But I was too tired to wonder why he or she and everyone else had deserted the building. Without even the energy to close the door, I threw myself onto the bed and fell asleep fully dressed.

I was jolted awake by a loudspeaker chanting some quotations by Mao, one being: "If the enemy won't surrender, we will eliminate them!" I was suddenly wide awake. I realized our building was under attack.

The next thing I heard was the whine of bullets very close by, and windows breaking. The loudspeaker yelled out the name of some Rebel organization, urging it to surrender. Otherwise, it screeched, the attackers would dynamite the building.

Jin-ming burst in. Several armed men wearing rattan helmets were rushing into the rooms opposite mine, which overlooked the front gate. One of them was a young boy shouldering a gun taller than himself. Without a word, they raced to the windows, smashed the glass with the butts of their rifles, and started shooting. A man who seemed to be their commander told us hurriedly that the building had been the headquarters of his faction, and was now being attacked by the opposition. We had better get out quickly but not down the stairs, which led to the front. How then?

We frantically tore the sheets and quilt covers off the bed and made a sort of rope. We fled one end of it to a window frame and scrambled down the two stories. As we landed, bullets whistled and hissed into the hard mud around us. We bent double and ran for the collapsed wall.

Once over it, we kept running for a long time before we felt safe enough to stop. The sky and the maize fields were beginning to show their pale features. We made for a friend's place in a nearby commune to catch our breath and decide what to do next. On the way, we heard from some peasants that the guesthouse had been blown up.

At our friend's place, a message was waiting for me. A telegram from my sister in Chengdu had arrived just after we had left Nana's village in search of the registrar. As no one knew where I was, my friends had opened it and passed the message around so that whoever saw me could let me know.

This was how I learned that my grandmother was dead.

Jin-ming and I sat on the bank of the Golden Sand River, waiting for a ferry. I rested my head on my hands and stared at the unruly river tumbling past me on its long journey from the Himalayas to the sea. It was to become the longest fiver in China the Yangtze, after joining the Min River at Yibin, 300 miles downstream.

Toward the end of its journey, the Yangtze spreads and meanders, irrigating vast areas of flat farmland. But here, in the mountains, it was too violent to build a bridge across it. Only ferries linked Sichuan province with Yunnan to the east. Every summer, when the torrent was high and fierce with the melted snow, the river claimed lives. Just a few days before, it had swallowed a ferry with three of my schoolmates in it.

Dusk was descending. I felt very ill. Jin-ming had spread his jacket on the ground for me so I would not have to sit on the damp grass. Our aim was to cross over to Yunnan and try to hitch a lift to Chengdu. The roads through Xichang were cut off by fighting between Rebel factions, so we had to try a roundabout route. Nana and Wen had offered to get my registration book and luggage, and those of Xiao-hong, to Chengdu.

A dozen strong men rowed the ferry against the current, chanting a song in unison. When they reached the middle of the river, they stopped and let the ferry be carried downstream toward the Yunnan side. Huge waves broke over us several times. I had to hold on tight to the side while the boat listed helplessly. Normally I would have been terrified, but now I felt only numbness. I was too preoccupied with the death of my grandmother.

A solitary truck stood on a basketball court in the town on the Yunnan bank, Qjaojia. The driver readily agreed to give us a lift in the back. All the time, I kept turning over in my head what I could have done to save my grandmother. As the truck jolted along, we passed banana groves at the back of mud houses in the embrace of cloud-capped mountains. Seeing the gigantic banana leaves, I remembered the small, potted, fruitless banana by the door of my grandmother's hospital ward in Chengdu. When Bing came to see me, I used to sit beside it with him, chatting deep into the night. My grandmother did not like him because of his cynical grin and the casualness with which he treated adults, which she considered disrespectful. Twice she came staggering downstairs to call me back.

I had hated myself for making her anxious, but I could not help it. I could not control my desire to see Bing. Now how I wished I could start all over again! I would not do anything to upset her. I would just make sure she got better although how I did not know.

We passed through Yibin. The road wound down Emerald Screen Hill on the edge of the city. Staring at the elegant redwoods and bamboo groves, I thought back to April, when I had just returned home to Meteorite Street from Yibin. I was telling my grandmother how I had gone to sweep Dr. Xia's tomb, which was on the side of this hill, on a sunny spring day. Aunt Jun-ying had given me some special 'silver money' to burn at the tomb. God knows where she had got it from, as it had been condemned as 'feudal." I searched up and down for hours, but could not find the tomb. The hillside was a battered mess. The Red Guards had leveled the cemetery and smashed the tombstones, as they considered burial an 'old' practice. I can never forget the intense flame of hope in my grandmother's eyes when I mentioned the visit, and how it darkened almost immediately when I stupidly added that the tomb was lost. Her look of disappointment had been haunting me. Now I kicked myself for not telling her a white lie.

But it was too late.

When Jin-ming and I got home, after more than a week on the road, there was only her empty bed. I remembered seeing her stretched out on it, her hair loose but still tidy, biting her lips hard, her cheeks sunken. She had suffered her murderous pains in silence and composure, never screaming, never writhing. Because of her stoicism, I had failed to realize how serious her illness was.

My mother was in detention. What Xiao-her and Xiaohong told me about Grandmother's last days caused me such anguish that I had to ask them to stop. It was only years later that I learned what had happened after I left.

She would do some housework, then go back to bed and lie there with her face taut, trying to fight back the pain.

She constantly murmured that she was anxious about my trip, and worried about my younger brothers.

"What will become of the boys, with no schools?" she would sigh.

Then one day she could not get out of bed. No doctor would come to the house, so my sister's boyfriend, Specs, carried her to the hospital on his back. My sister walked by his side, propping her up. After a couple of journeys, the doctors asked them not to come anymore. They said they could find nothing wrong with her and there was nothing they could do.

So she lay in bed, waiting for death. Her body became lifeless bit by bit. Her lips moved from time to time, but my sister and brothers could hear nothing. Many times they went to my mother's place of detention to beg for her to be permitted to come home. Each time, they were turned away without being able to see her.

My grandmother's entire body seemed to be dead. But her eyes were still open, looking around expectantly. She would not close them until she had seen her daughter.

At last my mother was allowed home. Over the next two days, she did not leave my grandmother's bedside. Every now and then, my grandmother would whisper something to her. Her last words were about how she had fallen into this pain.