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was she who helped me learn to think for myself. A few afternoons each week, I stopped by her house after school for a heart-to-heart talk. Gradually, I came to know her unusual life story, how she had fallen from a prestigious family in Beijing to our remote village in Shandong.
    Before the Communist victory in 1949, Mrs. Qian’s family was one of the few great capitalist families in Beijing, specializing in the silk trade. Among their enterprises were the silk shops that even today populate the commercial area near Tiananmen Square. In her youth, she lived a life of luxury, with servants attending to her and four younger sisters in the family’s two-story estate. After World War II, when the Nationalists took over, Beijing became a den of iniquity and corruption that was eventually smashed by the Communist Party. As the People’s Liberation Army marched into the capital, Chairman Mao stood on the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Tiananmen Square and declared to the world, “The people of China have now stood up!” Mrs. Qian and her family were among the crowd in the Square that boiled with enthusiasm at Mao’s words.
    Not long after liberation, the Communist Party initiated a policy of cooperation between public and private management. The Qian family’s capital was completely nationalized, leaving them only their house. They were just grateful to be part of the exciting new society, which offered so much hope and promise. Little did they know that in 1966, at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, their house would be ransacked at night, sealed off, and confiscated because of their capitalist background. The Red Guards subsequently sent Mrs. Qian’s mother to the countryside, on a train filled with so-called rich imperialists and counterrevolutionaries, who for the most part were a bunch of old men and women. To express their hatred for class enemies, the Red Guards commanded the old men and women to kneel on the floor and crawl from one car to the next, while the guards brandished their belts and mercilessly whipped anyone who crawled too slowly.
    While Mrs. Qian’s mother was humiliated on the way to the countryside, Mrs. Qian herself was struggling with tuberculosis. She had been accepted into the architecture department of Tsinghua University (equivalent to MIT in the United States), but because she was from a capitalist family, she was not allowed to join the Communist Party at school, nor was she allowed to pursue the study of physics and follow in the footsteps of Madame Curie. Eventually she transferred to the hydraulics department and later married a young air force pilot who had fallen in love with her while she was in the hospital.
    One afternoon when I entered Mrs. Qian’s courtyard gate, I ran into a man dressed like a peasant, his dark face wrinkled like a walnut. He was not quite standing and not quite sitting outside the house, smoking a cigarette. He reminded me of the country people I often saw at the bus stop, the ones the city people made fun of for their backward ways and appearance.
    After the man had left, Mrs. Qian said to me, somewhat uncomfortably, “That is the father of my children. He fixed a tractor for the production team today and stopped by to see the kids because he was in the neighborhood. Don’t pay attention to what he looks like now; twenty years ago, when he was an air force pilot, he was really handsome and had a great spirit!”
    Dumbfounded, I watched the stooped-over man hobble off into the distance. I couldn’t for the life of me relate him to the Mrs. Qian I knew. I’ll never forget the image of that man; it was as if life had squeezed him dry of the spirit and vigor of youth. What kind of force could do such a frightening thing?
    Mrs. Qian told me that soon after their marriage her husband had been relieved of all his assignments and accused of committing some political error by aligning with the traitor Lin Biao, who was a vice chairman of the Communist Party and one