We had exams every week and the results were put up on the notice board. I was always at the top of the class, which was rather resented by those behind me. They sometimes took their bitterness out on me by calling me 'thousand-gold little precious' (qian-jin xiao-jie), doing things like putting a frog in my desk drawer, and tying the ends of my plaits to the back of my seat. They said I had no 'collective spirit' and looked down on others. But I knew I simply liked being on my own.

The curriculum was like that in a Western school, except during the period when we had to produce steel. There was no political education, but we did have to do a lot of sports: running, high jump and long jump, as well as compulsory, gym and swimming. We each had one after school sport: I was selected for tennis. At first my father was against the prospect of my becoming a sportswoman, which was the purpose of the training, but the tennis coach, a very pretty young woman, came to see him, dressed in her fetching shorts. Among his other jobs, my father was in charge of sports for the province. The coach gave him her most charming smile and told him that since tennis, the most elegant of sports, was not played much in China at the time, it would be good if his daughter set an example – 'for the nation," as she put it. My father had to give in.

I loved my teachers, who were excellent and had the girl of making their subjects fascinating and exciting. I remember the science teacher, a Mr. Dali who taught us the theory behind putting a satellite into orbit (the Russians had just launched the first Sputnik) and the possibility of visiting other planets. Even the most unruly boys were glued to their seats during his lessons. I overheard some pupils saying that he had been a rightist, but none of us knew what this meant, and it did not make any difference to us.

My mother told me years later that Mr. Dali had been a writer of children's science fiction. He was named a rightist in 1957 because he had written an article about mice stealing food and fattening themselves up, which was alleged to be a covert attack on Party officials. He was banned from writing, and was about to be sent to the countryside when my mother managed to get him relocated to my school. Few officials were brave enough to reemploy a rightist.

My mother was, and this was the very reason she was in charge of my school. According to its location, it should have come under the Western District of Chengdu. But the city authorities assigned it to my mother's district in the east because they wanted it to have the best teachers, even if they came from 'undesirable' backgrounds, and the head of the Public Affairs Department of the Western District would not dare to give such people jobs. The academic supervisor in my school was the wife of a former Kuomintang officer who was in a labor camp. Usually people with a background like hers would not have been able to occupy a job like this, but my mother refused to transfer them, and even gave them honorary grades. Her superiors approved, but they wanted her to take the responsibility for this unorthodox behavior. She did not mind.

With the implicit additional protection which my father's position brought her, she felt more secure than her colleagues.

In 1962 my father was invited to send his children to a new school that had just been set up next to the compound where we lived. It was called "Plane Tree' after the trees which formed an avenue on the grounds. The school was set up by the Western District with the express purpose of making it into a key school, since there was no key school under the jurisdiction of this district. Good teachers were transferred to Plane Tree from other schools in the district.

The school soon acquired a reputation as the 'aristocratic school' for the children of VIPs in the provincial government.

Before Plane Tree was set up there had been one boarding school in Chengdu, for the children of top army officers. A few senior ci 'vdian officials also sent their children there. Its academic level was poor, and it earned a reputation for snobbery, as the children were highly competitive about their parents. They could often be heard saying things like: "My father is a division commander.

Yours is ouly a brigadier!" At weekends there were long lines of cars outside, with nannies, bodyguards, and chauffeurs waiting to take the children home. Many people thought the atmosphere was poisoning the children, and my parents had always been totally averse to this school.

Plane Tree was not set up as an exclusive school, and after meeting the headmaster and some of the teachers, my parents felt that it was committed to high ethical standards and discipline. There were only about twenty-five pupils in each year. Even in my previous school there had been fifty pupils in my class. The advantages of Plane Tree were, of course, partly intended for the benefit of the top officials who lived next door, but my newly mellowed father overlooked this fact.

Most of my new classmates were children of officials in the provincial government. Some lived in the compound with me. Apart from school, the compound was my entire world. The gardens were filled with flowers and luxuriant plants. There were palm trees, sisal hemps, oleanders, magnolias, camellias, roses, hibiscus, and even a pair of rare Chinese aspens which had grown toward each other and intertwined their arms, like lovers. They were very sensitive, too. If we scratched one of the trunks even ever so gently the two trees would tremble and their leaves would start to flutter. During the summer lunch breaks I would sit on a drum-shaped stone stool under a trellis of wisteria, my elbows resting on a stone table reading a book or playing chess. Around me were the blazing colors of the grounds and not far away a rare coconut tree thrust arrogantly into the sky. My favorite, though, was a heavily scented jasmine, also climbing on a big trellis. When it was in blossom, my room was filled with its fragrance. I loved to sit by the window gazing at it and soaking up the delicious smell.

When we first moved into the compound we lived in a lovely detached one-story house set in its own courtyard.

It was built in traditional Chinese style, with no modern facilities: no running water indoors, no flush toilet, no ceramic bath. In 1961, some modern Western-type apartments with all these amenities were built in one corner of the compound, and my family was assigned one of them.

Before we moved in, I visited this wonderland and examined all the novel and magical taps and flush toilets and mirrored cupboards on the walls. I ran my hand along the shiny white files on the walls of the bathrooms. They felt cool and pleasant to the touch.

There were thirteen apartment blocks in the compound.

Four were for the directors of departments, the rest for bureau chiefs. Our apartment occupied a whole floor, whereas the bureau chiefs had to share a floor between two families. Our rooms were more spacious. We had anti mosquito screens on our inner windows, which they did not, and two bathrooms, while they had only one. We had hot water three days a week, whereas they had none. We had a telephone, which was extremely rare in China, and they did not. Lesser officials occupied blocks in a smaller compound on the other side of the street, and their amenities were one grade lower still. The half-dozen Party secretaries who formed the core of the provincial leadership had their own inner compound within our compound. This inner sanctum lay behind two gates, which were guarded around-the-clock by army guards with guns, and only specially authorized personnel were allowed through.

Inside these gates were detached two-story houses, one for each Party secretary. On the doorstep of the first secretary, Li Jing-quan, stood yet another armed guard. I grew up taking hierarchy and privilege for granted.