Her hair was in a mess, and part of it seemed to be matted with blood. Her eyes were bulging out in desperation as she shrieked: "Red Guard masters! I do not have a portrait of Chiang Kai-shek! I swear I do not!" She was banging her head on the floor so hard there were loud thuds and blood oozed from her forehead. The flesh on her back was covered with cuts and bloodstains. When she lifted her bottom in a kowtow, murky patches were visible and the smell of excrement filled the air. I was so frightened that I quickly averted my eyes. Then I saw her tormentor, a seventeen-year-old boy named Chian, whom up to now I had rather liked. He was lounging in a chair with a leather belt in his hand, playing with its brass buckle.

"Tell the truth, or I'll hit you again," he said languidly.

Chian's father was an army officer in Tibet. Most officers sent to Tibet left their families in Chengdu, the nearest big city in China proper, because Tibet was considered an uninhabitable and barbaric place. Previously I had been rather attracted by Chian's languorous manner, which had given an impression of gentleness. Now I murmured, trying to control the quaking in my voice, "Didn't Chairman Mao teach us to use verbal struggle [wendou] rather than violent struggle [wu-dou]? Maybe we shouldn't…?"

My feeble protest was echoed by several voices in the room. But Chian cast us a disgusted sideways glance and said emphatically: "Draw a line between yourselves and the class enemy. Chairman Mao says, "Mercy to the enemy is cruelty to the people!" If you are afraid of blood, don't be Red Guards!" His face was twisted into ugliness by fanaticism. The rest of us fell silent. Although it was impossible to feel anything but revulsion at what he was doing, we could not argue with him. We had been taught to be ruthless to class enemies. Failure to do so would make us class enemies ourselves. I turned and walked quickly into the garden at the back. It was crammed with Red Guards with shovels. From inside the house the sound of lashes started again, accompanied by screams that made my hair stand on end. The yelling must have been unbearable for the others too, because many swiftly straightened up from their digging: "There is nothing here. Let's go!

Let's go? As we passed through the room, I caught sight of Chian standing casually over his victim. Outside the door, I saw the woman informer with the ingratiating eyes.

Now there was a cringing and frightened look there. She opened her mouth as if to say something, but no words came out. As I glanced at her face, it dawned on me that there was no portrait of Chiang Kai-shek. She had denounced the poor woman out of vindictiveness. The Red Guards were being used to set He old scores. I climbed back into the truck full of disgust and rage.

I found an excuse to get out of school, and was home again the next morning. The apariment was empty. My father was in detention. My mother, grandmother, and Xiao-fang were in Peking. My teenage siblings were living their own, separate lives elsewhere.

Jin-ming had resented the Cultural Revolution from the very beginning. He was in the same school as me, and was in his first year. He wanted to become a scientist, but this was denounced by the Cultural Revolution as 'bourgeois."

He and some boys in his form had formed a gang before the Cultural Revolution. They loved adventure and mystery, and had called themselves the "Iron-Wrought Brotherhood." Jin-ming was their number-one brother. He was tall, and brilliant at his studies. He had been giving his form weekly magic shows using his chemistry knowledge, and had been openly skipping lessons which he was not interested in or which he had already gone beyond.

And he was fair and generous to the other boys.

When the school Red Guard organization was set up on August, Jin-ming's 'brotherhood' was merged into it.

He and his gang were given the job of printing leaflets and distributing them on the streets. The leaflets had been written by older Red Guards in their mid-teens and typically had rifles like "Founding Declaration of the First Brigade of the First Army Division of the Red Guards of the Number Four School' (all Red Guard organizations had grand names), "Solemn Statement' (a pupil announced he was changing his name to "Huang the Guard for Chairman Mao'), "More Than Gigantic Wonderful News' (a member of the Cultural Revolution Authority had just given an audience to some Red Guards), and "The Latest Most Supreme Instructions' (a word or two by Mao had just been leaked out).

Jin-ming was soon bored stiff by this gibberish. He started to absent himself from his missions, and became interested in a girl of his age, thirteen. She seemed to him the perfect lady beautiful, gentle, and slightly aloof, with a touch of shyness. He did not approach her, but was content to admire her from afar.

One day the pupils in his form were summoned to go on a house raid. The older Red Guards said something about 'bourgeois intellectuals." All members of the family were declared prisoners and ordered to gather in one room while the Red Guards searched the rest of the house.

Jin-ming was appointed to watch the family. To his delight, the girl was the other 'jailer."

There were three 'prisoners': a middle-aged man and his son and daughter-in-law. They had obviously been expecting the raid, and sat with resigned expressions on their faces, staring into Jin-ming's eyes as though into space. Jin-ming felt very awkward under their gaze, and he was also uneasy because of the presence of the girl, who looked bored and kept glancing toward the door. When she saw several boys carrying a huge wooden case full of porcelain, she mumbled to Jin-ming that she was going to have a look, and left the room.

Facing his captives alone, Jin-ming felt his discomfort growing. Then the woman prisoner stood up and said she wanted to go and breast-feed her baby in the next room.

Jin-ming readily agreed.

The moment she left the room, the object of Jin-ming's affection rushed in. Sternly, she asked him why a prisoner was at large. When Jin-ming said he had given permission, she yelled at him for being 'soft on class enemies." She was wearing a leather belt on what Jin-ming had thought of as her 'willowy' waist. Now she pulled it off and pointed it at his nose a stylized Red Guard posture while she screamed at him. Jin-ming was struck dumb. The girl was unrecognizable. All of a sudden she was far from gentle, shy, or lovely. She was all hysterical ugliness. Thus was Jin-ming's first love extinguished.

But he shouted back. The girl left the room and returned with an older Red Guard, the leader of the group. He started yelling so much his spittle splashed on Jinming, and he too pointed his rolled-up belt at him. Then he stopped, realizing that they should not be washing their dirty linen in front of class enemies. He ordered Jin-ming to go back to the school to 'wait for adjudication."

That evening, the Red Guards in Jin-ming's form held a meeting without him. When the boys came back to the dormitory, their eyes avoided his. They behaved distantly for a couple of days. Then they told Jin-ming they had been arguing with the militant girl. She had reported Jin-ming's 'surrender to the class enemies' and had insisted that he be given a severe punishment. But the Iron-Wrought Brotherhood defended him. Some of them resented the girl, who had been terribly aggressive toward other boys and girls too.

Still, Jin-ming was punished: he was ordered to pull out grass alongside the 'blacks' and 'grays." Mao's instruction to exterminate grass had led to a constant demand for manpower because of the grass's obstinate nature. This fortuitous by offered a form of punishment for the newby created 'class enemies."