The earliest document, dated May 26, 1989, was my application to join the Communist Youth League. I was then a high school student in a remote mountain town in northeast China. At the time, thousands of university students were gathering on Tiananmen Square in Beijing to protest government corruption and dictatorship — but my application had nothing to do with those protests and it was accepted. Ever since then my file has shadowed me from that remote township to Beijing, and on to Chengdu in the west. It’s hard for me to imagine even today the forces behind my file, about which I knew nothing, traversing the length and breadth of China.

I am responsible for some of the lies in my file. I can vaguely recall making up wild untruths, even though several of the forms I filled out over the years included a reminder that they must be completed honestly, “with a faithful and truthful attitude toward the Party.” I claimed that both my mother and sister were Communist Party members. (They were not, but it’s always good to have a few party members in the family.) In one form, I claimed that I had won prizes in writing and speech competitions. I did not win those prizes. No one ever spoke to me about the lies. I suspect no one had ever carefully examined my file.

Some lies came courtesy of my teachers and classmates. Our teachers taught us to love the Communist Party and the government, but they knew that whatever they said about us would follow us for the rest of our lives, so in private they tried to put in a good word for us, even though it meant taking a few risks.

In one evaluation, my teachers wrote that I was in charge of organization and publicity for the school’s branch of the Communist Youth League, and that I was an after-hours tutor at a primary school. Not true. I don’t even know if that school existed. The truth is that though I did well in my studies, I often skipped classes and was frequently involved in schoolyard brawls.

Regarding extracurricular activities, my teachers said I had participated in military training and visited families of military martyrs during the Chinese New Year of 1991 — an activity promoted as a classic good deed. I had done none of that.