title: The DRAGON'S PEARL
author:  Sirin Phathanothai 
description: In 1956, when Bangkok-Beijing relations were tense, the prime minister of Thailand sent the two children of his principal adviser to China as a goodwill offering. They became the wards of Premier Zhou Enlai. The author of this memoir was one of those children. She was eight; her brother, then 12, plays an almost negligible role in these pages. The memoir only comes to life when Sirin, writing with freelancer Peck, relates how she was caught up in the Cultural Revoution in the mid-1960s. Accused of the crime of having been reared in a bourgeois Thai family and by the capitalist sympathizer Zhou, she was forced to denounce her family in public. Then, in an almost miraculous turn of events, Sirin became a Communist Party heroine by saving two children in a fire--but she was required to announce that her deed was inspired by the teachings of Chairman Mao. Though she tends to exaggerate her importance as an instrument of diplomacy, Sirin's memoir provides a valuable eyewitness account of the Cultural Revolution. Photos. <br />Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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  #  Chapter One
  
  
  The forest was silent as we made our way down the island from the Qianlong
  sanctuary. We’d gone up a few hours prior with our weapons in hand to fight
  and defeat the sorcerer Tuzakeur. Instead of coming back down with just our
  weapons and the satisfaction that we’d killed the man who’d tortured Rana for
  so long, we came down with the blue dragon in tow.
  
  
  Heijing was everything we expected and more of the Qianlong. She was highly
  intelligent and cunning, and she’d asked to be brought along with us. I’d
  agreed to it since she would be an excellent ally to us and would take Rana on
  her journey to find her family. I hadn’t decided yet if the Qianlong could be
  trusted, but her thoughts were pure, and her intentions seemed to be the same.
  I glanced over at her, and her icy blue eyes met mine immediately. She’d been
  scrutinizing my face this entire time; it didn’t throw me off, but I had many
  questions to ask