A historian's blog devoted to Shakespeare's characters
In which conversation?
In what story?
In the story, the author reminisces about Dismount Fort, the small town where she attended elementary school in the 1960s. After a decade, she returns for a visit but finds country life dull. At night, she passes her time by reading books and magazines and writing her boyfriend. It is while reading a narrative poem in an issue of<span> Youth </span>magazine that she remembers her elementary school teacher, Zhu Wenli, a young female teacher who taught at the school eleven years before.
The narrator remembers that Zhu Wenli was a pretty and delicate recent college graduate when she first taught at the school. Her features were exquisite, 'lacking the stern looks of a woman soldier,' and 'her voice was much too soft and too weak for those revolutionary songs' the children had to learn how to sing. Chairman Mao's words were gospel at that time, and the narrator learned to scoff at her teacher's fragile sweetness. After all, the children were being taught that 'sweet flowers are poisonous.'
