The Tings knew that my father loved my mother very much, and tried to break him through her. Intense pressure was put on her to denounce him. She had many reasons to resent my father. He had not invited her mother to their wedding. He had let her walk hundreds of agonizing miles, and had not given her much sympathy in her crises. In Yibin he had refused to let her go to a better hospital for a dangerous birth. He had always given the Party and the revolution priority over her. But my mother had understood and respected my father and had above all never ceased to love him. She would particularly stand by him now that he was in trouble. No amount of suffering could bring her to denounce him.

My mother's own department turned a deaf ear to the Tings' orders to torment her, but Mrs. Shau's group was happy to oblige, and so were some other organizations which had nothing to do with her. Altogether, she had to go through about a hundred denunciation meetings. Once she was taken to a rally of tens of thousands of people in the People's Park in the center of Chengdu to be denounced. Most of the participants had no idea who she was. She was not nearly important enough to merit such a mass event.

My mother was condemned for all sorts of things, not least for having a warlord general as a father. The fact that General Xue had died when she was barely two made no difference.

In those days, every capitalist-roader had one or more teams investigating his or her past in minute detail, because Mao wanted the history of everyone working for him thoroughly checked. At different times my mother had four different teams investigating her, the last of which contained about fifteen people. They were sent to various parts of China. It was through these investigations that my mother came to know the whereabouts of her old friends and relatives with whom she had lost contact for years.

Most of the investigators just went sight-seeing and returned with nothing incriminating, but one group came back with a 'scoop."

Back in Jinzhou in the late 1940s, Dr. Xia had let a room to the Communist agent Yu-wn, who had been my mother's boss, in charge of collecting military information and smuggling it out of the city. Yu-wu's own controller, who was unknown to my mother then, had been pretending to work for the Kuomintang. During the Cultural Revolution, he was put under intense pressure to confess to being a Kuomintang spy, and was tortured atrociously. In the end, he 'confessed," inventing a spy ring which included Yu-wu.

Yu-wu was tortured ferociously as well. In order to avoid incriminating other people, he killed himself by slashing his wrists. He did not mention my mother. But the investigation team found out about their connection and claimed that she was a member of the 'spy ring."

Her teenage contact with the Kuomintang was dragged up. All the questions that had come up in 1955 were gone over again. This time they were not asked in order to get an answer. My mother was simply ordered to admit that she was a Kuomintang spy. She argued that the investigation in 1955 had cleared her, but she was told that the chief investigator then, Mr. Kuang, was a 'traitor and Kuomintang spy' himself.

Mr. Kuang had been imprisoned by the Kuomintang in his youth. The Kuomintang had promised to release underground Communists if they signed a recantation for publication in the local newspaper. At first he and his comrades had refused, but the Party instructed them to accept. They were told the Party needed them, and did not mind 'anti-Communist statements' which were not sincere. Mr. Kuang followed orders and was duly released.

Many others had done the same thing. In one famous case in 1936, sixty-one imprisoned Communists were released this way. The order to 'recant' was given by the Party Central Committee and delivered by Liu Shaoqi.

Some of these sixty-one subsequently became top officials in the Communist government, including vice-premiers, ministers, and first secretaries of provinces. During the Cultural Revolution, Mme Mao and Kang Sheng announced that they were 'sixty-one big traitors and spies."

The verdict was endorsed by Mao personally, and these people were subjected to the cruelest tortures. Even people remotely connected with them got into deadly trouble.

Following this precedent, hundreds of thousands of former underground workers and their contacts, some of the bravest men and women who had fought for a Communist China, were charged with being 'traitors and spies' and suffered detention, brutal denunciation meetings, and torture. According to a later official account, in the province next to Sichuan, Yunnan, over 14,000 people died.

In Hebei province, which surrounds Peking, 84,000 were detained and tortured; thousands died. My mother learned years later that her first boyfriend, Cousin Hu, was among them. She had thought he had been executed by the Kuomintang, but his father had in fact bought him out of prison with gold bars. No one would ever tell my mother how he died.

Mr. Kuang fell under the same accusation. Under torture, he attempted suicide, unsuccessfully. The fact that he had cleared my mother in 1956 was alleged to prove her 'guilt." She was kept in various forms of detention on and off for nearly two years from late 1967 to October 1969. Her conditions depended largely on her guards.

Some were kind to her when they were alone. One of them, the wife of an army officer, got medicine for her hemorrhage. She also asked her husband, who had access to privileged food supplies, to bring my mother milk, eggs, and chicken every week.

Thanks to kindhearted guards like her, my mother was allowed home several times for a few days. The Tings learned of this, and the kind guards were replaced by a sourfaced woman whom my mother did not know, who tormented and tortured her for pleasure. When the fancy took her, she would make my mother stand bent over in the courtyard for hours. In the winter, she would make her kneel in cold water until she passed out. Twice she put my mother on what was called a 'tiger bench." My mother had to sit on a narrow bench with her legs stretched out in front of her. Her torso was tied to a pillar and her thighs to the bench so she could not move or bend her legs. Then bricks were forced under her heels. The intention was to break the knees or the hipbones. Twenty years before, in Jinzhou, she had been threatened with this in the Kuomintang torture chamber. The 'tiger bench' had to stop because the guard needed men to help her push in the bricks; they helped reluctantly a couple of times, but then refused to have any more to do with it. Years later the woman was diagnosed as a psychopath, and today is in a psychiatric hospital.

My mother signed many 'confessions," admitting that she had sympathized with a 'capitalist road." But she refused to denounce my father, and she denied all 'spy' charges, which she knew would inevitably lead to the incrimination of others.

During her detention we were often not allowed to see her, and even had no idea where she was. I would wander the streets outside the possible place in the hope of catching sight of her.

There was a period when she was detained in a deserted cinema on the main shopping street. There we were occasionally permitted to deliver a parcel for her to a warden, or to see her for a few minutes, although never on her own. When a fierce guard was on duty, we had to sit under freezing eyes. One day in autumn 1968 I went there to deliver a food parcel and was told it could not be accepted. No reason was given, and I was told not to send things anymore. When my grandmother heard the news she passed out. She thought my mother must be dead.

It was unbearable not knowing what had happened to my mother. I took my six-year-old brother Xiao-fang by the hand and went to the cinema. We walked up and down the street in front of the gate. We searched the rows of windows on the second floor. In desperation we screamed "Mother! Mother!" at the top of our voices again and again.