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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What was "Contemporary Heroes"?

2. What objection did Communist party members have to the French novel, The Red and the Black?

3. What is the "white and expert way"?

4. What does Lao Wei counsel Yue Daiyun to do to redeem herself with the party?

5. What happened for the first time during the June 18th affair?

Short Essay Questions

1. What was the rationale for sending Chinese literature students to work in the mines?

2. What advice does Lao Wei give Yue Daiyun about survival in the countryside?

3. In 1976, what did the students do to Yue Daiyun's home?

4. What did Yue Daiyun see in Old Uncle that she had never seen among the intellectuals?

5. Why did Yue Daiyun support Party policy above her own conscience?

6. What is the "theory of revolutionary inheritance"?

7. What is the message of Yue Daiyun's poem "To the Storm"?

8. How did the peasants react to the decision to distribute work points evenly, with eight each day for women and ten per day for men?

9. Why had Yue Daiyun's earlier visit to the Soviet Union been disillusioning?

10. What is the difference between one who is an "alien class element" and one who is a "counter-revolutionary"?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Several times in this memoir, people were urged to make a confession to things of which they did not believe themselves guilty. In your essay, evaluate the effect of this practice. Why did people make false confessions? What was the benefit? The cost?

Essay Topic 2

During the time that is portrayed in this memoir, military and police power were placed in the hands of committees and groups - sometimes self-appointed, as the student groups were. In your essay, discuss the results of these shifts in power.

Essay Topic 3

During Yue Daiyun's time as a professor of literature during the Cultural Revolution, it was criminal to glorify "middle characters" in fiction. Middle characters are ordinary people with flaws as well as good characteristics. Analyze and evaluate the purpose for this decision and its effect on readers, according to Yue Daiyun.

(see the answer keys)

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