This is one of only a few known first-hand accounts of the re-education system established by Maoist China during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in the 1960s.

This movement sought to eradicate bourgeois culture by sending elite youth into rural areas for re-education and by destroying non-communist literature. The irony is that the peasants were the ones most often re-educated by gaining access to literature brought to them by the bourgeois youth.

Simultaneously tragic and comic, this little novel is worth reading.