Later I realized that in winter the rectangular room was a battlefield of bitter winds from all directions through the thin glass, and dust fell like rain from the high ceiling when the wind blew. Still, on a calm night, lying in bed with the moonlight filtering through the windows, and the shadow of the tall paper mulberry tree dancing on the wall, I was filled with joy. I was so relieved to be out of the compound and all its dirty politics that I hoped my family would never go near it again.

I loved our new street as well. It was called Meteorite Street, because hundreds of years before a meteorite had fallen there. The street was paved with crushed cobblestones, which I much preferred to the asphalt surface of the street outside the compound.

The only thing that reminded me of the compound was some of our neighbors, who worked in my father's department and belonged to Mrs. Shau's Rebels. When they looked at us it was with expressions of steely rigidity, and on the rare, unavoidable occasions when we had to communicate, they spoke to us in barks. One of them had been the editor of the closed-down magazine, and his wife had been a schoolteacher. They had a boy of six called Jo-jo, the same age as my brother Xiao-fang. A minor government official, with a five-year-old daughter, came to stay with them, and the three children often played together in the garden. My grandmother was anxious about Xiao-fang playing with them, but she dared not forbid him our neighbors might interpret this as hostility toward Chairman Mao's Rebels.

At the foot of the wine-red spiral staircase which led to our rooms was a big half-moon-shaped table. In the old days, a huge porcelain vase would have been placed on it with a bouquet of winter jasmine or peach blossom. Now it was bare, and the three children often played on it.

One day, they were playing 'doctor': Jo-jo was the doctor, Xiao-fang a nurse, and the five-year-old girl the patient.

She lay on her stomach on the table and pulled her skirt up for an injection. Xiao-fang held a piece of wood from the back of a broken chair as his 'needle." At this moment, the girl's mother came up the sandstone steps onto the landing. She screamed and snatched her daughter off the table.

She found a few scratches on the child's inner thigh.

Instead of taking her to a hospital, she fetched some Rebels from my father's office a couple of streets away. A crowd soon marched into the front garden. My mother, who happened to be home for a few days from detention, was immediately seized. Xiao-fang was grabbed and yelled at by the adults. They told him they would 'beat him to death' if he refused to say who had taught him to 'rape the girl."

They tried to force him to say it was his elder brothers.

Xiao-fang was unable to say a word, even to cry. Jo-jo looked badly scared. He cried and said it was he who had asked Xiao-fang to give the injection. The little girl cried, too, saying she had not had her injection. But the adults shouted at them to shut up, and continued to hector Xiaofang. Eventually, at my mother's suggestion, the crowd, jostling my mother and dragging Xiao-fang, stormed off to the Sichuan People's Hospital.

As soon as they entered the outpatients' department, the angry mother of the girl and the dramatically heated crowd started to make accusations to the doctors, nurses, and the other patients: "The son of a capitalist-roader has raped the daughter of a Rebel! The capitalist-roader parents must be made to pay!" While the girl was being examined in the doctor's room a young man in the corridor, a complete stranger, shouted, "Why don't you grab the capitalistroader parents and beat them to death?"

When the doctor finished examining the girl, she came out and announced that there was absolutely no sign that the girl had been raped. The scratches on her legs were not recent, and they could not have been caused by Xiao-fang's piece of wood which, as she showed the crowd, was painted and smooth. They were probably caused by climbing a tree. The crowd dispersed, reluctantly.

That evening, Xiao-fang was delirious. His face was dark red and he screamed and raved incoherently. The next day, my mother carried him to a hospital, where a doctor gave him a large dose of tranquilizers. After a few days he was well again, but he stopped playing with other children. With this incident, he practically said goodbye to his childhood at the age of six.

Our move to Meteorite Street had been left to the resources of my grandmother and us five children. But by then we had the help of my sister Xiao-hong's boyfriend, Cheng-yi.

Cheng-yi's father had been a minor official under the Kuomintang and had not been able to get a proper job after 1949, partly because of his undesirable past and partly because he had TB and a gastric ulcer. He did odd jobs like street cleaning and collecting the fees at a communal water tap. During the famine he and his wife, who were living in Chongqing, died from illnesses aggravated by starvation.

Cheng-yi was a worker in an airplane engine factory, and had met my sister at the beginning of 1968. Like most people in the factory, he was an inactive member of its major Rebel group, which was affiliated with 26 August.

In those days, there was no entertainment, so most Rebel groups set up their own song-and-dance troupes, which performed the few sanctioned songs of Mao quotations and eulogies. Cheng-yi, who was a good musician, was a member of one such troupe. Though she was not in the factory, my sister, who loved dancing, joined it, together with Plumpie and Ching-ching. She and Cheng-yi soon fell in love. The relationship came under pressure from all sides: from his sister and his fellow workers, who were worried 'that a liaison with a capitalist-roader family would jeopardize his future; from our circle of high officials' children, who scorned him for not being 'one of us," and from the unreasonable me, who regarded my sister's desire to live her own life as deserting our parents. But their love survived, and sustained my sister through the following difficult years. I soon came to like and respect Cheng-yi very much, as did all my family. Because he wore glasses, we took to calling him "Specs."

Another musician from the troupe, a friend of Specs, was a carpenter and the son of a truck driver. He was a jolly young man with a spectacularly large nose which made him look somewhat un-Chinese. In those days the only foreigners whose pictures we saw often were Albanians, because tiny, faraway Albania was China's only ally even the North Koreans were considered to be too decadent.

His friends nicknamed him "Al," short for "Albanian."

Al came with a cart to help us move to Meteorite Street. Not wanting to overtax him, I suggested we leave some things behind. But he wanted us to take everything. With a nonchalant smile, he clenched his fists and proudly flexed his taut, bulging muscles. My brothers poked the hard lumps with great admiration.

Al was very keen on Plumpie. The day after the move, he invited her, Ching-ching, and me to lunch at his home, one of the common windowless Chengdu houses with mud floors, which opened directly onto the pavement. This was the first time I had been in one of these houses. When we reached Al's street, I saw a group of young men hanging about on the corner. Their eyes followed us as they said a pointed hello to Al. He flushed with pride, and went over to talk to them. He came back with an animated smile on his face. In a casual tone he said, "I told them you were high officials' children, and that I had made friends with you so I could lay my hands on privileged goods when the Cultural Revolution is over."

I was stunned. First, what he said seemed to suggest that people thought officials' children had access to consumer goods, which was not the case. Second, I was amazed at his obvious pleasure at being associated with us, and the prestige this clearly gave him in the eyes of his friends. At the moment when my parents were in detention and we had just been thrown out of the compound, when the Sichuan Revolutionary Committee had been established and the capitalist-roaders had been ousted, when the Cultural Revolution seemed to have won, AI and his friends still apparently took it for granted that officials like my parents would come back.