y brothers and I were like all other boys, fighting at times and getting on each other's nerves. But the bond between us was strong: we were expected to love and care for each other, to be happy for each other's achievements. The older brothers were expected to look after the younger ones and the younger ones to respect the older.

Our dia and his fourth brother grew up very close too, although my dia was nearly eight years younger. My fourth uncle and aunt could not have children, so out of love and compassion my parents agreed to let them adopt their third son. So, before he was two years old, my third brother Cunmao was given to my uncle and auntie a couple of houses away, and we always thought we were cousins.

It wasn't until years later, when he was a teenager, that he found out the truth.

I was feeding our hens that day with what little grain we could spare, when Cunmao stormed into our house. "Where is my seventh niang?" he shouted, which was what he called our niang.

"She is sewing on the kang," I told him. He looked so strangely emotional that I quietly followed him, and listened.

"Why did you give me away? Why not one of the others?" I heard Cunmao demand angrily.

"This was decided even before you were born," our niang replied gently. "You were not singled out. I love you just like my other sons."

"I want to come back!" he said.

There was silence. "No, you can't," our niang said at last, her voice quivering.

"You're my niang and I'm your third son. I want to come back!" I could hear his shaking voice. He was close to tears.

Our niang let out a long sigh. "I beg you to forget that I'm your real mother! Do you think this is easy for me to see you around every day? Go back and love your parents. Be good to them until they die. They love you like their real son. You're luckier than your brothers. At least you have enough food to eat. Just look at how poor we are!"

"I'd rather be starving with you than living apart from you!" Cunmao said.

"What has been done is done. Your parents would be destroyed if I took you back now! I'll always love you as one of my sons whether you're living with us or not. But you must first love them and bear a son's responsibilities towards them. You may then love us too if you desire."

There was silence again. After a brief moment she said, "Come here." And through the window I could see them hug each other, sobbing uncontrollably.

I ran away then, and hid in a cornfield. I couldn't believe my third cousin was really one of my own brothers. My heart felt wretched. My eyes filled with tears, and from that moment on I regarded Cunmao as one of my real brothers. I stayed in that cornfield for the rest of the afternoon.

Cunmao's pursuit of returning to his real family broke my parents' hearts, as well as my uncle's and aunt's. But in the end Cunmao respected my parents' position, and he remained a faithful son to my uncle and aunt. I could not imagine what emotional trauma he went through though, especially as we lived so close.

My eldest brother, Cuncia, we called Big Brother. He was thirteen years older than me. I didn't really know him when I was growing up, because I was only four years old when, in August 1965, he left for Tibet. The central government called for hundreds of thousands of young people to go to Tibet to help advance the government's political agenda: they wanted people like my brother to influence Tibetan culture in the dominant Mandarin way. His journey to Tibet, riding buses, trains and horses, would have taken him more than a week. In his absence, my second brother Cunyuan took on the responsibilities of the eldest son. But Cunyuan wanted to be free and different. He too wanted to go to Tibet, but my parents refused. They needed his salary, and they were desperate for a daughter-in-law to help our niang with the domestic duties. So they arranged his marriage to a girl from our first auntie's village. Our aunt told our parents that this girl was hardworking and could cook, and would be a perfect match for Cunyuan. And now, under Chairman Mao, they could even meet each other before their wedding day to "talk about love".

But Cunyuan was in love with a classmate instead. Her father was a county official. When she found out about the arranged marriage she immediately came to our house. "Uncle, Aunt," she said to my parents, "I've known Cunyuan for nearly four years now. I love him and he loves me too! I beg you not to force him into marrying someone he doesn't love."

"Young girl," my niang replied, "you're too young to understand what love is or what is required. You don't understand him. He is not worthy of you. There is no future working in the commune."

"Aunt, I do know what love is! I will follow him to the end of the earth. I'm willing to eat only grass for food as long as I can be with him."

"You don't know our son's temperament. You wouldn't suit each other," my dia replied.

"Please give us a chance! I know we'll make each other happy."

"You come from a different background to Cunyuan's," my dia added. "You won't like our poor commune life."

"Yes, I will! I'll get used to it. I promise you I'll be a faithful wife and a good daughter-in-law!"

But my parents felt strongly that this girl came from a family that was too good for us. Cunyuan needed someone who was sturdier, to rein him in. "You're a beautiful girl and you will find a nice husband in the city one day. That's where you belong. We hope you will understand our decision and leave our son alone," my niang said.

By this point the girl was in tears. "Is there any chance for me to marry Cunyuan?" she asked weakly.

"No. He is engaged to someone else," my dia said.

The girl covered her face with a handkerchief and flew out of our house. I can recall it vividly: I'd felt my heart throbbing. I'd wished my parents had given in. I never saw that girl again.

Cunyuan had many emotional fights with my parents over this girl. He resented our parents for arranging his marriage and his relationship with my parents suffered terribly.

I remember my fourth brother Cunsang could carry heavy grain sacks on his shoulder and could balance and push a heavily loaded cart with ease. He wasn't the cleverest among us, but our niang always had a tender spot for him. She often blamed the accident he'd had as a baby, when the chairs crashed down on his head, for his poor school results. I loved my fourth brother: he was kind, honest and loving. He always smiled, and he was the only older brother of mine who didn't mind me sitting beside him while he played his card games.

It was my fifth brother Cunfar who was the closest to me, however. We were two and a half years apart—and we fought over everything. I was notorious in the family for loving food, and if any food was missing they would always blame me first. Cunfar seized upon this and sometimes nicked food and blamed me for it. But I loved him. He was my protector against the bullies, my partner in games and my rival in races.

Cunfar always won our wrestling matches because he was stronger than me. No matter how hard I tried I'd still lose. But I was a faster runner. I'd make him mad by running away from him, calling him Cunfar instead of the more respectable "Wuga" or Fifth Brother which I was meant to use. He'd stop chasing me because he had asthma, and by the time he caught his breath I would be miles away. Then I'd make him even angrier by copying his coughs and his strange running style. He'd pick up stones to throw at me and swear to kill me ten times over if he ever caught me. "You'll have a silver beard all the way to the floor by the time you catch me!" I'd call back.

Cunfar would often have severe coughs and asthma when we were growing up. My parents tried everything to cure him. Once we had to find a young rooster and feed it a mixture of millet and cooked toad. Twenty-four hours later my niang cooked the rooster and Cunfar had to eat everything, including the bones. I wanted to eat his rooster so badly that I stole some from him. I don't know whether it was the toad or the rooster that worked, but a month later his asthma had gone.

So I grew up with my brothers, playing outside, under the sun, in the rain and even in the freezing winter—a wild street boy. Summer was my favourite time because I could play and run in the village and the countryside with nothing much on. Except in winter, I hardly ever wore any shoes for the first nine years of my life.

One day, late in the afternoon, the sun was setting and we were playing hide-and-seek. I was climbing on people's walls and roofs, trying to find a good place to hide. I climbed over our six-foot-high stone wall, over our toilet, trying to get behind the three-foot clay pots where the pigs' food was stored. One of the pots stored fermented millet waste and the other contained wheat shells from the soy sauce factory. But this day my foot slipped on the loose stones of the wall and I lost my balance. I fell headfirst, right into the pot of fermented millet waste. It was thick, gooey stuff and I was only about seven or eight years old and only just about a foot taller than the pot.

Our niang was busy cooking dinner and my fourth brother was her windbox pusher. By chance, Cunsang looked out and noticed the shadow of a pair of feet struggling upside down on the toilet wall. He immediately rushed to the pots and pulled me out. "What are you doing? You could have found a better place to die than the millet waste pot!" he said.

I was gasping for air, covered with the thick, gooey millet waste, seconds away from losing my life.

But nothing would stop our outdoor activities. The streets, the riverbank, the dam and the hilly fields were our playgrounds. We made our own spinning tops with carved wood and played games with marbles. Of course, we often had to help our dia too, working the small piece of land that the commune allocated to us. Sometimes we worked on it in the rain, trying to capture as much rainwater as possible. We used all the buckets and pots we had. In winter though, we didn't have to help our dia on the land, because it was always frozen hard, and the fields were covered with snow. I loved playing in the snow. We built snowmen and had snowball fights, chasing each other wildly around in the thick, thick snow. Often we would fall on the uneven roads or fields. We would roam wild, for hours, in this white world, in the vast open space of the fields, with the snow still falling around us. We would return home covered with snow, sometimes with our clothes torn, our ears, nose, hands and feet bright red from the cold, and our bodies steaming with sweat under our quilted cotton clothes. More washing and mending for our niang.

One game I especially liked was "fighting on the one-legged horse". We'd divide into two groups. Everybody had to hop on one leg and try to knock their opponent off-balance with the other bent knee. If you were knocked down you were out. We usually played it on hills to make it more difficult. Another game we played used an empty can or half of a used corncob as the "object". Every player had a bamboo stick. The middle player had to use his stick to push the object back into a hole, but any player could strike the object and hit it away. Sometimes both the object and the bamboo sticks would be flying frantically at each other and the game would become dangerous. We liked using an empty can as the object much more than the corncob because of the noise the metal made, but we didn't often have that luxury.

One Sunday, in the middle of a summer drought, my brothers and I had just finished helping our dia carry buckets of water to the yam crops. The earth was dry and the ground was cracked. We were sweating and the hot sun burnt our skin, so our dia allowed us to go to the dam near by to cool down. I was the fastest runner and when I got there some of the older boys of the village were already swimming and splashing in the middle of the dam. The water level was low. The other boys were treading water, so it looked like they were standing and, without thinking, I dived in. I had never learnt to swim, and I panicked when I couldn't touch the bottom. Every time I tried to yell for help, I would swallow some water, my head going up and down, up and down. Luckily, one of my cousins was with the group of older boys and he noticed me struggling and quickly swam to me and pulled me out of the water. A minute later I would have drowned.

On another hot day that summer, a popsicle seller rode his bicycle into our village. This was a rare treat! Several of my friends had money to buy popsicles, so I ran to my niang and asked her for three fen.

"I don't have a single fen," she replied.

I knew it was true. She never had any money.

I ran to my grandmother's house. Na-na, our dia's mother, was eighty-four years old by then. We loved our na-na. She often shared treats with us. She had no teeth left, so she could only eat soft food and she often asked us to peel her apples or pears so she could scrape them with a spoon, and she would let us eat the skin and the left-overs. Her eyesight was bad and she was hard of hearing: many times she got us all mixed up, calling us the wrong name. Zhang guan li dai, we called it: putting Zhang's hat on Li. She often complained that things were not as good as in her era. She disliked the chaos and change caused by Mao's Cultural Revolution. She used to save her falling hair, twirl it into a little ball, and exchange it for money or sometimes sewing needles. She just might have a few spare fen, I thought.

"Na-na, would you like a popsicle?" I didn't want to ask her for the three fen too bluntly.

"No, they are too cold for me. I haven't had a popsicle for years," she replied.

"Niang doesn't have three fen for me to buy a popsicle," I said. "My dia has the money. Can you lend me three fen?" I asked, and quickly added, "All my friends have bought popsicles!"

Na-na searched around, but had no change, only a one-yuan note.

"I would be happy to take a yuan if you could spare it. I'll pay you back later! I promise!"

She thought this was very funny, me having the audacity to borrow one whole yuan, and saying I could possibly pay her back. "Ah, one yuan!" She laughed and laughed. I was sure that if she'd had any teeth she would have laughed them off. But she ended up giving me the yuan anyway and I kept my promise. Of course I only used three fen, which I repaid a few days later. I picked up as much scrap metal and gathered as much hair as I could and sold it to the commune scrap-shop for a few fen a time. When I had saved ten fen, I would change them into a note and hide them between different pages of my copy of Chairman Mao's Red Book. After I'd paid Na-na back, I surprised my niang by producing the rest of my savings to buy some bean curd, which she loved. She questioned me at first—she thought I had stolen the money from my dia.

During those summers, some of the nights were unbearably hot. We had no fans in our house, and the breezes were too slight to blow away the swarming mosquitoes. To keep us out of mischief during these hot summer nights, the adults always told us stories. The most popular storyteller was the Wuho man, who had given my niang the cure for our warts. We loved him. He told good Kung Fu stories and countless fascinating fables. When he died a few years later, I went to see his body lying in a simple coffin. It seemed as though his body had shrunk. He had no children, so his coffin was donated by the neighbours and his burial ceremony was simple. I missed him and his enticing stories—they had a profound effect on my life.

One of my favourite activities on those summer days was catching dragonflies. They would rest on the water in the dams and I would sit by the edge and wait for them, a bamboo broom at the ready. I would tiptoe up to them, sweep them with my broom into the water, and then lift them out. Then I would tie the females to a wooden stick and circle the dragonfly aloft, so she would attract male dragonflies. I would pull down the mating pair, slowly, in circles, and catch the male when it was within reach. I caught flies or worms to feed my dragonflies, and I would let them go at night.

I also liked to catch crickets, but only male crickets, which we used in cricket fighting competitions. I loved the sound the crickets made—it was just like music or singing. Night or day I would follow the crickets' singing until I caught one, but we had to take care because we often looked in dangerous areas where there might also be snakes. The crickets were smart little creatures: they concealed their homes well, and would stop their singing long before I got close. A lot of patience was needed.

I was kind to my crickets and tried to provide them with the best food and housing I could. I kept them in glass bottles with rocks, dirt and even grass, along with their water and food, but often my brave cricket fighters would become big and lazy on the good food I fed them. I would reward my top fighter with a female for company. It is not surprising then, that one of my favourite fables the Wuho man used to tell us was about a cricket. We would sit around the Wuho man in a huge circle, mostly with no clothes on because it was so hot, and he would begin, one hand smoothing his long silver beard, his ancient pipe in the other:

Once there was a Chinese emperor who loved cricket fighting. Each year the emperor required the governors in each province to donate their best crickets. To win the emperor's favour, each governor ordered his people to search for the best crickets all over the land.

Under a mountain in a small village lived a poor family, with one ten-year-old son. They named him Brave Hero. His father was a courageous hunter and his mother was kind. They loved their boy. He was the sunshine in their eyes. One day the father came home from the mountains with his biggest catch, a beautiful cricket. He named the cricket Brave Hero, after his boy. The father was relieved—he would have been fined heavily if he hadn't found a cricket within twenty-four hours. The young boy was beside himself with this cricket. He begged his father to allow him to look at it. At first his father said no, but the boy kept begging and he eventually relented. Just as the boy opened the bamboo tube in which the cricket was kept, the cricket jumped out and hopped away. Their rooster near by ate the cricket up. The boy's father was in such a rage over the loss of the cricket that he ordered his son to find another cricket or else never return. The poor boy went into the mountains. They found him next day lying on a big rock, almost dead. The father cried his heart out. As he picked up his son's limp body, a small and ugly cricket jumped on the boy's pale face. The father brushed the cricket off and carried the boy home.

The parents wept over their dying boy. They placed him in a coffin in the middle of their living room waiting for the last breath to leave him. As they prayed in front of the coffin, they heard the faint sound of a cricket. It was the same ugly cricket that the father had brushed away from the boy's face before. The father was very annoyed and threw it outside. Moments later the governor came to collect the cricket and the father told him that he had none. Just as the angry governor was ordering his guards to burn down the house, they heard a cricket singing from the house. Its sound was strong and loud. They followed the sound to the bamboo tube and found the same little cricket inside. The governor thought the hunter was playing a joke with him when he saw this ugly little cricket and he threw the cricket towards the rooster. Just as the rooster was about to eat the cricket, the cricket jumped onto the rooster's crown and after a brief struggle the rooster dropped dead. The governor was very impressed. He asked the hunter if he had a name for the cricket. The hunter told him that he called it Brave Hero. Brave Hero quickly became the number one fighter in the kingdom. He never lost a fight. He even beat the emperor's fighting roosters. The emperor treasured him.

Back in the mountain village, the boy was still breathing. As long as their son breathed the couple would keep him lying in their living room. As the cricket-fighting season drew to a close, the emperor ordered the governor to reward the original finder of the cricket with some gold and silver because the cricket had given him such pleasure. But the parents' sorrow was too deep. Material things could not bring their son back. One day, Brave Hero mysteriously disappeared from his royal cage in the palace. On that same day the boy became alive again. The little cricket was Brave Hero's spirit. He had turned himself into the cricket to save his family.

I loved this tale. I loved the boy's bravery and I wished that I too could turn myself into a cricket and save my family from poverty. What a shame Chairman Mao didn't like cricket fights.

Our childhood in the Li Commune could never be just games and fables of course. It was around this time that the Cultural Revolution reached its most chaotic period, from about the middle of 1966. Jing Tring and I were too young to participate—six, seven, eight years old. But my three eldest brothers did. They would go out in the evenings and return late at night. They would tell me horror stories about the young Red Guards, how they burnt and destroyed anything that had a Western flavour: books, paintings, artwork—anything. They tore down temples and shrines: Mao wanted communism to have no competition from other religions. Communism was to be our only faith. The young Guards would travel to other regions and investigate possible counter-revolutionary suspects. They only had to mention Chairman Mao's name and the Red Guards would not have to pay for a thing. For a brief period, those young Guards nearly bankrupted China and the country teetered on the edge of civil war as different factions of the military supported different government leaders. But back in the New Village, we knew little of that wider picture.

My parents tried their hardest to persuade my brothers to stay home on those evenings. They even threatened to lock them out if they returned too late. But in reality there was nothing they could do—there was an unstoppable political heatwave sweeping through China. Emotions ran high and wild, especially among young people and especially in the major cities.

Then, one day, the well-respected head of our village was accused of being a counter-revolutionary. My brothers and I watched as a group of counter-revolutionaries were paraded through our village, with heavy blackboards around their necks and tall, pointed white paper hats on their heads. Their crimes were written in chalk on the boards around their necks and their names were written on their hats. They had to stand on a temporary platform in the centre of the commune square and confess their crimes to the massive crowd. We went along to watch. The officials and Red Guards handed out propaganda papers. The noise from the crowd was horrendous. One man kept shouting propaganda slogans with a hand-held speaker. People were shouting and jeering. During their confessions the accused had to lower their heads to avoid the objects that were thrown at them. If anyone looked up, he would be regarded as arrogant or too stubborn to change and too deeply influenced by capitalist filth. They could do nothing right: if they spoke softly they were smacked and accused of hiding something, and if they spoke loudly they were kicked and accused of having an "evil landlord-like attitude". Their confessions were often disrupted by the man with the hand- held speaker, who shouted revolutionary slogans such as "Knock down and kill the capitalists!" or "Never allow Chiang Kaishek and the landlords to return!" or "Never forget the cruel life of the old China and always remember the sweet life of the new China!" And of course there were the endless "Long live Chairman Mao! Long, long live Chairman Mao!" slogans. The revolutionaries constantly pulled the counter-revolutionaries' heads back up to humiliate them even more. Often their hats would come off—almost all of them had shaved their heads to avoid their hair being ripped out.

My parents told us that the head of our village was a good man. I was confused. I couldn't understand what crime he could have committed. A few days later, however, the communist revolutionary leader led a big crowd to the head villager's house. Only then did I realise that he'd been missing from the group of accused during the parade and rally.

The door of his house was locked when we got there and the leader banged on it, screaming, "Open the door, open the door! Otherwise your crime will be increased ten-fold!"

Eventually the door opened. His wife stood there, begging mercy for her husband. She told the communist leader that her husband was so sick he couldn't even get off the bed. The leader didn't believe her. He demanded to see him, but when he did he became convinced that the head villager was indeed very sick. A few years later, I remember seeing our head villager sitting by his gate on a little chair. He looked pale and motionless. He'd lost all his hair. Even his eyebrows were gone. I felt desperately sorry for him, but by that time I was one of Mao's young Guards too, and I felt guilty for even thinking that way.

I witnessed many rallies and parades during the Cultural Revolution. The Red Guards said they were killing the class enemies, which included the landlords, factory owners, successful businessmen, Guomindang Party members and army officers, intellectuals and anyone who might pose a threat to the communist government. But there was one particular rally that still, to this day, makes my heart bleed. It was a huge rally. My friends and I went along as usual. We heard the communist leader read out the sentences for about fifteen landlords, factory owners and counter-revolutionaries. Then they were loaded onto a truck. We could see their pointed white hats, with their names written on them in black ink and with a huge red cross struck through each name. They were taken to a nearby field. Despite the adults' warnings, my friends and I followed as fast as we could. By the time we got there, an excited crowd had formed a semi-circle around the accused. There were so many people that nobody noticed us peeking through the cracks between the crowd's legs.

I saw the men standing against a mud wall. Someone started counting. Two of the men crumbled onto their knees. One started to scream, "I'm innocent, I'm innocent! I didn't do anything wrong! Please let me live!" Another screamed, "I have young children! They'll starve to death without me! Have mercy for my family!" Then I heard someone shouting, "Yi, er, san!" One, two, three… Guns fired. The sound ripped through my heart. I saw blood splatter everywhere. The bodies fell down. I screamed, and ran home as fast as I could.

I wished I had listened to the adults. I wished I'd never witnessed this. It haunted me in many of my dreams.