The youth were fed with ideas that love was not for revolutionaries. “Red Guards had no sex” since sex was perceived to be ugly, dirty and very dangerous. The youth-only loved with hearts and did not dare hold or touch each other. Rae brings out the various relationships that she had from her childhood to her first love at the pig’s farm in northern China (Yang 210).
Yang talks about her nanny who was a poor lady who looked after her and told her bedtime stories. Rae idolizes her father who was determined to see her have a good future by taking her to school. Yang remembers her grandmother who was an icon in her childhood dream. Nainai, Yang’s grandmother dies of diabetic in a delusional windowless room in the house the family had owned before the Cultural Revolution.
