The librarians were delighted that these books were being read, especially by a student, and were extremely helpful. The index system had been thrown into chaos, and they dug through piles of books to find the ones I wanted. It was through the efforts of these kind young men and women that I laid my hands on some English classics.

Louisa May Alcott's Little Women was the first novel I read in English. I found women writers like her, Jane Austen, and the Bronte sisters much easier to read than male authors like Dickens, and I also felt more empathy with their characters. I read a brief history of European and American literature, and was enormously impressed by the Greek tradition of democracy, Renaissance humanism, and the Enlightenment's questioning of everything. When I read in Gulliver's Travels about the emperor who 'published an Edict, commanding all his Subjects, upon great Penalties, to break the smaller End of their Eggs," I wondered if Swift had been to China. My joy at the sensation of my mind opening up and expanding was beyond description.

Being alone in the library was heaven for me. My heart would leap as I approached it, usually at dusk, anticipating the pleasure of solitude with my books, the outside world ceasing to exist. As I hurried up the flight of stairs, into the pastiche classical-style building, the smell of old books long stored in airless rooms would give me tremors of excitement, and I would hate the stairs for being too long.

With the help of dictionaries which some professors lent me, I became acquainted with Longfellow, Wait Whitman, and American history. I memorized the whole of the Declaration of Independence, and my heart swelled at the words "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal," and those about men's 'unalienable Rights," among them "Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." These concepts were unheard of in China, and opened up a marvelous new world for me. My notebooks, which I kept with me at all times, were full of passages like these, passionately and tearfully copied out.

One autumn day in 1974, with an air of extreme secrecy, a friend of mine showed me a copy of Newsweek with pictures of Mao and Mme Mao in it. She could not read English, and was keen to know what the article said. This was the first genuine foreign magazine I had ever set eyes on. One sentence in the article struck me like a flash of lightning. It said that Mme Mao was Mao's 'eyes, ears, and voice." Up fill that moment, I had never allowed myself to contemplate the obvious connection between Mme Mao's deeds and her husband. But now Mao's name was spelled out for me. My blurred perceptions surrounding his image came sharply into focus. It was Mao who had been behind the destruction and suffering. Without him, Mme Mao and her second-rate coterie could not have lasted a single day. I experienced the thrill of challenging Mao openly in my mind for the first time.

All this time, unlike most of his former colleagues, my father had not been rehabilitated or given a job. He had been sitting at home in Meteorite Street doing nothing since he came back from Peking with my mother and me in autumn 1972. The problem was that he had criticized Mao by name. The team investigating him was sympathetic and tried to ascribe some of what he had said against Mao to his mental illness. But the team came up against fierce opposition amongst the higher authorities, who wanted to give him a severe condemnation. Many of my father's colleagues sympathized with him and indeed admired him.

But they had to think about their own necks. Besides, my father did not belong to any clique and had no powerful patron which might have helped get him cleared. Instead, he had well-placed enemies.

One day back in 1968, my mother, who was briefly out from detention, saw an old friend of my father's at a roadside food stall. This man had thrown in his lot with the Tings. He was with his wife, who had actually been introduced to him by my mother and Mrs. Ting when they were working together in Yibin. In spite of the couple's obvious reluctance to have anything to do with her beyond a brief nod, my mother marched up to their table and joined them.

She asked them to appeal to the Tings to spare my father.

After hearing my mother out, the man shook his head and said, "It's not so simple… Then he dipped a finger into his tea and wrote the character Zuo on the table. He gave my mother a meaningful look, got up with his wife, and left without another word.

Zuo was a former close colleague of my father's, and was one of the few senior officials who did not suffer at all in the Cultural Revolution. He became the darling of Mrs. Shau's Rebels and a friend of the Tings, but survived their demise and that of L'm Biao and remained in power.

My father would not withdraw his words against Mao.

But when the team investigating him suggested putting them down to his mental illness, he acquiesced, with great anguish.

Meanwhile, the general situation made him despondent.

There were no principles governing either the behavior of the people or the conduct of the Party. Corruption began to come back in a big way. Officials looked after their families and friends first. For fear of being beaten up, teachers gave all pupils top marks irrespective of the quality of their work, and bus conductors would not collect fares.

Dedication to public good was openly sneered at. Mao's Cultural Revolution had destroyed both Party discipline and civic morality.

My father found it difficult to control himself so that he would not speak his mind and say things that would incriminate him and his family further.

He had to rely on tranquilizers. When the political climate was more relaxed, he took less; when the campaigns intensified, he took more. Every time the psychiatrists renewed his supply, they shook their heads, saying it was extremely dangerous for him to continue taking such large doses. But he could only manage short periods off the pills.

In May 1974 he sensed that he was on the verge of a breakdown, and asked to be given psychiatric treatment.

This time he was hospitalized swiftly, thanks to his former colleagues who were now back in charge of the health service.

I got leave from the university and went to stay with him in the hospital to keep him company. Dr. Su, the psychiatrist who had treated him before, was looking after him again. Under the Tings, Dr. Su had been condemned for giving a true diagnosis about my father, and had been ordered to write a confession saying my father had been faking madness. He refused, for which he was subjected to denunciation meetings, beaten up, and thrown out of the medical profession. I saw him one day in 1968, emptying rubbish bins and cleaning the hospital spittoons. His hair had turned gray, though he was only in his thirties. After the downfall of the Tings he was rehabilitated. He was very friendly to my father and me, as were all the doctors and nurses. They told me they would take good care of my father, and that I did not have to stay with him. But I wanted to. I thought he needed love more than anything else. And I was anxious about what might happen if he fell down with no one around. His blood pressure was dangerously high, and he had already had several minor heart attacks, which had left him with a walking impediment. He looked as though he might slip at any time.

Doctors warned that a fall could be fatal. I moved into the men's ward with him, into the same room he had occupied in summer 1967. Each room could accommodate two patients, but my father had the room to himself, and I slept in the spare bed.