I had no chance, being neither a Party member nor trusted by my department, even if a scholarship were to fall from heaven onto my university. But now it began to bud somewhere in my mind that since exams were back, and China was shedding its Maoist straitjacket, I might have a chance.

Hardly had I begun to dream this than I forced myself to kill the idea, I was so afraid of the inevitable disappointment.

When I came back from my trip, I heard that my department had been given a scholarship for a young or middleaged teacher to go to the West. And they had decided on someone else.

It was Professor Lo who told me the devastafng news.

She was in her early seventies and walked unsteadily with a stick, but was nonetheless perky and almost impetuously quick in every other way. She spoke English rapidly, as if she was impatient to get out all the things she knew. She had lived in the United States for about thirty years. Her father had been a Kuomintang high court judge, and had wanted to give her a Western upbringing. In America she had taken the name Lucy, and had fallen in love with an American student called Luke. They planned to get married, but when they told Luke's mother, she said, "Lucy, I like you very much. But what would your children look like? It would be very difficult… '

Lucy broke with Luke because she was too proud to be accepted into his family with reluctance. At the beginning of the 1950s, after the Communists took over, she went back to China, thinking that at last the dignity of the Chinese would be restored. She never got over Luke, and entered into a very late marriage with a Chinese professor of English, whom she did not love, and they quarreled nonstop. They had been thrown out of their apa,iment during the Cultural Revolution and were living in a tiny room, about ten feet by eight, crammed with fading old papers and dusty books. It was heart-rending to see this frail white-haired couple, unable to bear each other, one sitting on the edge of their double bed, the other on the only chair that could be squeezed into the room.

Professor Lo became very fond of me. She said she saw in me her own vanished youth of fifty years before when she had also been restless, wanting happiness out of life.

She had failed to find it, she told me, but she wanted me to succeed. When she heard about the scholarship to go abroad, probably to America, she was terribly excited, but also anxious because I was away and could not stake my claim. The place went to a Miss Yee, who had been one year ahead of me and was now a Party official. She and the other young teachers in my deparhnent who had been graduated since the Cultural Revolution had been put in a training scheme to improve their English while I was in the countryside. Professor Lo was one of their tutors; she taught partly by using articles from English-language publications she had procured from friends in the more open cities like Peking and Shanghai (Sichuan was still completely closed to foreigners). Whenever I was back from the country, I sat in on her classes.

One day the text was about the use of atomic energy in US industry. After Professor Lo explained the meaning of the article, Miss Yee looked up, straightened her back, and said with great indignation, "This article has to be read critically! How can the American imperialists use atomic energy peacefully?" I felt my irritation flaring up at Miss Yee's parroting of the propaganda line. Impulsively I retorted, "But how do you know they can't?' Miss Yee and most of the class stared at me incredulously. To them, a question like mine was still inconceivable, even blasphemous. Then I saw the sparkle in Professor Lo's eyes, the smile of appreciation that only I could detect. I felt understood and fortfied.

Besides Professor Lo, some other professors and lecturers wanted me, not Miss Yee, to go to the West. But although they had begun to be respected in the new climate, none of them had any say. If anyone could help, it had to be my mother. Following her advice, I went to see my father's former colleagues, who were now in charge of universities, and told them I had a complaint: since Comrade Deng Xiaoping had said that university entrance was to be based on merit, not the back door, surely it was wrong not to follow this procedure for studying overseas. I begged them to allow me a fair competition, which meant an exam.

While my mother and I were lobbying, an order suddenly came from Peking: for the first time since 1949, scholarships for studying in the West were to be awarded on the basis of a national academic examination, and it was soon to be held simultaneously in Peking, Shanghai, and Xi'an, the ancient capital where the terra-cotta army was later excavated.

My department had to send three candidates to Xi'an. It withdrew Miss Yee's scholarship and chose two candidates, both excellent lecturers around the age of forty, who had been teaching since before the Cultural Revolution.

Partly because of Peking's order to base selection on professional ability, and partly because of the pressure from my mother's campaign, the department decided that the third candidate, a younger one, should be chosen from among the two dozen people who were graduated during the Cultural Revolution, through a written and an oral examination on 18 March.

I received the highest marks in both, although I won the oral test somewhat irregularly. We had to go one at a time into a room where two examiners, Professor Lo and another elderly professor, were seated. On a table in front of them were some paper balls: we had to pick one and answer the question on it in English. Mine read: 'what are the main points in the communique of the recent Second Plenary Session of the Eleventh Congress of the Communist Party of China?" Of course I had no idea, and stood there stupefied. Professor Lo looked into my face and stretched out her hand for the slip of paper. She glanced at it and showed it to the other professor. Silently she put it in her pocket and motioned with her eyes for me to pick another. This time the question was: "Say something about the glorious situation of our socialist motherland."

Years of compulsory exaltation of the glorious situation of my socialist motherland had bored me sick, but this time I had plenty to say. In fact, I had just written a rapturous poem about the spring of x 978. Deng Xiaoping's right-hand man, Hu Yaobang, had become head of the Party's organization Department, and had begun the process of clearing all sorts of' class enemies' en masse. The country was palpably shaking off Maoism. Industry was going at full blast and there were many more goods in the shops. Schools, hospitals, and other public services were working properly. Long-banned books were being published, and people sometimes waited outside book shops for two days to obtain them. There was laughter, on the streets and in people's homes.

I began to prepare frantically for the examinations in Xi'an, which were not quite three weeks away. Several professors offered their help. Professor Lo gave me a reading list and a dozen English books, but then decided I would not have time to read them all. So she briskly cleared a space on her crowded desk for her portable typewriter, and spent the next two weeks typing out summaries of them in English. This, she said with a mischievous wink, was how Luke had helped her with her examinations fifty years before, as she had preferred dancing and parties.

The two lecturers and I, accompanied by the deputy Party secretary, took a train to Xi'an, a day and a night's journey away. For most of the journey I lay on my stomach on my 'hard sleeper," busily annotating Professor Lo's pile of notes. No one knew the exact number of scholarships or the countries for which the winners were destined, as most information in China was a state secret. But when we arrived in Xi'an we heard that there were twenty-two people taking the exams there, mostly senior lecturers from four provinces in western China. The sealed exam paper had been flown in from Peking the day before. There were three parts to the written exam, which took up the morning; one was a long passage from Roots, which we had to translate into Chinese. Outside the windows of the examination hall, white showers of willow flowers swept across the April city as if in a magnificent rhapsodic dance. At the end of the morning, our papers were collected, sealed, and sent straight to Peking to be marked together with the ones done there and in Shanghai. In the afternoon there was an oral exam.