Er Tai Gao was a twenty-two-year-old art teacher in 1957 when he wrote an article entitled, ″On Beauty.″ It was published and became fairly well-known in cultural circles. Unfortunately he wrote about art being subjective and individual, a concept that went against Mao′s opinion that art was a reflection of Party values and objective. It, and a denunciation by his roommate, earned him an indefinite sentence of ″reform (later re-education) through labor″ as a ″rightist.″ He was sent to a remote labor camp where 90% of the men died in three years. Fortunately he only spent a year and a half there, then was moved around painting for artistic projects until he ended up at the Mogao Caves in Dunhuang. He spent ten years there documenting and preserving the paintings from ten dynasties on the walls of 490 caves. He was finally exonerated in 1978.

The story of Er Tai Gao′s experience is absorbing, in part because I knew little about what ″reform through labor″ meant. The title is a bit deceiving though, in that his two stints in the camps were relatively short compared to his twenty-one years of punishment. Much of the book is spent describing his ten years working on the caves at Dunhuang. That was very interesting, both the caves themselves and his relationships with the others there. Now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Thousand Buddha Grottoes, as they are also known, are worth taking a look at: on Wikipedia or the World Heritage site.

Unfortunately, the memoir was not written as well as it could have been. I′m not sure if it is the fault of the author, the translators, or the poor editing. The transitions between chapters are awkward with each chapter beginning as though you had not read the previous ones. The endnotes were somewhat helpful, although it was curious what was deemed important to note. I would have found a list of names helpful, as the narrative goes back and forth in time, and I lost track of who was who or what their position was. Overall I′m glad I read it, but it could have been better written.

(Edited the same day to fix typographical error.) ( )

(Rewritten, posted before I had finished the review)

I rarely read introductions or forewords until I've finished the book. I wish I had stuck to that this time.

The introduction was written by the translator. It was verbose, badly-written and a struggle to get through. It had very little to say I would want to read in an introduction but it said it anyway, at length. That should have been warning enough. Interesting as the subject was it was so difficult to read, so terribly heavy, humourless and with a certain lack of emotion that meant I couldn't get attached to the narrator, the main character. Whether the translator was true to the original book or whether it was the translator's own shortcomings as a writer were coming through I'll never know, but I don't really care anyway.

The one thing that struck me before I put the book aside, was the casual way in which the narrator related without any emotion at all that the when he was a teacher, his best friend, with whom he shared a room, had denounced him as some sort of rightist. For this he had been sent somewhere or other unpleasant to perform manual labour for endless years (I didn't get that far). You might have expected a bit of schadenfreude when his room-mate was himself denounced, but no, none nor sadness when he hears that he had killed himself rather than go into exile. Who could get into such an emotionless, monotonous, one-tone book? Not me. ( )