"But where to?" I heard my mother asking. Then an impatient man's voice: "The Party's instructions are: no one is to know." When he came out of the study my father saw me and took my hand.

"Father is going away for a while," he said.

"Be a good girl to your mother."

My mother and I walked with him to the side gate of the compound. The long path was lined with members of his department. My heart was pounding and my legs seemed to be made of cotton wool. Father appeared very agitated. His hand was shaking in mine. I stroked it with my other hand.

A car was parked outside the gate. The door was held open for him. There were two men in the car, one in front and one in the back. Mother's face was taut, but she was calm. She looked into my father's eyes and said, "Don't worry. I will do it." Without hugging me or my mother, my father was gone. The Chinese show little physical affection in public, even at extraordinary times.

I did not realize that my father was being taken into custody, because the act was dressed up as 'protection."

Being fourteen, I had not learned to decipher the regime's hypocritical style; deviousness was involved here because the authorities had not made up their minds what to do with my father. As in most such cases, the police played no role. The people who came to take my father away were members of his department with a verbal authorization from the Provincial Party Committee.

As soon as Father was gone, my mother threw a few clothes into a bag and told us she was going to Peking. My father's letter was still in draft form, with scribbles and alterations. The minute he saw the staff posse coming he had pushed it into her hand.

My grandmother hugged my four-year-old brother Xiao-fang and wept. I said I wanted to go with my mother to the station. There was no lime to wait for a bus, so we jumped into a tricycle taxi.

I was fearfid and confused. My mother did not explain what was happening. She looked strained and preoccupied, deep in her thoughts. When I asked her what was going on, she said briefly that I would know in time, and left it at that. I assumed she thought it was too complicated to explain, and I was used to being told I was too young to know certain things. I could also tell that my mother was busy sizing up the situation and planning her next moves, and I did not want to distract her. What I did not know was that she was battling to comprehend the confused situation herself.

We sat in the tricycle taxi silent and tense, my hand in hers. My mother kept glancing over her shoulder: she knew the authorities would not want her to get to Peking, and had only let me come with her so I could be a witness in case anything happened. At the station she bought a 'hard-seat' ticket for the next train to Peking. It was not due until dawn, so we sat down on a bench in the waiting room, a kind of shed with no walls.

I huddled up against her to wait for the long hours to pass. Silently, we gazed at the darkness descending over the cement ground of the square in front of the station. A few feeble bare bulbs on top of wooden lampposts were shedding a pale light, reflected in the puddles of water left over from a heavy thunderstorm that morning. I felt chilly in my summer blouse. My mother wrapped her raincoat around me. As the night dragged on, she told me to go to sleep. Exhausted, I dozed off with my head on her lap.

I was awakened by a movement of her knees. I lifted my head and saw two people in hooded raincoats standing in front of us. They were arguing about something in low voices. In my muddled state, I could not work out what they were saying. I could not even tell whether they were men or women. I vaguely heard my mother say, in a calm, restrained voice, "I will shout for the Red Guards." The gray-hooded raincoats fell silent. They whispered to each other and then walked away, obviously not wanting to attract attention.

At dawn, my mother got on the train to Peking.

Years later she told me that the two people were women she knew, junior officials from my father's depasiment.

They told her the authorities had ruled that her going to Peking was an 'anti-Party' act. She quoted the Party charter, which said that it was the right of any Party member to appeal to the leaders. When the emissaries indicated that they had men wailing in a car who could seize her by force, my mother said that if they did she would shout for help from the Red Guards around the station and tell them they were trying to stop her going to Peking to see Chairman Mao. I asked her how she could be sure the Red Guards would help her rather than the pursuers.

"Suppose they denounced you to the Red Guards as a class enemy who was trying to escape?" Mother smiled and said, "I calculated that they would not take the risk. I was prepared to gamble everything. I had no alternative."

In Peking my mother took my father's letter to a 'grievance office." Chinese rulers throughout history, having never permitted an independent legal system, had set up offices where ordinary people could lodge grievances against their bosses, and the Communists inherited this tradition. When during the Cultural Revolution it began to look as though Communist bosses were losing their power, many people who had been persecuted by them in the past flooded into Peking to appeal. But the Cultural Revolution Authority soon made it clear that 'class enemies' were not allowed to complain, even against 'capitalist-roaders." If they tried to do so they would be doubly punished.

Few cases concerning senior officials like my father were presented to the grievance office, so my mother received special attention. She was also one of the very few spouses of victims who had the courage to go and appeal in Peking, as they were under pressure to 'draw a line' between themselves and those accused rather than invite trouble by speaking up for the victims. My mother was received almost immediately by Vice-Premier Tao Zhu, who was the head of the Central Department of Public Affairs and one of the leaders of the Cultural Revolution at the time.

She gave him my father's letter, and pleaded with him to order the Sichuan authorities to release my father.

A couple of weeks later, Tao Zhu saw her again. He gave her a letter which said my father had acted in a perfectly constitutional manner and in concert with the Sichuan party leadership, and should be released at once. Tao had not investigated the case. He took my mother's word, because what had happened to my father was a common occurrence: Party officials all over China were choosing scapegoats in their panic to save their own skins. Tao gave her the letter directly rather than sending it through normal Party channels, knowing they were in disarray.

Tao Zhu showed he understood and agreed with the other concerns in my father's letter: the epidemic of scape goating and the widespread random violence. My mother could see he wanted to control the situation. As it happened, because of this, he himself was soon to be condemned as 'the third biggest capitalist-roader," after Lin Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping.

Meanwhile, my mother hand-copied Tao Zhu's letter, mailed the copy to my grandmother and asked her to show it to my father's deparunent and to tell them that she would return only after they released my father. My mother was worried that if she returned to Sichuan the authorities there might arrest her, seize the letter and not release my father. She felt that, on balance, her best bet was to stay in Peking, where she could continue to exercise pressure.

My grandmother passed on my mother's hand-copied text of Tao Zhu's letter. But the provincial authorities said the whole thing was a misunderstanding, and that they were just protecting my father. They insisted that my mother must come back and stop her individualistic meddling.