Professor Wu's troubles began when he returned from the US to serve the new China. An outspoken liberal, he was denounced as an ultra-rightist and sent to a labour camp in the Great Northern Wilderness. In the years that followed, as famine swept the land and he struggled to stay alive, his wife, Li Yikai, relates how she had to cope with the endless problems arising from guilt by association and how, eventually, after a desperate fight against a ruthless bureaucracy, she managed to rescue her husband from prison. This book tells of their struggle and their fight against the odds.