enjoyed the food and their company. You never objected to sculpting peasants—but you also yearned to create figures like Prometheus.”
Before Shao-Bai departed, he clasped Zhou-Nan’s hand firmly and said, “Do you remember when we rowed out to the middle of the Long River and jumped in? You were the strongest swimmer of us all. You were our Superman, Zhou-Nan!”
“Shao-Bai!” Zhou-Nan cried out as his eyes snapped open.
The moon had vanished. A pale band of twilight stretched across the horizon.
“Shao-Bai!” he called, turning his head, scanning every corner of the room. But there was no one.
“Shao-Bai…” His voice broke.
He lay back on the cold floor, staring up at the dim ceiling as tears slid silently down his cheeks. It had been a dream. Shao-Bai was gone. He would not see him again.
* * *
Sleep had restored some strength. Hunger gnawed at him, while thirst burned his throat. Thoughts of home filled his mind. He attempted to sit up, but intense pain shot through him. His right leg must have been broken. Gritting his teeth, he dragged himself toward the door, only to discover it was locked from the outside.
Home. His father. His mother. His brother and sister. He didn’t mind disappearing from this world, but the grief it would cause them was unbearable. And there was one more thing: he had wanted to talk with his father.
His brilliant father, once an avant-garde poet of the May Fourth spirit, whose verses defied emperors and superstition, had once written, “The sun and moon are my companions, and I speak truth with the fire of a free man.” But that fire had dimmed. In the dusk of his life, Zhou-Nan found his father by the window, murmuring reverently a poem of the Great Leader, in which the Great Leader called himself the greatest hero history had ever known. The rebel had become a submissive official, bowing not to truth but to power.
Zhou-Nan despised his father’s capitulation to the cult of personality. He seldom spoke to him. Yet, it was this very father who had protected him—his position had kept Zhou-Nan out of prison, unlike the other members of the Superman Club. He had failed as a hero, but not as a father.
After being expelled from school, Zhou-Nan dedicated himself to sculpting. He had longed to say to his father: “Do you see this injustice? This cruelty? This madness? The Great Leader—your sage king—plunged us into it, and you helped build it with your silence. Why do you bow to him like a slave? Is this the freedom you dreamed of when you joined the revolution?” Yet how could he bring himself to wound his aging father with such words? It would be too cruel. Each time he saw the deep lines on his father’s forehead and his gentle gaze, the words dissolved on his tongue.
The door remained locked.
He thought of Prometheus, bound to the rock, punished for bringing fire to humankind.
In the end, Zhou-Nan had sculpted himself.
Gazing at the faint light of dawn, he whispered, “Zi-Ang, Shao-Bai . . . I will see you there!”
Then, despite the agony, he dragged himself toward the window.
Behind him, the chaotic footsteps of Red Guards approached. A key turned quietly in the lock.
Zi Shui holds a Ph.D. in Chinese philosophy from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley and teaches Chinese literature and culture at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada. Growing up during the Cultural Revolution in China, she witnessed stories of youth navigating its darkness. Her fiction explores their resilience, defiance, and the human spirit amid history’s shadows.