The young doctor who had been to medical school was the one everybody wanted. His prescriptions of Chinese herbs cured many ailments. He was very conscientious, too, visiting patients in their villages and collecting and growing herbs in his spare time. The other doctor, with the goatee, terrified me with his medical nonchalance. He would use the same needle to inject several different patients without any sterilization. And he injected penicillin without testing whether the person was allergic to it, which was extremely dangerous because Chinese penicillin was not pure and could cause serious reactions, even death.

Politely, I offered to do it for him. He smiled, not offended by my interference, and said there had never been any accidents: "The peasants are not like delicate city folk."

I liked the doctors, and they were very kind to me, always helpful when I asked questions. Not surprisingly, they did not see me as a threat. Out in the countryside, it was one's professional skills, rather than political rhetoric, that counted.

I enjoyed living on that hilltop, far away from any village.

Every morning I got up early, strolled along the edge of the hill, and to the rising sun recited lines from an ancient book of verse about acupuncture. Beneath my feet, the fields and cottages began to wake up to the cocks' crowing.

A lonely Venus watched with a pale glow from a sky that was getting brighter every minute. I loved the fragrance of the honeysuckle in the morning breeze, and the big petals of nightshade shaking off pearls of dew. Birds chirped all around, distracting me from my recitations. I would linger for a bit, and then walk back to light my stove for breakfast.

With the help of an anatomical chart and my acupuncture verses, I had a fairly clear idea where on the body I should stick my needles to cure what. I was eager for patients. And I had some enthusiastic volunteers boys from Chengdu who were now living in other villages and who were keen on me. They would walk for hours for an acupuncture session. One young man, rolling up his sleeve to expose an acupuncture point near his elbow, declared with a brave face, "What are men friends for?"

I did not fall in love with any of them, although my resolution to deny myself a boyfriend in order to dedicate myself to my parents and appease my guilt over my grandmother's death was weakening. But I found it difficult to let my heart go, and my upbringing prevented me from having any physical relationship without surrendering my heart. All around me, other boys and girls from the city were leading rather freer lives. But I sat, lonely, on a pedestal. Word got out that I wrote poetry, and that helped keep me there.

The young men all behaved most chivalrously. One gave me a musical instrument called a san-xian, made of a snakeskin bowl with a long handle and three silk strings, which were plucked, and spent days teaching me how to play it. The permitted tunes were all in praise of Mao, and were very limited. But that did not make much difference to me: my ability was even more limited.

In the warm evenings, I sat by the fragrant medicinal garden encircled by Chinese trumpet creepers, and thrummed to myself. Once the shop next door closed for the night, I was entirely alone. It was dark except for the gently shining moon and the twinkling of lights from distant cottages. Sometimes fireflies glowed and floated by like torches carried by tiny, invisible flying men. The scents from the garden made me dizzy with pleasure. My music hardly matched the enthusiastic chorus of the thundering frogs and the wistful croon of the crickets. But I found solace in it.

Three days' truck journey from Chengdu, in northern Xichang, is Buffalo Boy Flatland. There the road forks, one branch heading southwest to Miyi, where my father's camp was, the other southeast to Ningnan.

A famous legend gave the Flatland its name. The Goddess Weaver, daughter of the Celestial Queen Mother, used to descend from the Celestial Court to bathe in a lake there. (The meteor which fell on Meteorite Street is supposed to have been a stone that propped up her loom.) A boy living by the lake who looks after buffaloes sees the goddess, and they fall in love. They marry, and have a son and a daughter. The Celestial Queen Mother is jealous of their happiness, and sends some gods down to kidnap the goddess. They carry her off, and the buffalo boy rushes after them. Just as he is about to catch them, the Celestial Queen Mother pulls a hairpin from her coil and draws a huge river between them. The Silver River separates the couple permanently, except on the seventh day of the seventh moon, when magpies fly from all over China to form a bridge for the family to meet.

The Silver River is the Chinese name for the Milky Way. Over Xichang it looks vast, with a mass of stars, the bright Vega, the Goddess Weaver, on one side, and Altair, the Buffalo Boy, with his two children, on the other. This legend has appealed to the Chinese for centuries because their families have often been broken up by wars, bandits, poverty, and heartless governments. Ironically, it was to this place that my mother was sent.

She arrived there in November 1969, with her 500 former colleagues from the Eastern District Rebels as well as capitalist-roaders. Because they had been ordered out of Chengdu in a hurry there was nowhere for them to live, except for a few shacks left by army engineers who had been building a railway from Chengdu to Kunming, the capital of Yunnan. Some squeezed into these.

Others had to cram their bedrolls into the houses of local peasants.

There were no building materials except cogon grass and mud, which had to be dug out and carried down from the mountains. The mud for the walls was mixed with water and made into bricks. There were no machines, no electricity, not even any work animals. On the Flatland, which is about 5,000 feet above sea level, it is the day, rather than the year, that is divided into four seasons. At seven in the morning, when my mother started working, the temperature was around freezing. By midday, it could reach the high 80s. At about 4 p.m. hot winds swirled through the mountains and literally swept people off their feet. At seven in the evening, when they finished work, the temperature plummeted again. In these harsh extremes my mother and the other inmates worked twelve hours a day, breaking only for a brief lunch. For the first few months, all they had to eat was rice and boiled cabbage.

The camp was organized like an army, run by army officers, and came under the control of the Chengdu Revolutionary Committee. At first my mother was treated as a class enemy and was forced to stand for the whole of every lunch break with her head bowed. This form of punishment, called field side denunciation," was recommended by the media as a way to remind the others, who were able to rest, that they should save some energy for hatred. My mother protested to her company commander that she could not work all day without resting her legs. The officer had been in the Military Department of the Eastern District before the Cultural Revolution, and had got on well with her; he put a stop to the practice. Still, my mother was given the hardest jobs, and she did not have Sundays off, unlike the other inmates. The bleeding from her womb worsened. Then she was struck down with hepatitis. Her whole body was yellow and swollen, and she could hardly stand up.

One thing the camp did have was doctors, as half the hospital staff in the Eastern District had been packed off there. Only those who were most in demand by the bosses of the Revolutionary Committees remained in Chengdu.