Chapter 6 Summary and Analysis

When De-hong is sent to report to Comrade Wang Yu for her work assignment with the Communist party, her first impression of the man is that there's something "dreamy" about him and that he looks like a poet. He will become the father of the author.

Wang Yu was raised in poverty, often hungry and often abused. He worked mainly at a series of odd jobs after the death of his father when Wang Yu was thirteen. His first encounter with communism was when he saw a young man about to be executed. The man spoke for several moments about the virtues of communism and then was beheaded. He got a job in a bookshop that sold left-wing publications and excelled at the party's Academy of Marxist-Leninist Studies. He spent years in Yan'an, a city that was blockaded but that had...