"Well," she answered, 'they didn't always loot… and they were not always evil… Her words hit me like a bombshell. I was so shocked that I never told anyone what she had said.

At the time, none of us had any idea that the cult of Mao and the emphasis on class struggle were part of Mao's plans for a showdown with the president, Liu Shaoqi, and Deng Xiaoping, the general secretary of the Party. Mao was unhappy about what Liu and Deng were doing. Since the famine they had been liberalizing both the economy and the society. To Mao, their approach smacked of capitalism rather than socialism. It especially galled him that what he called 'the capitalist road' was proving successful, while his chosen way, the 'correct' way, had turned out to be a disaster. As a practical man, Mao recognized this, and had to allow them to have their way. But he planned to impose his ideas again as soon as the country was in good enough shape to stand the experiment, and as soon as he could build-up enough momentum to dislodge his powerful enemies in the Party.

Mao found the idea of peaceful progress suffocating. A restless military leader, a warrior-poet, he needed action violent action and regarded permanent human snuggle as necessary for social development. His own Communists had become too tolerant and soft for his taste, seeking to bring harmony rather than conflict. There had been no political campaigns, in which people fought each other, since 1959!

And Mao was sore. He felt that his opponents had humiliated him by showing him up as incompetent. He had to take revenge, and, being aware that his opponents had widespread support, he needed to increase his authority hugely. To achieve this, he needed to be deified.

Mao bided his time while the economy was recovering.

But as it improved, especially after 1964, he began to prepare the grand opening of his confrontation. The relative liberalization of the early 1960s began to fade.

The weekly dances in the compound stopped in 1964.

So did the films from Hong Kong. Out went my mother's fluffy bobs; in came short, straight hair. Her blouses and jackets were no longer colorful or figure-hugging. They were made of plain quiet colors and looked like tubes. I was particularly sorry to see her skirts go. I remembered how, a short time before, I had watched her getting off her bicycle, gracefully lifting her blue-and-white check skirt with her knee. I was leaning against the mottled trunk of a plane tree that formed part of the glade coveting the street outside the compound. Her skirt had been flowing like a fan as she rode toward me. On summer evenings, I had often pushed Xiao-fang there in his bamboo pram and waited for her to come home.

My grandmother, now in her mid-fifties, kept more signs of her femininity than my mother. Although her jackets still in the traditional style all became the same color of pale gray, she took particular care of her long, thick black hair. According to Chinese tradition, which the Communists inherited, hair had to be well above the shoulder for women of middle age, meaning over thirty.

My grandmother kept her hair tied up in a neat bun at the back of her head, but she always had flowers there, sometimes a pair of ivory-colored magnolias, and sometimes a white Cape jasmine cupped by two dark-green leaves, which set off her lustrous hair. She never used shampoo from the shops, which she thought would make her hair dull and dry, but would boil the fruit of the Chinese honey locust and use the liquid from that. She would rub the fruit to produce a perfumed lather, and slowly let her mass of black hair drop into the shiny, white, slithery liquid. She soaked her wooden combs in the juice of pomelo seeds, so that the comb ran smoothly through her hair, and gave it a faint aroma. She added a final touch by putting on a little water of osmanthus flowers which she made herself, as perfume had begun to disappear from the shops. I remember watching her combing her hair. It was the only thing over which she took her time. She did everything else very swiftly. She would also paint her eyebrows lightly with a black charcoal pencil and dab a little powder on her nose. Remembering her eyes smiling into the mirror with a particular kind of intense concentration, I think these must have been among her most pleasurable moments.

Watching her doing her face was strange, even though I had been watching her do it since I was a baby. The women in books and films who made themselves up now were invariably wicked characters, like concubines. I vaguely knew something about my beloved grandmother having been a concubine, but I was learning to live with contradictory thoughts and realities, and getting used to compartmentalizing them. When I went out shopping with my grandmother, I began to realize that she was different from other people, with her makeup, no matter how discreet, and the flowers in her hair. People noticed her.

She walked proudly, her figure erect, with a restrained self-consciousness.

She could get away with it because she lived in the compound. If she had been living outside, she would have fallen under one of the residents' committees, which supervised the lives of any adult who did not have a job and so did not belong to a work unit. The committees usually contained retired men and old housewives, and some of them became notorious for minding other people's business and throwing their weight around. Had my grandmother been under one of these, she would have received disapproving hints or open criticism. But the compound had no committee. She did have to go to a meeting once a week with other parents-in-law and maids and nannies from the compound, to be told about Party policies, but she was mainly left alone. Actually, she enjoyed the meetings; they were a chance to chat with the other women and she always came home beaming with the latest gossip.

Politics invaded my life more and more after I went to middle school in the autumn of 1964. On our first day we were told we should thank Chairman Mao for being there, because his 'class line' had been applied to our year's enrollment. Mao had accused schools and universities of having taken in too many children of the bourgeoisie. Now, he had instructed, priority should be given to sons and daughters of 'good backgrounds' (chu-shen hao). This meant having workers, peasants, soldiers, or Party officials as parents, particularly as fathers. The application of this 'class-line' criterion to the whole society meant that one's lot was more than ever determined by one's family and the accident of birth.

However, the status of a family was often ambiguous: a worker might once have been employed in a Kuomintang office; a clerk did not belong to any category; an intellectual was an 'undesirable," but what if he was a Party member?

How should the children of such parents be classified?

Many enrollment officers decided to play it safe, which meant giving preference to children whose parents were Party officials. They constituted half the pupils in my class.

My new school, the Number Four Middle School, was the leading key school for the whole province and took students with the highest marks in the all-Sichuan entrance exams. In previous years, entrance had been decided solely on the basis of exam results. In my year, exam marks and family background were equally important.

In the two exam papers, I got 100 percent for math and an unusual 100 percent 'plus' for Chinese. My father had constantly drummed it into me that I should not rely on my parents' name, and I did not like the suggestion that the 'class line' had helped me get into the school. But I soon thought no more about it. If this was what Chairman Mao said, it must be good.

It was in this period that "high officials' children" (gao-gan zi-di) became almost a stratum of their own. They developed an air which identified them unmistakably as members of an elite group, exuding an awareness of powerful backing and untouchability. Many high officials' children now grew more arrogant and haughty than ever, and from Mao downward concern was constantly being expressed about their behavior. It became a recurrent theme in the press. All this only reinforced the idea that they were a special group.