In the summer of 1989, I was assigned to a job in an electrical engineering company in Nanjing. My train pulled in at one in the afternoon, and as I walked out of the station—two large bags slung over my shoulder—I was ambushed by a mob of peasant girls delegated by hotels to pester people for business. The sweat was pouring off me, and I was not in a good mood. “Get lost,” I told them. “I live here; I don’t need a hotel.”

The clueless cousin of mine who’d said he’d meet me off the train hadn’t...

I still have perfect recall of Li Zi’s student number: 3379101. Mine was 3379102. I’ve often admired the genius of the serial number system: why, another 3379102 probably won’t come along for another hundred years. Even if someone two or three generations after me does take my number in 2079, I’ll be too dead to be inconvenienced by the potential confusion of identity. And whoever inherits my number will have no idea I ever existed. I’m too much of a mediocrity to make any mark on posterity. Indeed, I’ll happily admit that 3379102 is already as good as dead.

During...

One Wednesday morning, the seven of us—all fresh out of university—were notified that we should go to the office in the transport depot to sign our apprenticeship contracts. I was overjoyed with the factory to which I had chosen to devote my life. I’d done a couple of work placements there while still at college, and I had been delighted by how much the workers swore—and particularly by how freely and foully they expressed their contempt for the upper-level leadership of both the factory and the country as a whole. They liked a drink, too, which struck...

My name is Chen Zhiqiang. I’m twenty-five years old. I used to work at the Xinhua Printing Factory. My father worked at the same factory all his life. He never smoked a cigarette in his life and then died of lung cancer before he was fifty. No one could understand it.

It was only my father’s posthumous influence that got me a job at his old factory as a temporary worker. After five years of this, I was finally installed in a full-time, permanent job in 1992. By then the factory was on the rocks, and it went through several...

Allow me to introduce my friend Xiao Liu.* His real name is Liu Guixiang, and he’ll be fifty this year. He was born in the year of the ox, which makes him a whole lunar cycle and a half older than me, and he works in the IT department of the Soil Research Institute here in Nanjing. He received some semblance of a further education at the end of the Cultural Revolution, spending two years at the Nanjing Workers’ College (now Southeast University) in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, after which he was assigned by our wonderful state planners to...

I have only one motive in compiling the following narrative: to clarify everything that has happened. In so doing, I have no intention of justifying what I have done. I know that everything I have achieved in my career goes for nothing now, that my reputation is destroyed. But I’m past caring. All I want to do is to explain how it came to end like this. I’m not going to ask for your sympathy because it wouldn’t mean anything to me. I’ll be sixty-five this year: even if this hadn’t happened, my life would still be almost over. And...

I was fast asleep at one in the afternoon when I received notification that I was to report back to my alma mater on August 31.

Events of the past decade or more had proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the moral and political indoctrination that my cohort (the graduating class of 1989) received at university had failed miserably. Taking the view that late was better than never, the government had therefore decided to take administrative measures against us: to summon our entire year back to our respective institutions to undergo reeducation; to begin anew the process of...

Gongbu—the southeastern kingdom that the Buddhist master Padmasambhava called the Capital of the Dead—refuses to celebrate New Year on the same day that the rest of Tibet does. In Gongbu, it falls on the first day of the tenth month of the Tibetan calendar, for reasons that drift back seven hundred years, to the reign of King Ajiejiebu. The people of Gongbu say—they’ve always said—that although King Niechi gave them their independence, it’s the heroic Ajiejiebu they should thank for their courage. One year, as deep autumn turned into winter, Ajiejiebu called together every fighting man...