by ALAN FARAGO
No one owned a private car. We were nearly alone in the hotel restaurant. There really wasn’t any business being done in Shanghai. The boy, whose name I have forgotten, was very polite. He studied very hard, he said, because he hoped to go to college. Because the government had punished their family– for their past status– he had to be at the top of his class. Unless he was the most brilliant, he would have no chance of being accepted. My friend in Hong Kong, the boy’s aunt, told me of a cousin in Shanghai whose joints had frozen in the shape of a crouch from the cage he was kept in, throughout the Cultural Revolution. The boy picked at a full breakfast with restraint. If he was nervous, I couldn’t tell.
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