...boredom Was As Exhausting As Backbreaking Labor.

I No Longer Have The Terrible Nightmares That I Used To Have. Mao Had Just Died In 1976, And China Began To Open Up. For The First Time Scholarships To Go To The West To Study Were Awarded On Academic Merit.

When I Was In China, Mao Was Chairman, And Parents Were Terrified To Tell Their Children Anything That Differed From The Party Line In Case The Children Repeated It And Endangered The Whole Family.

I Remember When My Mother Pointed To A Stone, And She Said This Was The Kind Of Stone People Used To Place On The Feet Of The Baby Girls To Stop Them Trying To Climb Away And Unbind Their Feet.

As A Child, My Idea Of The West Was That It Was A Miasma Of Poverty And Misery, Like That Of The Homeless 'little Match Girl'in The Hans Christian Andersen Story. When I Was In The Boarding Nursery And Did Not Want To Finish My Food, The Teacher Would Say:'think Of All The Starving Children In The Capitalist World!

At The Age Of Fifteen My Grandmother Became The Concubine Of A Warlord General.