The beginning of summer 1966 a firestorm was about to sweep through the country.
One dawn my mother lit a fire in the courtyard of our house. Mother told me to watch the fire which then burnt for three days and nights in a row…
Since my father had held a post in publishing, we owned nearly every book published in those years. We had everything from the complete works of Marx, Engel, Lenin, and Stalin to children`s picturebooks…
My mother threw piles of books into the fire without expression. She tried to do it as quickly as possible. Warmed by the fire, I sat excited and curious.
This year later I was sent to middle school. We attended two classes a day. In the politics class we studied Mao`s poems. Of course, there were roll calls in the morning, and evening reports, and we sang “The  East is Red ”…
We were craving something but we did not know what.
One day, another girl and I broke into the library and stole a lot of books we couldn`t even read. We were caught and sent to the “ class for dad students ”…

作者：ChenQingQing