The story of being sent down to the countryside feels impossibly distant to me now, as if from another life. That is precisely why I have long wanted to write about it yet always felt my heart was willing but my strength insufficient. Even so, fragments of those years keep churning in my mind. Though they cannot be woven into a continuous narrative, these memory shards are etched into the deepest recesses of my mind. The "Up to the Mountains and Down to the Villages" movement was our generation's rite of passage. I was among the very last cohort sent down after the Cultural Revolution, catching the very tail end. At the time I did not meet the age requirement and could have remained in the city by policy. But the reality then was that staying in the city and waiting for job assignments often meant permanent unemployment — unlike being sent down, where after a few years you might be called back for factory work or even college (as a so-called worker-peasant-soldier student). Besides, under the influence of the era's ethos, those who stayed behind seemed somehow lesser than those who went. I had a close classmate, an only son, who stayed in the city. When we met afterward, he no longer carried himself with the same proud bearing we sent-down youth had. The Three Brothers of U Village The place I was sent to was a remote mountain village in southern Anhui called U Village, just beside the town. Three of us were sent to this village together. Brother Chen came from a family of traditional Chinese medicine practitioners — steady and honest, he brought half a trunk full of medical books. Brother Yu was the son of a demobilized soldier veteran, a bit of a slacker with a devil-may-care attitude. I brought along Bo Bing's Concise English Grammar and a transistor AM radio, hoping to keep up with the radio Broadcast English lessons. The moment the three of us got off the bus at the town, Old Party Secretary of U Village led a crowd banging drums and gongs to welcome us in. We were temporarily housed in the home of a commune barefoot doctor for two months. Later the village used the state resettlement allowance issued for the three of us to build three large, warehouse-like rooms — drafty as could be — and only then were we properly settled. The first month we ate "assigned meals," rotating through every household day by day. The farmers were mostly simple and hospitable. On the day we ate at a given home, the host would usually prepare more dishes than usual. Still, circumstances varied from household to household, and the food was hit-or-miss — some meals were truly hard to swallow. But fearing we'd be mocked as soft city kids, we could only grit our teeth and eat. The worst part wasn't the quality of the food but the hygiene. One evening, as dusk was falling, I pushed open a door to go to dinner and my hand landed on something sticky. Back home, the three of us compared notes and realized it was either snot or phlegm residue. We were all sick to our stoma

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