She said the neighbors belonging to Mrs. Shau's group had held a denunciation meeting against her in the courtyard. The receipt for the jewelry she had donated during the Korean War had been confiscated by some Rebels in a house raid. They said she was 'a stinking member of the exploiting class," otherwise how could she have acquired all that jewelry in the first place?

My grandmother said she had had to stand on a small table. The ground was uneven and the table wobbled, and she felt dizzy. The neighbors were yelling at her. The woman who had accused Xiao-fang of raping her daughter hit one leg of the table ferociously with a club. My grandmother could not keep her balance and fell backwards onto the hard ground. She said she had felt a sharp pain ever since.

In fact, there had been no denunciation meeting. But that was the image that haunted my grandmother to her last breath.

On the third day after my mother came home, my grandmother died. Two days later, immediately after my grandmother was cremated, my mother had to return to detention.

I have often dreamed of my grandmother since, and awakened sobbing. She was a great character vivacious, talented, and immensely capable. Yet she had no outlet for her abilities. The daughter of an ambitious small-town policeman, concubine to a warlord, stepmother to an extended but divided family, and mother and mother-inlaw to two Communist officials in all these circumstances she had little happiness. The days with Dr. Xia were lived under the shadow of their past, and together they endured poverty, Japanese occupation, and the civil war. She might have found happiness in looking after her grandchildren, but she was rarely free from anxiety about us. Most of her life she had lived in fear, and she faced death many times.

She was a strong woman, but in the end the disasters which hit my parents, the worries about her grandchildren, the tide of ugly human hostility all conspired to crush her.

But the most unbearable thing for her was what happened to her daughter. It was as though she felt in her own body and soul every bit of the pain that my mother suffered, and she was finally killed by the accumulation of anguish.

There was another, more immediate factor in her death: she was denied proper medical care and could not be looked after, or even seen, by her daughter when she was fatally ill. Because of the Cultural Revolution. How could the revolution be good, I asked myself, when it brought such human destruction, for nothing? Over and over again, I told myself I hated the Cultural Revolution, and I felt even worse because there was nothing I could do.

I blamed myself for not looking after my grandmother as well as I might have. She was in the hospital at the time when I had come to know Bing and Wen. My friendships with them had cushioned and insulated me, and had blunted my awareness of her suffering. I told myself it was despicable to have had any happy feelings at all, by the side of what I'now realized was my grandmother's deathbed. I resolved never to have a boyfriend again. Only by self denial I thought, could I expiate some of my guilt.

The next two months I stayed in Chengdu, desperately looking, with Nana and my sister, for a 'relative' nearby whose commune would accept us. We had to find one by the end of the autumn harvest when food was distributed, otherwise we would have nothing to eat for the following year our state supply ran out in January.

When Bing came to see me, I was very cold to him, and told him never to come again. He wrote me letters but I threw them into the stove without opening them- a gesture I had perhaps picked up from Russian novels. Wen came back from Ningnan with my registration book and luggage, but I refused to see him. Once I passed him on the street, and looked straight through him, catching only a glimpse of his eyes, in which I saw confusion and hurt.

Wen returned to Ningnan. One summer day in 1970, a forest fire broke out near his village. He and a friend rushed out with a couple of brooms to try to put it out. A gust of wind threw a ball of flames into his friend's face, leaving him permanently disfigured. The two of them left Ningnan and crossed into Laos, where there was a war going on between left-wing guerrillas and the United States. At the time a number of high officials' children were going to Laos and Vietnam to fight the Americans secretly, as it was forbidden by the government. These young people had become disillusioned with the Cultural Revolution, and hoped they could get back their youthful adrenaline by taking on the "US imperialists."

One day soon after they got to Laos, Wen heard the alarm which signaled that American planes were coming.

He was the first to leap up and charge out, but in his inexperience he stepped on a mine which his comrades had planted themselves. He was blown to smithereens. My last memory of him is his perplexed and wounded eyes watching me from a muddy street corner in Chengdu.

Meanwhile, my family was scattered. On 17 October 1969 Lin Biao ordered the country into a state of war, using as a pretext clashes which had broken out earlier that year on the border with the Soviet Union. In the name of 'evacuation," he sent his opponents in the army and the disgraced top leaders out of the capital and placed them under house arrest or detention in different parts of China. The Revolutionary Committees used this opportunity to speed up the deportation of 'undesirables." The 500 members of my mother's Eastern District staff were ordered out of Chengdu to a place in the Xichang hinterland called Buffalo Boy Flatland. My mother was allowed ten days at home from detention to make arrangements. She put Xiao-her and Xiao-fang on a train to Yibin. Although Aunt Jun-ying was half-paralyzed, there were other aunts and uncles there who could look after them. Jin-ming had been sent by his school to a commune fifty miles northeast of Chengdu.

At the same time Nana, my sister, and I finally found a commune that would take us in a county called Deyang, not far from where Jin-ming was. Specs, my sister's boyfriend, had a colleague from the county who was prepared to claim we were his cousins. Some communes in the area needed more farmhands. Although we had no proof of kinship, no one asked any questions. The only thing that mattered was that we were or at least seemed to be extra labor.

We were allocated to two different production teams, because two extra people was the maximum any one team could accommodate. Nana and I went to one team and my sister to another, three miles away. The railway station was about five hours' walk away, much of it along eighteen inch-wide ridges between rice paddies.

My family of seven was now dispersed in six different places. Xiao-her was happy to leave Chengdu, where the new Chinese-language textbook at his school, compiled by some teachers and members of the propaganda team there, contained a condemnation of my father by name, and Xiaohei was ostracized and bullied.

In the early summer of 1969, his school had been sent to the countryside on the outskirts of Chengdu to help with the harvest. The boys and girls camped separately in two large halls. In the evenings, under the starry vault of the sky, the paths between the paddy fields were frequented by young couples. Romance bloomed, not least in the heart of my fourteen-year-old brother, who started to fancy a girl in his group. After days of summoning up his courage, he nervously approached her one afternoon when they were cutting wheat, and invited her to go for a walk that evening. The girl bent her head and said nothing. Xiao-her thought this was a sign of 'silent consent," mo-xu.

He leaned on a haystack in the moonlight, and waited with all the anxieties and longings of first love. Suddenly, he heard a whistle. A gang of boys from his form appeared.