“Because my parents divorced when I was a child, my father was a stranger to me for a long time. My impression of my family before the break-up, apart from very few fragments of childhood memory, comes from my birthplace, Guantao County in Hebei Province, which my mother sometimes mentioned. My father was denounced as a rightist in 1957 and sent to a village in that county; he was there for seventeen years, during which he was introduced to my mother. In 1976 I was born in this place that was neither my parents' ancestral home nor where they grew up. After the Cultural Revolution my father was rehabilitated and returned to Beijing to work, and from then on my mother and I commuted between the two.”