Outside the Great Wall, by the Blue Danube

To advance her career, Yuan-tsung was obliged to demonstrate her loyalty to the Party by doing whatever it wanted her to do, and so in late 1950, she went to do land reform work in a poverty-stricken farming village, known as Dragon’s Village, outside the Great Wall in northwestern Gansu Province. Six months later, she returned to Beijing, and at a weekend party, an old Nankai schoolmate, Dora Zhang, introduced her to Jack Chen, an overseas Chinese who, along with his father, had been an early supporter of the Communists. At the party, they waltzed to the music of the “Blue Danube.” She was not as impressed by Chen’s political pedigree as by his library, which included banned works by writers like Marcel Proust and D. H. Lawrence. They talked about these “decadent writers” and fell in love.