They shoved him around and called him names, then they threw a jacket over his head and started to hit and kick him. He managed to break free, and staggered to the door of one of the teachers and shouted for help. The teacher opened the door, but pushed him away, saying, "I can't help you! Don't you dare come back!"

Xiao-her was too frightened to return to his camp, and spent the night hiding in a haystack. He realized it was his 'sweetheart' who had called in the bullies: she had felt insulted that the son of a 'counterrevolutionary capitalistroader' should have the audacity to fancy her.

When they returned to Chengdu, Xiao-her went to his street gang for help. They appeared at his school with much flaunting of muscles, and a gigantic wolfhound, and hauled the leading bully out of the classroom. He was shaking, his face ashen. But before the gang set upon him, Xiao-her was overtaken by pity, and asked his helmsman to let the boy go.

Pity had become an alien concept, and was seen as a sign of stupidity. Xiao-her was bullied even more than before. He made a feeble attempt at enlisting the help of his gang again, but they told him they would not help a 'shrimp."

Xiao-her approached his new school in Yibin dreading more bullying. To his amazement, he received a warm.

almost emotional welcome. The teachers, the propaganda team members who were running the school, the children all seemed to have heard of my father and referred to him with open admiration. Xiao-her immediately acquired a certain prestige. The prettiest girl in the school became his girlfriend. Even the most thuggish boys treated him with respect. It was clear to him that my father was a revered figure in Yibin, in spite of the fact that everyone knew he was in disgrace, and the Tings were in power.

The population of Yibin had suffered horribly under the Tings. Thousands had died or been injured in the factional fighting or under torture. One family friend escaped death because when his children went to collect his corpse in the morgue, they found he was still breathing.

People in Yibin had developed a great yearning for the days of peace, for officials who did not abuse their power, for a government that was dedicated to getting things to work. The focus of this nostalgia was the early 1950s, when my father was the governor. It was then that the Communists were at their most popular just after they had replaced the Kuomintang, put an end to starvation, and established law and order, but before their incessant political campaigns (and their own, Mao-induced famine).

My father became identified in the folk memory with the good old days. He was seen as the legendary good official, in stark contrast with the Tings.

Because of him, Xiao-her enjoyed his stay in Yibin although he learned lit He at school. Teaching materials still consisted of Mao's works and People's Daily articles, and no one had any authority over the pupils since Mao had not retracted his blanket dismissal of formal learning.

The teachers and the workers' propaganda team tried to enlist Xiao-her's help to enforce discipline in his class.

But here even my father's reputation failed, and Xiao-her was eventually ostracized by some of the boys for being the teacher's 'lackey." A whispering campaign began claiming that he had embraced his girlfriend under lampposts in the street, which was a 'bourgeois crime." Xiao-her lost his privileged position and was told to write self-criticisms and to pledge to carry out thought reform. The girl's mother turned up one day insisting on a surgical examination to prove her daughter's chastity. After a big scene, she took her daughter out of the school.

Xiao-her had one close friend in his class, a popular boy of seventeen who had one sensitive spot: his mother had never married, but had five children all with different and unknown fathers, which was extremely unusual in a society where 'illegitimacy' was heavily stigmatized, in spite of having been formally abolished. Now, in one of the witch-hunting tides, she was publicly humiliated as a 'bad element." The boy felt very ashamed of his mother, and told Xiao-her in private that he hated her. One day the school was awarding a best-swimmer prize (because Mao liked swimming), and Xiao-her's friend was unanimously nominated by the pupils; but when the award was announced, it was not to him. Apparently one young woman teacher had objected: "We can't give it to him: his mother is a "worn shoe."

When the boy heard this, he grabbed a kitchen chopper and stormed into the teacher's office. Someone stopped him while the teacher scuttled off and hid. Xiao-her knew how much this incident had hurt his friend: for the first time, the boy was seen weeping bitterly. That night, Xiaohei and some of the other boys sat up with him, trying to comfort him. The next day, he disappeared. His corpse was washed up on the bank of the Golden Sand River. He had tied his hands together before he jumped.

The Cultural Revolution not only did nothing to modernize the medieval elements in China's culture, it actually gave them political respectability.

"Modern' dictatorship and ancient intolerance fed on each other. Any one who fell foul of the age-old conservative attitude, could now become a political victim.

My new commune in Deyang was in an area of low hills dotted with shrubs and eucalyptus trees. Most of the farmland was good, producing two major harvests a year, one of wheat and one of rice. Vegetables, rapeseed, and sweet potatoes grew in abundance. After Ningnan, the biggest relief for me was that we did not have to do any climbing, and I could breathe normally instead of panting for breath all the time. I did not mind the fact that walking here meant staggering along narrow, muddy ridges between paddy fields. I often fell on my bottom, and sometimes in a grab for support I would push the person in front usually Nana into a rice paddy. Nor did I mind another peril of walking at night: the possibility of being bitten by dogs, quite a few of which had rabies.

When we first arrived, we stayed next to a pigsty. At night, we fell asleep to a symphony of pigs grunting, mosquitoes whining, and dogs barking. The room smelled permanently of pig manure and anti-mosquito incense. After a while the production team built Nana and me a two-room cottage on a plot of land which had been used for cutting mud bricks. The land was lower than the rice paddy which lay just across a narrow footpath, and in spring and summer, when the paddy He Ids were filled with water, or after heavy rain, marshy water would ooze up from the mud floor. Nana and I had to take off our shoes, roll up our trouser legs, and wade into the cottage. Fortunately the double bed we shared had tall legs, so we slept about two feet above the muddy water. Getting into bed involved putting a bowl of clean water on a stool, climbing up onto the stool, and washing our feet. Living in these damp conditions, my bones and muscles ached all the time.

But the cottage was also fun. When the flood receded, mushrooms would spring up under the bed and in the corners of the rooms. With a little imagination, the floor looked like something out of a fairy tale. Once I dropped a spoonful of peas on the ground. After the water had come and gone, a cluster of delicate petals unfolded from slender stems, as though they had just awakened to the rays of the sun, which brimmed through the wood-framed opening in the wall which was our window.

The view was perpetually magical to me. Beyond our door lay the village pond, overgrown with water lilies and lotuses. The path in front of the cottage led up to a pass in the hill about 350 feet above us. The sun set behind it, framed by black rocks. Before darkness fell, silver mist would hang over the fields at the foot of the hills. Men, women, and children walked back to the village after their day's work in the evening haze, carrying baskets, hoes, and sickles, and were met by their dogs who yapped and leaped about them. They looked as though they were sailing in clouds. Smoke curved out from the thatched cottages.