Gao Lian’s captivity and depersonalization training

Gao Lian’s captivity and depersonalization training turn a concealed room into both a place of enforced dependence and a system for remaking identity. His captor intends not merely to keep him there but to reshape his needs, language, and sense of self, until he can be made to perform violence while experiencing himself as a body directed by another will.

Confinement and the captor’s design

The training begins in a room hidden behind a bookcase. After moving a floor lamp, the captor lifts a catch and opens the concealed door; inside, Gao is asleep. The newspapers in the living room contain no report that he is missing, and there have been no radio announcements. His apparent absence from public notice becomes part of the captor’s calculation: believing no one is looking for him, she expects Gao to depend on her for protection so long as she provides for his basic needs.

Her plan exceeds care or simple containment. She intends to refine Gao’s desires until they match her own and imagines the two of them as parts of a single being: she will supply its intelligence, while he supplies its muscles. At first, she regards him as an embryo, not yet formed into the person she wants. The intended lesson is that victim and perpetrator can exist together in one person. In this design, Gao is to become the beast, while she retains the authority to decide whether it yields to its urges. The promise of unity therefore conceals a sharp division of power: she determines the meaning and direction of the shared identity.

A room made into a world

For Gao, the room gradually becomes the extent of the world available to him. Its ceiling, walls, floor, and mattress, along with the plastic flooring and a small room containing a shower and toilet, are presented as his whole domain. The bounded space also organizes his daily routine. He lifts weights, performs stomach exercises, and spends hours on an exercise bicycle installed in one corner. In the bathroom, a cupboard holds oils and creams that the captor rubs into him each evening, including products intended to ease his aches and pains and keep his skin soft.

This arrangement makes care and control difficult to separate. Gao receives attention and relief within a space from which he cannot freely leave, and the routines that tend to his body also form part of his training. The room is repeatedly associated with safety and cleanliness, but those qualities do not make it a refuge in any ordinary sense: it is the controlled environment in which his captor seeks to determine what he needs and how he responds. Its small scale is later stated explicitly when Gao has only four square metres in which to move and no chance of reaching the woman directing the scene.

Silence and the remaking of thought

The captor regulates not only Gao’s movements but also his means of communication. Whenever he tries to speak, she covers his mouth and hushes him. He communicates through quiet, precise, muffled grunts or sign language, and eventually stops uttering words altogether. He learns to observe her closely, memorizing what she wants him to do. Her approval is legible to him; when he rests his head in her lap and she strokes his cropped hair, he feels calm and hums softly to show that he is happy.

The change reaches into the form of his thought. At first he can think in words and sentences; as time passes, he relates experience to his body. Happiness becomes warmth in his stomach, anxiety a tension in his neck. Thought gives way to pictures and immediate feeling, and the stated aim is that he should become a body and nothing else. The training thus makes silence more than the absence of speech: it is an attempt to remove the language through which Gao might interpret or narrate his experience. His captor teaches him to do what she wants and to understand through doing, rather than to question the instructions in words.

From conditioning to performance

The training later appears as preparation for a staged encounter with another boy. Before it begins, Gao spends the morning purifying himself and meditating for hours in order to minimize thought. He is meant to eliminate any remaining logic that might interfere with what he has been trained to do. The required self-conception is reduced to four needs that sustain life: oxygen, water, food, and sleep. The narration crystallizes the result in the captor’s assessment that he is a machine.

The contrast between the earlier domestic routine and this preparation clarifies the purpose of the conditioning. Exercise, bodily care, silence, and the effort to empty thought have formed a method for making Gao act without the reflective language that could interrupt his assigned role. When the captor gives the signal for the performance to begin, Gao moves in front of a naked, helpless boy. The scene places the training’s intended transformation into action: the person once treated as an object to be reshaped is now positioned as an instrument in a performance directed by the captor.

Significance of the divided self

Gao’s training gives concrete form to the captor’s theory that victim and perpetrator can be joined within one person. The room’s promise of safety, his dependence on the woman who tends to him, and the gradual suppression of speech all help make that imposed unity seem like a complete world. Yet the relation remains unequal. The captor sets the routines, decides what Gao is to learn, and signals when the performance begins; his apparent participation has been prepared through confinement and the deliberate narrowing of thought.

The movement from a sleeping boy behind a concealed door to a trained performer is therefore not simply a change in behavior. It is a struggle over the terms by which a person can understand himself: in words, memories, and judgments, or as a body whose responses have been shaped by another. The narrative’s recurrence of the room as safe, clean, and wholly his sits uneasily beside the chain, the restricted space, and the prohibition on speech. That contrast exposes the central contradiction of the training: Gao is promised a unified identity, but the unity is manufactured by another person’s control.