One day my production team was making pea noodles, and borrowed my enamel washbowl to carry water. That day, the noodles collapsed into a shapeless mess. The crowd that had gathered excitedly and expectantly around the noodle-making barrel started muttering loudly when they saw me approaching, and glared at me with disgust.

I was scared. Later I was told by some women that the villagers blamed the sagging noodles on me. They said I must have used the bowl to wash when I was menstruating.

The women told me I was lucky to be a 'city youth." If it had been one of them, their menfolk would have given them 'a really good hiding."

On another occasion, a group of young men passing through our village carrying baskets of sweet potatoes were taking a break on a narrow road. Their shoulder poles were lying on the ground, blocking the way. I stepped over one of them. All of a sudden, one of the young men jumped to his feet, picked up his pole, and stood in front of me, with fiery eyes. He looked as though he was going to strike me. From the other peasants, I learned that he believed he would develop shoulder sores if a woman stepped over his pole. I was made to cross back over it 'to undo the poison."

During the whole time I was in the countryside, I never saw any attempt to tackle such warped thinking in fact, it was never even mentioned.

The most educated person in my production team was the former landlord. I had been conditioned to regard landlords as evil, and now, to my initial uneasiness, I found that I got on best with this family. They bore no resemblance to the stereotypes that had been drilled into my mind. The husband did not have cruel, vicious eyes, and his wife did not wiggle her bottom, or make her voice sugary, to appear seductive.

Sometimes, when we were alone, he would talk about his grievances.

"Chang Jung," he once said, "I know you are a kind person. You must be a reasonable person as well, since you have read books. You can judge whether this is fair." Then he told me why he had been classified as a landlord. He had been a waiter in Chengdu in 1948, and had saved up some money by watching every penny. At the time, some farsighted landlords were selling their land cheap, as they could see land reform coming if the Communists reached Sichuan. The waiter was not politically astute, and bought some land, thinking he had got a bargain. He not only soon lost most of it in the land reform, but became a class enemy to boot.

"Alas," he said, with resignation, quoting a classic line, 'one single slip has caused a thousand years of sorrow."

The villagers seemed to feel no hostility toward the landlord and his family, although they kept their distance. But, like all 'class enemies," they were always given the jobs no one else wanted. And the two sons got one work point less than other men, in spite of the fact that they were the hardest-working men in the village. They seemed to me to be highly intelligent, and also the most refined young men around. Their gentleness and gracefulness set them apart, and I found that I felt closer to them than to any other young people in the village. However, in spite of their qualities, no girls wanted to marry them. Their mother told me how much money she had spent buying presents for the few gifts whom the go-betweens had introduced. The gifts would accept the clothes and money and then walk off. Other peasants could have demanded the presents back, but a landlord's family could do nothing. She would sigh long and loud about the fact that her sons had little prospect of decent marriages. But, she told me, they bore their misfortune lightly: after each disappointment, they would try to cheer her up. They would offer to work on market days to earn back the cost of her lost presents.

All these misfortunes were told to me without much drama or emotion. Here it seemed that even shocking deaths were like a stone being dropped into a pond where the splash and the ripple closed over into stillness in no lime.

In the placidity of the village, in the hushed depth of the nights in my damp home, I did a lot of reading and thinking. When I first came to Deyang, Jin-ming gave me several big cases of his black-market books, which he had been able to accumulate because the house raiders had now mostly been packed off to the 'cadres' school' at Miyi, together with my father. All day while I was out in the fields, I itched to get back to them.

I devoured what had survived the burning of my father's library. There were the complete works of Lu Xun, the great Chinese writer of the 1920s and 1930s.

Because he died in 1936, before the Communists came to power, he escaped being persecuted by Mao, and even became a great hero of his whereas Lu Xun's favorite pupil and closest associate, Hu Feng, was personally named by Mao as a counterrevolutionary, and was imprisoned for decades. It was the persecution of Hu Feng that led to the witch-hunt in which my mother was detained in 1955.

Lu Xun had been my father's great favorite. When I was a child, he often read us essays by Lu. I had not understood them at the time, even with my father's explanations, but now I was engrossed. I found that their satirical edge could be applied to the Communists as well as to the Kuomintang. Lu Xun had no ideology, only enlightened humanitarianism. His skeptical genius challenged all assumptions.

He was another whose free intelligence helped liberate me from my indoctrination.

My father's collection of Marxist classics was also useful to me. I read randomly, following the obscure words with my finger, and wondering what on earth those nineteenth century German controversies had to do with Mao's China. But I was attracted by something I had rarely come across in China the logic that ran through an argument.

Reading Marx helped me to think rationally and analytically.

I enjoyed these new ways of organizing my thoughts. At other times I would let my mind slip into more nebulous moods and wrote poetry, in classical styles. While I was working in the fields I was often absorbed in composing poems, which made working bearable, at times even agree able. Because of this, I preferred solitude, and positively discouraged conversation.

One day I had been working all morning, cutting cane with a sickle and eating the juiciest parts near the roots.

The cane went to the commune sugar factory, in exchange for sugar. We had to fill a quota in quantity, but not in quality, so we ate the best parts. When lunch break came, and someone had to stay in the field to keep watch for thieves, I offered my services so I would have some time alone. I would go for my lunch when the peasants came back and so have even more time to myself.

I lay on my back on a stack of canes, a straw hat par fly shading my face. Through the hat I could see the vast turquoise sky. A leaf protruded from the stack above my head, looking disproportionately enormous against the sky.

I half-closed my eyes, feeling soothed by the cool greenness.

The leaf reminded me of the swaying leaves of a grove of bamboo on a similar hot summer afternoon many years before. Sitting in its shade fishing, my father had written a forlorn poem. In the same ge-lu pattern of tones, rhymes, and types of words as his poem, I began to compose one of my own. The universe seemed to be standing still, apart from the light rustle of the refreshing breeze in the cane leaves. Life felt beautiful to me at that moment.

In this period, I snatched at the chance for solitude, and ostentatiously showed that I wanted nothing to do with the world around me, which must have made me seem rather arrogant. And because the peasants were the model I was meant to emulate, I reacted by concentrating on their negative qualities. I did not try to get to know them, or to get on with them.

I was not very popular in the village, although the peasants largely left me alone. They disapproved of me for failing to work as hard as they thought I should. Work was their whole life, and the major criterion by which they judged anyone. Their eye for hard work was both uncompromising and fair, and it was clear to them that I hated physical labor and took every opportunity to stay at home and read my books. The stomach trouble and skin rash I had suffered in Ningnan hit me again as soon as I came to Deyang. Virtually every day I had some sort of diarrhea, and my legs broke out in infected sores. I constantly felt weak and dizzy, but it was no good complaining to the peasants; their harsh life had made them regard all nonfatal illnesses as trivial.