ABSTRACT
Even when they did not lead to imprisonment, the Communist party's mass campaigns molded careers and personalities in tragic ways. The text below expresses the grief felt by Wang Ruowang at the sorry fate and ultimate death of his first wife, much as another famous essay, by Ba Jin, mourns for his wife, who suffered and died in the later and more notorious Cultural Revolution. 1 Wang reminds us that the Cultural Revolution was not wholly unprecedented. One also might call the essay a tragic "modern love story" that has much in common with the wonderful literary pieces on the relationship between Li Qingzhao and her husband in Song times, or the unlucky Shen Fu and his wife during the late Qing, told in his Fusheng liuji (Six records of a floating life, 1809). In the end there can only be silence, the effects of the mass movements and the inner urges of an intellectual to express herself having resulted in a personality crushed, a once sensitive mind driven to insanity.
