Another, a former army officer who had been on the Long March with Mao, was punctilious about his appearance, taking particular pride in his military uniform. A third turned himself into a workhorse. He was the first one up in the morning and the first to get back to the ditches after a rest period. Naturally, he was hated by the other men, but, apart from that, his was probably not the best survival strategy: one day he simply dropped dead from overwork.

Mr. Gao’s strategy was to write, producing tiny characters on whatever scraps of paper he could find. “While I wrote,” he says, “I was alive.” This was a dangerous, potentially fatal, undertaking, but he managed to hide his precious, life-threatening bundle of thoughts and impressions wherever he was sent. The result is this book. Its background explains why “In Search of My Homeland” is so fragmentary, repetitious and disjointed, and while it may seem mean-spirited to complain, careful editing and supplemental material would have produced a more coherent and rounded work.

Image Er Tai Gao Credit... Geri Kodey

When the conditions of his life improved, Mr. Gao married and had a daughter. Frustratingly, his wife and daughter are mentioned only in passing, even though his wife later died after being sent to a labor camp.

In 1959 Mr. Gao was transferred to Lanzhou to work on some public paintings, then to a second camp until his release in 1962. Penniless, he found work doing research at the Mogao Caves, a site of ancient temples with relics dating back to the fourth century. But in the mid-’60s, as the Cultural Revolution took hold, he was denounced again, demoted to physical labor, humiliated, imprisoned and beaten. His patron and supervisor at the caves fared worse: beatings left him with no teeth and a spine so badly injured that he could no longer stand.

Mr. Gao left the caves in 1972, but his life since then is only sketchily presented. He was officially rehabilitated at the end of the ’70s and taught philosophy at Lanzhou University in the ’80s. On the last page of the memoir we learn that he fled China for Los Angeles in 1993.

It’s tempting to try to read Mr. Gao’s story optimistically, as a lesson about the strength and resilience of the human spirit, with this book as the happy ending. The publisher, for example, sees proof of “the power of hope.” Something similar is often said about Holocaust survivors (as if the millions who didn’t make it were somehow inadequate).