Jin witnessed the rise of the cult of Mao and even joined a youth auxiliary to the Red Guards, but he also experienced the cruelty and hysteria of attacks on those accused of counterrevolutionary thinking when his family was publicly criticized and harassed because his maternal grandfather had once been a landholder. Jin felt pressure to prove his devotion to Mao and to China. "Like everyone else," he revealed in a
New York Times Magazine profile (6 February 2000), "I wanted to be a hero, a martyr." Thus, in late 1969, just a few months before turning fourteen, he enlisted in the army.
Initially assigned to an artillery company on the Sino-Soviet border, Jin later trained as a telegraph operator. After five and a half years of service, he left the army and worked as a telegrapher for the Harbin Railroad Company from 1974 to 1977. He began a process of intense self-education, particularly in the classics of Chinese literature, and slowly improved his reading and writing skills. He also began to study English by listening to an educational radio program. When the universities were reopened at the end of the Cultural Revolution, he enrolled in Heilongjiang University to study English.
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