“I had been the victim of political movements since the age of three, first through my mother, then through my father, and now through an absurd coincidence in my own affairs. Society hated me. It turned me into an outcast and a thief”
Here you can see the distress Heng’s childhood has had on his adulthood and how his experiences living under communist china has shaped his present. He considers himself to be a ‘victim’ of all sorts, which is why it is later unsurprising that he leaves it all behind to start a new life away from it all.
“All this was extremely confusing, especially for the old people, and everybody was always getting off at the wrong bus stop and getting lost. To make matters even worse, the ticket-sellers on the buses were too busy giving instructive readings from the Quotations of Chairman Mao between stops to have much time to help straighten out the mess.”
One of the changes that came under Mao’s rule was a change in the names of roads, locations, and other things. It is clear that the political regime didn’t just extend to people, but to China as a whole. Every part of what people were used to and had grown up with was eradicated and replaced with new, politically correct counterparts.
