I stayed ten days, and was to depart for my father's camp on New Year's Day. My nice truck driver was to pick me up where he had dropped me off. My mother's eyes moistened because, although his camp was not far away, she and my father were forbidden to visit each other. I put the food basket on my back untouched my mother insisted I take the whole lot to my father. Saving precious food for others has always been a major way of expressing love and concern in China. My mother was very sad that I was going, and kept saying she was sorry I had to miss the traditional Chinese New Year breakfast which her camp was going to serve: tang-yuan, round dumplings, symbolizing family union. But I could not wait for it for fear of missing the truck.

My mother walked half an hour with me to the roadside and we sat down in the high grass to wait. The sweep of the landscape undulated with the gentle waves of the thick cogon grass. The sun was already bright and warm. M?

mother hugged me, her whole body seeming to say that she did not want to let me go, that she was afraid she would never see me again. At the time, we did not know whether her camp and my commune would ever come to an end.

We had been told we would be there for life. There were hundreds of reasons why we might die before we saw each other again. My mother's sadness infected me, and I thought of my grandmother dying before I was able to get back from Ningnan.

The sun rose higher and higher. There was no trace of my truck. As the large rings of smoke that had been pouring out of the chimney of her camp in the distance thinned down, my mother was seized by regret that she had not been able to give me the New Year's breakfast. She insisted on going back to get some for me.

While she was away the truck came. I looked toward the camp and saw her running toward me, the white-golden grass surging around her blue scarf. In her right hand she carried a big colorful enamel bowl. She was running with the kind of carefulness that told me she did not want the soup with the dumplings to spill. She was still a good way off, and I could see she would not reach me for another twenty minutes or so. I did not feel I could ask the driver to wait that long, as he was already doing me a big favor.

I clambered onto the back of the truck. I could see my mother still running toward me in the distance. But she no longer seemed to be carrying the bowl.

Years later, she told me the bowl had fallen from her hand when she saw me climbing onto the truck. But she still ran to the spot where we had been sitting, just to make sure I had really gone, although it could not have been anyone else getting onto the truck. There was not a single person around in that vast yellow ness For the next few days she walked around the camp as though in a trance, feeling blank and lost.

After many hours of being bounced around on the back of the truck, I arrived at my father's camp. It was deep in the mountains, and had been a forced labor camp a gulag. The prisoners had hacked a farm out of the wild mountains and had since been moved on to open up more harsh virgin land, leaving this relatively cultivated site for those one rung better off on China's punishment ladder, the deported officials. The camp was huge: it held thousands of former employees of the provincial government.

I had to walk for a couple of hours from the road to reach my father's 'company." A rope suspension bridge wobbled over a deep chasm as I stepped onto it, almost making me lose my balance. Exhausted as I was, with the load on my back, I still managed to be amazed by the stunning beauty of the mountains. Although it was only early spring, bright flowers were everywhere, next to kapok trees and bushes of papayas. When I finally got to my father's dormitory, I saw a couple of colorful pheasants swaggering majestically under a glade of early pear, plum, and almond blossoms. Weeks later, the fallen petals, pink and white, were to bury the mud path.

My first sight of my father after over a year was harrowing. He was trotting into the courtyard carrying two baskets full of bricks on a shoulder pole. His old blue jacket hung loose on him, and his rolled-up trouser legs revealed a pair of very thin legs with prominent sinews. His sun-beaten face was wrinkled, and his hair was almost gray. Then he saw me. He put down his load with a fumbling movement, the result of over excitement as I rushed over to him.

Because the Chinese tradition permitted little physical contact between fathers and daughters, he told me how happy he was through his eyes. They were so full of love and tenderness. In them I also saw traces of the ordeal he had been going through. His youthful energy and spark had given way to an air of aged confusion with a hint of quiet determination. Yet he was still in his prime, only forty-eight years old. A lump rose in my throat. I searched his eyes for signs of my worst fear, the return of his insanit)'. But he looked all right. A heavy load lifted from my heart.

He was sharing a room with seven other people, all from his department. There was only one tiny window, so the door had to be left open all day to let in some light. The people in the room seldom spoke to each other, and no one greeted me at all. I felt immediately that the atmosphere was much more severe than in my mother's camp.

The reason was that this camp was under the direct control of the Sichuan Revolutionary Committee, and therefore of the Tings. On the walls of the courtyard there were still layers of posters and slogans reading "Down with Soand-so' or "Eliminate So-and-so," against which were propped scarred hoes and spades. As I soon discovered, my father was still being subjected to frequent denunciation meetings in the evenings after a hard day's work. Since one way to get out of the camp was to be invited back to work for the Revolutionary Committee, and the way to do that was to please the Tings, some Rebels competed with each other to demonstrate their militancy, and my father was their natural victim.

He was not allowed into the kitchen. As an 'anti-Mao criminal," he was alleged to be so dangerous he might poison the food. It did not matter whether anyone believed this. The point was in the insult.

My father bore this and other cruelties with fortitude.

Only once did he allow his anger to show. When he first came to the camp, he was ordered to wear a white arm band with black characters saying 'counterrevolutionary element in action." He pushed away the arm band violently and said from between clenched teeth, "Come on and beat me to death. I will not wear this!" The Rebels backed away. They knew he meant it and they had no order from above to kill him.

Here in the camp, the Tings were able to revenge themselves on their enemies. Among them was a man who had been involved in the investigation into them in 1965. He had worked in the underground before 1949, and had been imprisoned and tortured by the Kuomintang, which had destroyed his health. In the camp he soon fell gravely ill, but he had to go on working, and was not allowed a single day off. Because he was slow, he was ordered to make it up in the evenings. Wall posters denounced him for his laziness. One of the posters I saw opened with the words: "Have you, Comrade, noticed this grotesque living skeleton with hideous facial features?" Under Xichang's relentless sun, his skin had become scorched and withered, and was peeling off in great chunks. Also, he was starved out of human shape: he had had two-thirds of his stomach cut out, and could digest only a small amount of food at a time.

Because he could not have frequent meals, as he needed to, he was permanently starving. One day, in desperation, he went into the kitchen to look for some pickle juice. He was accused of trying to poison the food. Knowing he was on the verge of total collapse, he wrote to the camp authorities saying that he was dying and requesting to be spared some heavy jobs. The only answer was a venomous poster campaign. Soon afterward he fainted in a field under the blazing sun, as he was spreading manure. He was taken to the camp hospital and died the next day. He had no family at his deathbed. His wife had committed suicide.