Ninth Building; a review
To be able to let go of the burdens of carrying the shared history of millions, this was a tale that demanded to be shared.
An ode to a forgotten generation; “Ninth Building” by Zou Jingshi is a jumbled drawer of short journal entries. It is the antithesis of the classic, late 20th-century coming-of-age story, in both form and content.[1] The narrator is often the wallflower of his own story. At sixteen, he was dragged by the current of the Cultural Revolution to his place in our apathetic universe. There are no moral lessons and there is no pleasant ending, but all the same, the narrator grows up.
Zou’s publication of oft-overlooked tales of adolescents (in this case, autobiographical), existing during the tumultuous period of mid-century China strikes a dissonant chord when compared to our comfortable lives in the modern-day West. A central theme throughout is the diminished value of life in the face of a monolithic society.
In the world of Zou's youth, every loss is recalled with childlike innocence. A particularly striking glimpse of Zou's exile in the far north involves the dysenteric death of a seventeen-year-old girl soon after they arrived. For the youths, the displacement from home and ideological indoctrination made for an environment like no other. This event was so surreal that life simply went on after burying her. Months later, only when the girl's father arrived, swept and grieved openly at her grave[2] did the cohort of now ex-students appreciate that they were still living in reality. People truly died and their light was extinguished forever.
These sorts of accounts, often only passed orally, are fading quickly from our collective consciousness. As the keepers of history fade from existence, their voices are smothered by duty and politics. Many Chinese of Zou's generation will sometimes casually recount terrible tales of tragedy. However, pride silences criticism or even acknowledgment of the role of the state in these events of their youth. Imagine the richness of life and lessons forgotten as this generation passes to the next stage of existence.
Just as Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five” addresses war by depicting the nihilistic humour in post-firebombed Dresden, Zou pushes the same themes about the Cultural Revolution. There were no heroes, no glory; just waste.
I suppose there is bravery in publishing this text with the current political censorship in the PRC. However, when reading these disjointed vignettes of a stolen youth, one recognises that this was a book Zou needed to write. The catharsis to be experienced here was not for the reader but for the author. To be able to let go of the burdens of carrying the shared history of millions, this was a tale that demanded to be shared.
