They were in a world where there was nothing they could take for granted. No certitude. No reliability. No conviction.

Except him in her, and her in him.

After a day’s labor, he would sometimes read poems to her, in Chinese, and then in English, behind the cadre school pigsty, or on a ridge in the rice paddy, their hands soil-covered, a broken loudspeaker repeating Chairman Mao’s quotations in the air, black crows hovering over the deserted field.

The Cultural Revolution was a national disaster, they realized, in which each and every individual was smashed to pieces, “burned to ashes,” as in a revolutionary slogan. For them, however, it was as if they had been reborn out of the ashes.

“A terrible beauty is born,” he said. “There will be a new future for the people, for the country.”

He especially liked a poem entitled “You and I,” written by a woman poet named Guan Daosheng in the thirteenth century. The passion was expressed quite directly, as was seldom seen, according to him, in classical Chinese poetry.

After having finished reading the long quote in an emotion-suffused voice, Peiqin said “But such a passion was hardly comprehensible in the cadre school. What’s worse, it was a passion viewed by one of the school leaders as a brazen challenge to the Party authorities.

“So a mass criticism meeting was held. Yang was marched onto a temporary stage and denounced as a negative example of the reactionary intellectual who resisted ideological reform by falling in love. Yin’s lot was hardly better: in addition to a serious inner-Party warning, she was ordered to stand barefoot beside him on the stage. She did not wear a blackboard; she bore a halter of ragged shoes around her neck, a time-honored symbol of shame, of being worn out after being used by numerous men, like the dirty shoes.

“There is a famous quotation by Chairman Mao, There is no groundless love or hatred in this world. There must have been a reason for the two ‘black elements’ embracing each other, their revolutionary critics said. It must have been out of their common hatred of the Cultural Revolution, the critics concluded.

“Yin and Yang remained defiant, continuing to meet each other, whenever and wherever possible, despite the repeated warnings of the cadre school authorities.

“He was then put into an ‘isolation room,’ deprived of all contact with the outside world and Yin. He was ordered to write confessions and self-criticisms all day long. He refused to do so, declaring that there was nothing wrong in one human being loving another. After a week, he was marched out to work for extra-long hours in the rice paddy during the day, then sent back to the isolation room to write in the evening.

“She, too, suffered terribly Half her hair was shaved off down to the scalp-in a special style called the Yin-Yang haircut, designed for class enemies-a cruel play on the coincidence of their family names. She did not even bother to wear a hat, as if proud of the price she had had to pay for her passion.

“What’s worse, she was not allowed to see Yang. After a day’s work, she could only wander, alone, around the hut in which he was kept, hoping to catch a glimpse of his silhouette against the window. She kept repeating the lines he had taught her, ‘What a starry night this, / but not that night, long ago, lost. / For whom do I find myself standing here, / against the wind and the frost / deep in the night?’

“Not long afterward, Yang fell sick again. Because of his lack of cooperation with the school authorities, they made it hard for him to get proper treatment. The barefoot doctor believed that a silver acupuncture needle could cure any illness, because Chairman Mao said that traditional Chinese medicine could perform miracles. Yin was denied the right to visit him until the very last day of his life, when everybody could see that he was beyond hope. It was a cold day, and his hands in hers were even colder. All his roommates left the room, making one excuse or another, leaving the two of them together. Holding her hand, he remained conscious to the end, even though he was no longer able to speak. He died in his dorm room, in her arms. As a poem Yang had translated says: ‘If only your body, cold as ice, as snow, / could be brought back life / by the warmth of mine…’

“Two years later, the Cultural Revolution came to an end. The cadre school dissolved. She went back to her college. Because of the English she had learned from him, she was assigned to teach English.

“As for Yang, it was officially declared that he had died a natural death. He had not been executed or beaten to death like some intellectuals, so there was no need to look into the specific circumstances of his last days. So many had died during those years. No one bothered. Nothing was done about him in the first few years after the Cultural Revolution.

“In the early eighties, the Party authorities issued a document entitled ‘Correction of the Anti-Rightist movement in the Fifties,’ in which having labeled such a large number of intellectuals as Rightists was acknowledged as a mistake, although ‘at the time, there might have been a few of them who harbored malicious intentions against the government.’ Anyway, the survivors were no longer Rightists, and they shot off firecrackers in celebration. There was a movie about such a Rightist who had been lucky enough to find his love during his Rightist years, and survived miraculously, of course, to make new contributions to the construction of socialism.

“Not so Yang. In a belated memorial service for him, Yang was posthumously de-Rightisted and called ‘Comrade Yang’ once again. A few of his colleagues attended the service. Some of them were actually summoned to it because the school authorities were worried that people might have already forgotten about him. At the memorial service, Yang’s death was declared a ‘sad and serious loss to modern Chinese literature.’ The event was reported in the local newspaper.

“There was a small incident not covered in the report though. Qiao Ming, one of the former cadre school leaders, also came to the service. Yin angrily spat in his face. People separated them in a hurry. ‘The past is past,’ people said to her, and to Qiao too.

“Life went on as usual. She remained single and edited a poetry manuscript left by him. A collection of his poems was then published by Shanghai Literature Publishing House. But it was not until after the publication of Death of a Chinese Professor that anyone began to talk about Yang again. Or, to be exact, about the romantic affair between Yin and Yang.

“That’s the gist of the story,” Peiqin said at the end of her narrative. “What I have told you is also based on information I obtained from the library, from reviews, or from people’s reminiscences. “

“Isn’t there anything else?”

“Well, there have been various responses to the book.”

“Tell me about those responses.”

“Some believed that this must be a true story of their love affair. A few even blamed her for his death. But for their affair, Yang would not have ruffled the feathers of the authorities and suffered persecution. He might have survived.” Peiqin shifted to a new position, nestling against Yu’s shoulder. “Some discredited the story totally. For one thing, a cadre school was no place for romantic love. The dorm rooms were so cramped. They would not have been able to find any place to meet, even if they had the desire and the energy. Not to mention the political atmosphere. The officials of the cadre school would have been too vigilant.”