No one knew that the caller was not my father, but another high official who had come over to the Communists from the Kuomintang during the war against Japan.

Having once been a Kuomintang officer, he had come under suspicion and had been imprisoned by the Communists in 1947, although he was eventually cleared. He cited his experience to reassure my mother, and in fact remained a lifelong friend of hers. My father never phoned once in the six long months. He knew from his years of being a Communist that the Party preferred the person under investigation to have no contact with the outside world, not even with their spouse. As he saw it, to comfort my mother would imply some kind of distrust of the Party. My mother could never forgive him for deserting her at a time when she needed love and support more than anything. Once again he had proved that he put the Party first.

One January morning, as she was staring at the clumps of shivering grass being battered by the dismal rain under the jasmine on the trellis with its masses of intertwined green shoots, my mother was summoned to see Mr. Kuang, the head of the investigating team. He told her she was being allowed to go back to work and to go out. But she had to report in every night. The Party had not reached a final conclusion about her.

What had happened, my mother realized, was that the investigations had bogged down. Most of the suspicions could not be either proved or disproved. Although this was unsatisfactory for her, she pushed it to the back of her mind in her excitement at the thought of seeing her children for the first time in six months.

In our different boarding nurseries, we seldom saw our father, either. He was constantly away in the countryside.

On the rare occasions when he was back in Chengdu, he would send his bodyguard to bring my sister and me home on Saturdays. He never had the two boys fetched because he felt he could not cope with them, they were too young.

"Home' was his office. When we got there he would always have to go off to some meeting, so his bodyguard would lock us up in the office, where there was nothing to do, apart from competing at blowing soap bubbles. Once I got so bored I drank a lot of soapy water and was ill for days.

When my mother was told she could go out, the first thing she did was jump on her bicycle and speed off to our nurseries. She was particularly worried about Jin-ming, now two and a half, whom she had hardly had any time to get to know. But, after sitting around unused for six months, her bicycle's tires were flat, and she was barely out of the gate when she had to stop and get some air put in them. She had never felt so impatient in her life, as she paced around the shop while the man pumped up her tires in what seemed to her a very lackadaisical manner.

She went to see Jin-ming first. When she arrived, the teacher looked at her coldly. Jin-ming, the teacher said, was one of the very few children who had been left behind on weekends. My father had hardly ever come to see him, and had never taken him home. At first, Jin-ming had asked for "Mother Chen," the teacher said.

"That's not you, is it?" she asked. My mother acknowledged that "Mother Chen' was his wet-nurse. Later, Jin-ming would hide in a corner room when it was time for the other parents to come and collect their offspring.

"You must be a stepmother," the teacher said accusingly. My mother could not explain.

When Jin-ming was brought in, he remained at the far end of the room and would not go near my mother. He just stood there silently, resentfully refusing to look at her.

My mother produced some peaches and asked him to come over and eat them while she peeled them. But Jin-ming would not move. She had to put the peaches on her handkerchief and push them along the table. He waited for her to withdraw her hand before he grabbed one peach and devoured it. Then he took another one. In no time the three peaches were gone. For the first time since she had been taken into detention, my mother let her tears fall.

I remember the evening she came to see me. I was nearly four, and was in my wooden bed which had bars like a cage. One side of the railing was let down so she could sit and hold my hand while I fell asleep. But I wanted to tell her about all my adventures and mischief. I was worried that once I fell asleep she would disappear again forever.

Whenever she thought I was asleep and tried to slip her hand away, I gripped it and started to cry. She stayed until around midnight. I screamed when she started to leave, but she pulled herself away. I did not know that 'parole' time was up.

Because we now had no nurses and my mother had to check in for her 'parole' report every evening, we children had to stay on in our nurseries. My mother could not have looked after us anyway. She was too busy 'racing toward socialism' as a propaganda song went with the rest of Chinese society.

While she had been in detention Mao had accelerated his attempt to change the face of China. In July 1955 he had called for a speeding up of collective farming, and in November he abruptly announced that all industry and commerce, which had so far remained in private hands, were to be nationalized.

My mother was thrown straight into this movement. In theory, the state was supposed to own enterprises jointly with the former owners, who were to draw 5 percent of the value of their business for twenty years. Since there was officially no inflation, this was supposed to represent full payment of the total value. The former owners were to stay on as managers and be paid a relatively high wage, but there would be a Party boss over them.

My mother was put in charge of a work team supervising the nationalization of over a hundred food factories, bakeries, and restaurants in her district. Although she was still on 'parole," and had to report in every evening, and could not even sleep in her own bed, she was entrusted with this important job.

The Party had attached a stigmatic label to her kongzhi shi-yong, which meant 'employed but under control and surveillance." This was not made public, but was known to her and the people in charge of her case. The members of her work team knew she had been detained for six months, but did not know she was still under surveillance.

When my mother was put in detention, she had written to my grandmother asking her to stay on in Manchuria for the time being. She had concocted an excuse, as she did not want my grandmother to know she was being detained, which would have worried her terribly.

My grandmother was still in Jinzhou when the nationalization program started, and she found herself caught up in it. After she had left Jinzhou with Dr. Xia in 1951 his medicine business had been run by her brother, Yu-lin.

When Dr. Xia died in 1952 ownership of the medicine shop passed to her. Now the state was planning to buy it out. In every business a group, made up of work team members and representatives of both employees and management, was set up to value its assets so the state could pay a 'fair price." They would often suggest a very low figure to please the authorities. The value placed on Dr. Xia's shop was ridiculously low, but there was an advantage to this for my grandmother: it meant that she was classified only as a 'minor capitalist," which made it easier for her to keep a low profile. She was not happy about being quasi-expropriated, but she kept her own counsel.

As part of the nationalization campaign, the regime organized processions with drums and gongs and endless meetings, some of them for the capitalists. My grandmother saw that all of them were expressing willingness to be bought out, even gratitude. Many said that what was happening to them was much better than they had feared.