Many 1980s’ PRC novels turned backward in time to critique the darkest period for the PRC and its intellectuals, the two decades from the antirightist crackdown of 1957–1958 to the culmination of the Cultural Revolution in 1976 with Mao’s death. Occasionally, such novels blunt the harshness of those two decades by injecting a motif like that of the “romantic prison,” in which a discouraged prisoner regains hope through the affections of the wife or daughter of a warden or guard . In Ts’ung Wei-hsi’s (1933–) novel Feng lei yen (Eyes Tearful in the Wind; 1985), the protagonist, named So, is an intellectual who has been sentenced to a long term of hard labor in the countryside on trumpedup political charges. While alone tending the lime kiln in the camp one day, the half-starved inmate has his dinner of two hardtack buns snatched away by a famine refugee. He chases after the refugee, a raggedly dressed woman about twenty years old, and threatens to shoot her if she does not return the buns. Not realizing that he is merely bluffing, she panics: stooping down to grab a handful of lime dust, she whirls around and hurls it into So’s face. He flinches, but it is too late: the lime has gotten into his eyes and stings terribly. From that point on in his life, his left eye will be hypersensitive to wind, watering whenever a breeze grazes it.