ABSTRACT
In the memoirs in the form of essays that he has written since the late 1970s, Ba Jin looks back on the most creative years of his life, during the 1930s and 1940s; on the years when he was a submissive intellectual, in the early PRC; on the Cultural Revolution, when he was cruelly silenced; and finally, on the decade of Deng Xiaoping's reforms, when he was elected honorary chairman of the Chinese Writers' Association, following the death of Mao Dun (in 1981).
