He told her that she must be strong, and that as a young student “joining the revolution” she needed to “go through the five mountain passes”—which meant adopting a completely new attitude to family, profession, love, life-style, and manual labor, through embracing hardship and trauma. The Party’s theory was that educated people like her needed to stop being “bourgeois” and become closer to the peasants, who formed over 80 percent of the population.
