All these slogans and songs had been handed down, she thought, and if the words were not theirs was the emotion that propelled them borrowed, too? What about the students’ desire, their idealism, their righteousness, how many contradictory desires did it serve? Once idealism had belonged to Chairman Mao, the revolutionaries, the heroic Eighth Route Army. Had their generation inherited it? How could a person know the difference between what was real and what was
