Half an hour later, exhausted with crying, the girls finally got up and left the river. Along the same path that Ruo-Dan had led them earlier, they staggered back to school like drunks. Not until another half-hour had passed did the others, just up from their nap, hear the shocking news. As a frantic crowd ran to the river, one boy shouted at the three numbed girls:

“Did you call the workers in the factory”

The girls’ vacant expression made it clear that this possibility had not crossed their minds. The boys pleaded for help from workers in the same faction at the riverside factory. Hundreds of men and teenagers spent the rest of the afternoon searching for any sign of Ruo-Dan, in the water and along the riverbank. Night fell. They did not find her.

At ten the next morning, they found her body under water, only a few hundred metres from where she had gone in. Grass was tightly twined around one of her feet, preventing her from either floating up or being washed away. She looked as if she were sleeping.

Later I tried again and again to guess what had been going on in Ruo-Dan’s mind when she slipped into the river. Among the hundreds of Chairman Mao’s quotations that I could recite, this was the one that echoed in my ear: “Be resolute, fear no sacrifice, and surmount ten thousand difficulties to win victory.” A famous musician even made this statement into a song, which was broadcast over loudspeakers by both factions during every armed fight. Whenever we heard this song, we ran inside and tightly closed the doors. Was this the song playing in Ruo-Dan’s head when she walked into the river without another word

My parents were told and they immediately rushed to Ruo-Dan’s school, leaving me home alone with no instructions. The next morning, as soon as I opened my eyes from a night of strange dreams, I got up and walked to the bus station where I had left Ruo-Dan four days before. I waited in the line for a long time to get on a bus. The crowded bus took more than an hour to get to the Sha-Ping terminal. I did not cry. I hadn’t cried since I heard about Ruo-Dan’s death the day before.

I ran across the dusty street to the gate of the Third Middle School, once the best school in Chongqing. Inside the gate I ran toward the statue of Chairman Mao, then turned right, in the direction of the classroom building. In the building’s second-floor meeting room, I saw my parents sitting silently, surrounded by teenage girls and boys. Mother’s eyes were swollen. My parents stared at me blindly, their faces and bodies motionless. I looked around but did not see Ruo-Dan’s body anywhere.

“Where is my big sister” I demanded loudly.

A girl I recognized as one of Ruo-Dan’s close comrades pulled me into the hallway and whispered that Ruo-Dan had been buried the previous afternoon.

“No—!” I screamed. “Where is her grave Take me there! I want to see her! I want to see her!”