Windows were shattered within a radius of about fifty yards. The next morning, Hui-ge invited my mother over to the Ji mansion. His eyes were hollow and he was unshaven. He had obviously not slept a wink. He greeted her a little more guardedly than usual.

After a heavy silence, he asked her whether she had heard the news. Her expression must have confirmed his worst fears that he had helped to cripple his own division.

He said there was going to be an investigation.

"I wonder whether the explosion will sweep my head from my shoulders," he sighed, 'or blow a reward my way?" My mother, who was feeling sorry for him, said reassuringly: "I am sure you are beyond suspicion. I'm certain you will be rewarded." At this, Hui-ge stood up and saluted her in formal fashion.

"Thank you for your promise!" he said.

By now, Communist artillery shells had begun to crash into the city. When my mother first heard the whine of the shells flying over, she was a lit He frightened. But later, when the shelling became heavier, she got used to it. It became like permanent thunder. A kind of fatalistic indifference deadened fear for most people. The siege also broke down Dr. Xia's rigid Manchu ritual; for the first time the whole household ate together, men and women, masters and servants.

Previously, they had been eating in no less than eight groups, all having different food. One day, as they were sitting around the table preparing to have dinner, a shell came bursting through the window over the kang, where Yu-lin's one-year-old son was playing, and thudded to a halt under the dining table. Fortunately, like many of the shells, it was a dud.

Once the siege started there was no food to be had, even on the black market. A hundred million Kuomintang dollars could barely buy a pound of sorghum. Like most families who could afford to do so, my grandmother had stored some sorghum and soybeans, and her sister's husband, "Loyalty' Pei-o, used his connections to get some extra supplies. During the siege the family's donkey was killed by a piece of shrapnel, so they ate it.

On 8 October the Communists moved almost a quarter of a million troops into attack positions. The shelling became much more intense. It was also very accurate. The top Kuomintang commander, General Fan Han-jie, said that it seemed to follow him wherever he went. Many artillery positions were knocked out, and the fortresses in the uncompleted defense system came under heavy fire, as did the road and railway links. Telephone and cable lines were cut, and the electricity system broke down.

On 13 October the outer defenses collapsed. More than 100,000 Kuomintang troops retreated pell-mell into the center of the city. That night a band of about a dozen disheveled soldiers stormed into the Xias' house and demanded food. They had not eaten for two days. Dr. Xia greeted them courteously and Yu-lin's wife immediately started cooking a huge saucepan of sorghum noodles.

When they were ready, she put them on the kitchen table and went into the next room to tell the soldiers. As she turned her back, a shell landed in the saucepan and exploded, spattering the noodles all over the kitchen. She dived under a narrow table in front of the kang. A soldier was ahead of her, but she grabbed him by the leg and pulled him out. My grandmother was terrified.

"What if he had turned around and pulled the trigger?" she hissed once he was out of earshot.

Until the very final stage of the siege the shelling was amazingly accurate; few ordinary houses were hit, but the population suffered from the terrible fires which the shelling ignited, and there was no water to douse the flames.

The sky was completely obscured by thick, dark smoke and it was impossible to see more than a few yards, even in daytime. The noise of the artillery was deafening. My mother could hear people wailing, but could never tell where they were or what was happening.

On 14 October, the final offensive started. Nine hundred artillery pieces bombarded the city nonstop. Most of the family hid in an improvised air-raid shelter which they had dug earlier, but Dr. Xia refused to leave the house. He sat calmly on the kang in the corner of his room by the window and prayed silently to the Buddha. At one point fourteen kittens ran into the room. He was delighted: "A place a cat tries to hide in is a lucky place," he said. Not a single bullet came into his room and all the kittens survived. The only other person who would not go down into the shelter was my great-grandmother, who just curled up under the oak table next to the kang in her room. When the bat He ended the thick quilts and blankets covering the table looked like a sieve.

In the middle of one bombardment, Yu-lin's baby son, who was down in the shelter, wanted to have a wee-wee.

His mother took him outside, and a few seconds later the side of the shelter where she had been sitting collapsed.

My mother and grandmother had to come up and take cover in the house. My mother crouched next to the kang in the kitchen, but soon pieces of shrapnel started hitting the brick side of the kang and the house began to shake.

She ran out into the back garden. The sky was black with smoke. Bullets were flying through the air and ricocheting all over the place, spattering against the walls; the sound was like mighty rain pelting down, mixed with screams and yells.

In the small hours of the next day a group of Kuomintang soldiers burst into the house, dragging about twenty terrified civilians of all ages with them the residents of the three neighboring courtyards. The troops were almost hysterical. They had come from an arfllery post in a temple across the street, which had just been shelled with pinpoint accuracy, and were shouting at the civilians that one of them must have given away their position. They kept yelling that they wanted to know who had given the signal.

When no one spoke up, they grabbed my mother and shoved her against a wall, accusing her. My grandmother was terrified, and hurriedly dug out some small gold pieces and pressed them into the soldiers' hands. She and Dr. Xia went down on their knees and begged the soldiers to let my mother go. Yu-lin's wife said this was the only time she ever saw Dr. Xia looking really frightened. He pleaded with the soldiers: "She's my little girl. Please believe me that she did not do it… '

The soldiers took the gold and let my mother go, but they forced everyone into two rooms at bayonet point and shut them in so they would not send any more signals, they said. It was pitch-dark inside the rooms, and very frightening. But quite soon my mother noticed that the shelling was decreasing. The noises outside changed.

Mixed with the whine of bullets were sounds of hand grenades exploding and the clash of bayonets. Voices were yelling, "Put down your weapons and we'll spare your life!"

there were blood-curdling shrieks and screams of anger and pain. Then the shots and the shouts came closer and closer, and she heard the sound of boots clattering on the cobblestones as the Kuomintang soldiers ran away down the street.

Eventually the din subsided a bit and the Xias could hear banging on the side gate of the house. Dr. Xia went warily to the door of the room and eased it open: the Kuomintang soldiers had gone. Then he went to the side gate of the house and asked who was there. A voice answered: "We are the people's army. We have come to liberate you." Dr. Xia opened the gate and several men in baggy uniforms entered swiftly. In the darkness, my mother could see that they were wearing white towels wrapped around their left sleeves like armbands and held their guns at the ready, with fixed bayonets.

"Don't be afraid," they said.

"We won't harm you. We are your army, the people's army." They said they wanted to check the house for Kuomintang soldiers.