remainder of the Cultural Revolution as a member of a construction crew outside of Beijing. As a result of this experience, during which he lived among the poor, he came to reject Maoist policies and communist propaganda. By the early 1970s, Bei Dao began to focus on writing. His early poems drew praise from the acclaimed poet Bing Xin, to whom Bei Dao's father reported at the CAPD. During visits to Beijing, his home became a gathering place for friends and aspiring artists. These meetings were monitored by the neighborhood political committee, and on one occasion police raided the home of one member of the group. To avoid drawing attention, Bei Dao wrote alone in his kitchen late at night. In 1974, he composed the first draft of his novella, "Waves," in a darkroom under the guise that he was developing photographs. Overall, the Cultural Revolution was a tumultuous period for Bei Dao and his family. Like him, his siblings were sent away on "re-education through labor" assignments. His parents were sent to May Seventh Cadre School to undergo "ideological thought reform"; accused of living a bourgeois lifestyle (for, among other things, employing a nanny) they faced isolation, interrogation, and hard labor. The family was thus separated for much of the decade that Cultural Revolution policies were in force. In 1968, Bei Dao's aunt committed suicide after she became the focus of a government investigation. In July 1976, his sister died while attempting to rescue a drowning person. In his memoir, Bei Dao writes, "At this pivotal point in my life, I tried to reassess the past and peer into the future, but everything seemed fuzzy, indiscernible, my heart empty, vacuous". 1976 Tiananmen Incident and aftermath A watershed event occurred in April 1976, when the government's attempt to minimize public mourning for the death of Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai led to protests in Tiananmen Square—the first significant anti-government protests since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. Bei Dao participated in the demonstrations, which were violently suppressed. Inspired by his experience, he wrote what became his most famous poem, "The Answer," which has been compared to Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind" for its impact on a generation of Chinese. Written with defiant language, and extolling human agency, the poem has been described as a refusal of restrictions like those adopted during the Cultural Revolution. After the death of Mao and