The next day my mother wrote home saying she had met a man she liked very much. The immediate reaction of her mother and Dr. Xia was not enthusiasm but concern, because my father was an official, and officials had always had a bad name among ordinary Chinese. Apart from their other vices, their arbitrary power meant they were thought unlikely to treat women decently. My grandmother's immediate assumption was that my father was married already and wanted my mother as a concubine. After all, he was well beyond the marrying age for men in Manchuria.

After about a month it was judged safe for the Harbin group to return to Jinzhou. The Party told my father that he had permission to 'talk about love' with my mother.

Two other men had also applied, but their applications came too late. One of them was Liang, who had been her controller in the underground. In his disappointment he asked to be transferred away from Jinzhou. Neither he nor the other man had breathed a word of their intentions to my mother.

My father got back to be told he had been appointed head of the Public Affairs Department of Jinzhou. A few days later my mother took him home to introduce him to her family. The moment he came in the door my grandmother turned her back on him, and when he tried to greet her she refused to answer. My father was dark and terribly thin the result of the hardships he had been through in the guerrilla days, and my grandmother was convinced he was well over forty, and therefore that it was impossible he had not been married before. Dr. Xia treated him politely, if formally.

My father did not stay long. When he left, my grandmother was in floods of tears. No official could be any good, she cried. But Dr. Xia already realized, through meeting my father and from my mother's explanations, that the Communists exercised such tight control over their people that an official like my father would not be able to cheat. My grandmother was only half reassured: "But he is from Sichuan. How can the Communists find out when he comes from so far away?"

She kept up her barrage of doubts and criticism, but the rest of the family took to my father. Dr. Xia got on very well with him, and they would talk together for hours.

Yu-lin and his wife also liked him very much. Yu-lin's wife had come from a very poor family. Her mother had been forced into an unhappy marriage after her grandfather had staked her in a card game and lost. Her brother had been caught in a roundup by the Japanese and had had to do three years of forced labor, which destroyed his body.

From the day she married Yu-lin, she had to get up at three o'clock every morning to start preparing the various different meals demanded by the complicated Manchu tradition. My grandmother was running the house and, although they were in theory members of the same generation, Yu-lin's wife felt that she was the inferior because she and her husband were dependent on the Xias. My father was the first person to make a point of treating her as an equal, which in China was a considerable departure from the past, and several times he gave the couple film tickets, which for them was a big treat. He was the first official they had ever met who did not put on airs, and Yu-lin's wife certainly felt that the Communists were a big improvement.

Less than two months after returning from Harbin my mother and father filed their application. Marriage had traditionally been a contract between families, and there had never been civil registration or a marriage certificate.

Now, for those who had 'joined the revolution," the Party functioned as the family head. Its criteria were '28-7-regiment-l' which meant that the man had to be at least twenty-eight years old, a Party member for at least seven years, and with a rank equivalent to that of a regimental commander; the '1' referred to the only qualification the woman had to meet, to have worked for the Party for a minimum of one year. My father was twenty-eight according to the Chinese way of counting age (one year old at birth), he had been a Party member for over ten years, and he held a position equivalent to that of a deputy division commander. Although my mother was not a member of the Party, her work for the underground was accepted as meeting the '1' criterion, and since she had come back from Harbin she had been working full time for an organization called the Women's Federation, which dealt with women's affairs: it supervised the freeing of concubines and shutting down brothels, mobilized women to make shoes for the army, organized their education and their employment, informed them of their rights, and helped ensure that women were not entering into marriages against their wishes.

The Women's Federation was now my mother's 'work unit' (dan-we), an institution wholly under the control of the Party, to which everyone in the urban areas had to belong and which regulated virtually every aspect of an employee's life like in an army. My mother was supposed to live on the premises of the Federation, and had to obtain its permission to marry. The Federation left it up to my father's work unit, as he was a higher official. The Jinzhou City Party Committee speedily gave its written permission, but because of my father's position, clearance also had to come from the Party Committee for the province of West Liaoning. Assuming there would be no problem, my parents set the wedding day for 4 May, my mother's eighteenth birthday.

On that day my mother wrapped up her bedroll and her clothes and got ready to move into my father's quarters.

She wore her favorite pale blue gown and a white silk scarf.

My grandmother was appalled. It was unheard of for a bride to walk to the bridegroom's house. The man had to get a sedan chair to carry her over. For a woman to walk was a sign that she was worthless and that the man did not really want her.

"Who cares about all that stuff now?" said my mother as she tied up her bedroll. But my grandmother was more dismayed at the thought that her daughter was not going to have a magnificent traditional wedding. From the moment a baby girl was born, her mother would start putting things aside for her dowry. Following the custom, my mother's trousseau contained a dozen satin-covered quilts and pillows with embroidered mandarin ducks, as well as curtains and a decorated pelmet for a four-poster bed. But my mother regarded a traditional ceremony as old-fashioned and redundant. Both she and my father wanted to get rid of rituals like that, which they felt had nothing to do with their feelings. Love was the only thing that mattered to these two revolutionaries.

My mother walked, carrying her bedroll, to my father's quarters. Like all officials, he was living in the building where he worked, the City Party Committee; the employees were housed in rows of bungalows with sliding doors situated around a big courtyard. As dusk fell, and they were on the point of going to bed for the night, my mother was kneeling down to take off my father's slippers when there was a knock on the door. A man was standing there, and he handed my father a message from the Provincial Party Committee. It said they could not get married yet. Only the tightening of my mother's lips showed how unhappy she was. She just bent her head, silently gathered up her bedroll, and left with a simple "See you later." There were no tears, no scene, not even any visible anger. The moment was etched indelibly into my father's mind. When I was a child he used to say: "Your mother was so graceful."

Then, jokingly, "How times have changed! You're not like your mother! You wouldn't do something like that kneel down to take off a man's shoes!"

What had caused the delay was that the Provincial Committee was suspicious of my mother because of her family connections. They questioned her in great detail about how her family had come to be connected with Kuomintang intelligence. They told her she must be completely truthful. It was like giving evidence in court.