Salim Damerdji towards the end of 1968, the Great Helmsman of China's Revolution, Chairman Mao, launched a campaign

that would leave the country profoundly altered. The universities were closed and all the "young intellectuals," meaning boys and girls who had graduated from high school, were sent to the countryside to be "re-educated by the poor peasants" (6). "The saying goes: a sincere heart can make even a stone blossom. So tell me, was the flower girl's heart lacking in sincerity?" (35). his choice was to have a profound effect on our lives. The lim little colume was entitled Ursule Mirouet (56). Then I was seized with an idea: I would copy out my favourite passages from Ursule Mirouet, word for word. It was the first time in my life that I had felt any desire to copy sentences from a book (58). Better still, like Ursule, I would visit in my dreams, places I had never set my eyes on before (59). The change he had undergone since receiving his mothers letter was truly remarkable. A few days before it would have been unthinkable for him to snap at us like this. I hadnt suspected that a tiny glimmer of hope for the future could transform someone so utterly. He was insanely arrogant (79). It was all such a long time ago, but one particular image from our sting of re-education is still etched in my memory with extraordinary precision: a red-beaked raven keeping watch as Luo crawled along a narrow track with a yawning chasm on either side. On his back he carried the inconspicuous, work-soiled bamboo hod in which he had secreted Old Go, as Balzac's Pere Goriot was titled in Chinese -- the book he was going to read to the Little Seamstress, the lovely mountain girl in need of culture (109). Suddenly, I felt the stirrings of an uncontrollably sadistic impulse, like a volcano about to erupt. I thought about all the miseries of re-education, and slowed down the pace of the treadle Luo shot me a glance of complicity. I pedaled even more slowly, this time to punish him for treating to take me into custody (134). That the ultimate pay-off of this metamorphosis, this feat of Balzacian re-education, was yet to come didn't occur to us. Were we wrapped up in ourselves to notice the warning signals? Did we overestimate the power of love? Or, quite simply, had we ourselves failed to grasp the essence of the novels we have read to her? (180).