of course I would be among them

 "And yet it was so natural. I thought of all the upstarts, know-it-alls, teachers, critics and book reviewers that I would love to have seen herded on to a train to Mongolia to shovel pig shit and live in barns. But of course I would be among them. In China, an intellectual is usually just someone who does not do manual labor. And there we would all be, digging holes, as a punishment for being so boring. It was an awful fate, but it was easy to imagine how the policy had come about. Everyone in his life has wished at one time or another for someone he disliked to be trundled off to shovel shit--especially and uppity person who had never gotten his hands dirty. Mao carried this satisfying little fantasy to its nasty limit."

~~ from Riding the Iron Rooster: By Train Through China by Paul Theroux