Yi Qiu had strong survival instincts. She understood that regardless of the individual's reasons for doing so, it was self-destructive for a person to cut all ties with surrounding society, that to do so would lead to the danger of isolation, and that any individual who did so ran the risk of withering away. She knew that she had to make every effort to establish a relationship of mutual interdependence and trust with her classmates if her life was to have a solid and healthy foundation. She truly worked hard to bring this about. But because of her disability, she was rejected by this excessively normal and healthy group. Yi Qiu's isolation from this group, clearly, was not her own doing.

On the other hand, my isolation from it was. My behavior stems from a fear of the world outside the self; or, to put it another way, my disability is a mental one. I have never been willing to adopt an exploratory attitude toward the outside world, which would have created opportunities for me to establish real contacts with my companions within the group. Even today, I still have this kind of fear. I am stubbornly unwilling to recognize this fact: to reduce or abandon my concentration on self and open wide the door to socialization within the larger group would be to open the obvious door to my own survival; but, to look at it another way, would be to open the door to my own extinction.

We didn't complete our assignment for that day. Yi Qiu brought out her pictures of her parents to show me. The old-fashioned black-and-white photographs were ragged around the edges and starting to yellow with age. Yi Qiu told me lots of things about her life. Of course, she had heard these things from her uncle.

Yi Qiu's father had been the headmaster of a primary school. He was a big, tall, good man who cut an imposing figure. He was always extremely painstaking, easygoing, thoughtful, and modest and respectful in dealing with people in his school; but underneath, he was very easily upset by the people around him, was cynical and anxiety-ridden, and had no more courage than a mouse. Her mother, a member of a drama troupe, was spirited, cheerful, and attractive, with an aura of sexuality about her. Although she was not well educated and lacked a proper upbringing, she exuded a surface jauntiness and passion that fueled men's fantasies and turned them on, so in the eyes of the local males she was the number one "star," the woman they would fight over. Yi Qiu's father, after chasing her for eight years, finally won her over with his scholarship and his graciousness. They were married in early 1964 and the following year gave birth to little Yi Qiu, who inherited her mother's good looks and her father's submissiveness.

But the times were against them, and the idyllic scene soon ended. In 1968, when little Yi Qiu was three years old, her anxious father could no longer bear the vicious infighting of the political campaign that was going on in the country at that time. He had been ordered to sleep between two corpses, one of them one of his female teachers who had been beaten to death by the Red Guards, the other, the Dean of Instruction of his school, who had "jumped to his death for fear of facing his crime." He was ordered to not only lie between the two corpses but also continuously stroke them so that he could respond to questioning the next day "with a cleansed mind." The night of mental torment cracked his nerves. At the first hint of dawn the next morning, when the guard had dropped off to sleep for a moment, he fled from the cowshed where he was kept and went home. On that cold January morning, before the sun had risen, his depressed and weak spirit suddenly broke and he sank into a deep manic depression, which set the stage for the final bitter scene of the family's extinction.

When tiny Yi Qiu was dragged from the river by a passerby, she was very close to death. She had been stabbed several times with a pair of scissors, and it was easy to re-create the scene. Taking a pair of scissors with him, her father had carried her in his arms to the river. When she saw the demonic expression that had taken over his face, she beseeched him again and again, "Papa, I'll be a good girl, I won't bother you." After he had stabbed his baby daughter several times, he could still hear her pleading feebly, "Papa, I'll be a good girl," and unable to continue, he dropped her in the river.

The bodies of Yi Qiu's father and mother were found together in a grove of barren, bent-over trees on the outskirts of the city. They were hanging separately from two adjacent trees.

One summer a number of years earlier, Yi Qiu's father had gone to this place with a number of his colleagues for a weekend to escape the heat. At that time, the entire grove was filled with countless pink peach blossoms – a virtual peach garden paradise, like a totally romantic stage set in the midst of the gray city suburbs. In the center of the grove, completely surrounded by peach trees, was a clump of small birches, all canted over at an angle of about 45 degrees. Those slanted birches must have made a deep impression on Yi Qiu's father.

The bodies were discovered early in the morning by a woman doing calisthenics. She said that she was doing waist bends in an area facing and a little bit higher than Yi Qiu's parents' leaning birches. At first she only vaguely noticed what appeared to be a man standing in front of a bare tree, his cap pulled down very low, almost completely covering his face. It puzzled her that anyone would stand there so long without moving on such a cold day. Then she noticed a second person, apparently a woman, with her long hair around her shoulders, standing before another tree close by. She was convinced that it was a pair of lovers meeting secretly. She continued exercising, but her attention had shifted, and she kept an eye on the man and woman. At first, she thought it a little strange that they didn't move, but when they had been rigidly motionless for about twenty minutes, she was sure there must be something amiss. Lovers just wouldn't behave like that. She stopped exercising and started moving closer for a better look, until she could see that they were not standing, they were hanging about a foot above the ground. She gave out a stunned scream… As I listened to Yi Qiu talking about her life, I did everything I could to suppress my fear and discomfort. We agreed to meet again the next day.

When I was leaving, she pressed close to my ear and whispered that she had a "boyfriend," and enjoined me not to tell anyone else. From the way she said this I could more or less imagine what kind of secrets were involved. I was filled with the kind of admiration for Yi Qiu, with her unique life experience, that a young girl feels for an older girl.

One morning shortly after eight, when I arrived at Yi Qiu's place as usual, I had to go to the toilet because I had had a bowl of thin gruel and a glass of milk before I left home.

Yi Qiu was putting on a blouse that was so tight she could hardly do up the buttons. Her plump breasts threatening to tumble out, she used a bare foot to point to the westernmost corner of the big room. "Nnn! There!" she said.

Only then did I notice a white door curtain hanging against the wall, but no doorway.