A Past Written In Blood

But for every person who rebuffed him, there were others who opened up. They had been through so much, and they had bottled up their feelings for so long, that when they began talking about Lin, they would talk to Hu for hours without interruption.

One of the people Hu befriended was a retired librarian in Beijing named Gan Cui. He was an unassuming man in his late 60s, with thinning white hair and a smoker's stained teeth. After the Anti-Rightist Campaign, he and Lin had been assigned to work together in a library. After the party forbade them to date, a romance blossomed.

"The more they tried to prevent us from dating, with her personality and my personality, the more we dated, just to show them," Gan explained to Hu.

As graduation approached in 1959, Gan asked the party for permission to marry Lin. But the request was immediately rejected. The party ordered Gan to report for labor reform in Xinjiang, the desolate province in China's far west. Gan said goodbye to his sweetheart at the city's central train station, and promised to come find her as soon as he could. Then they embraced on the platform and wept.

Gan spent the next 20 years on a military work crew in Xinjiang. When he was allowed to return to Beijing in 1979, he learned Lin had been executed, and he moved on with his life. He married and had a son. But he told Hu that he had loved Lin more than he ever loved his wife.

Hu enjoyed sitting in Gan's apartment and listening to his stories, and he visited him whenever he could. More than a year after their first meeting, Gan revealed a secret: He had a collection of Lin's prison writings, nearly 140,000 words of it.

Hu was dumbstruck. Could it be true? How could the old man have obtained such material, he wondered, and why did he hide it from him for so long? Gan retrieved an old blue Adidas gym bag, and from the bag he pulled out a thick stack of paper, bound with string and packed in brown wrapping paper. There were nearly 500 yellowing pages.

After the Cultural Revolution, a police official had risked punishment and quietly given a bundle of Lin's writing to her sister. Another family member had given them to Gan. The text was in ink, but Lin wrote that she had composed almost all of it in blood first and copied it after prison authorities gave her pen and paper.

Hu read feverishly deep into the night. The document was ostensibly a letter to the People's Daily, the party's official newspaper, but it was unlike any letter he had ever seen. Lin condemned the Anti-Rightist Campaign and accused the party of taking advantage of the idealism of her generation. She wrote of the abuse she suffered in prison, of guards who handcuffed her in painful positions and force-fed her through her nostrils. She described how she wrote in blood after they took away her pen, and how the prison saved her writing to use against her. Occasionally the letter deteriorated into an incoherent rant, but every page was brimming with emotion and defiance.

When Hu finished reading, the winter sun had begun to rise over Beijing. From the window of his sister's apartment, he watched as the first rays of dawn struck the construction cranes scattered across the skyline. He felt invigorated, and proud. "I thought it was extraordinary that a great woman like Lin Zhao once lived in China," he recalled.

A Knock on the Door

Not long after Hu located Lin's writings, a friend called with some disturbing news: An agent of the Ministry of State Security had come around asking questions about him. A while later, other friends reported the state security agents had approached them, too, and Hu began to worry he might be arrested at any moment.

But it was not prison that frightened him most. It was the possibility that he might not be allowed to finish the documentary, that he would never be able to tell Lin Zhao's story. Hu was worried that if he were stopped, all the information he had uncovered would be buried again, maybe forever.