I was twenty-one years old, stationed at a commune in Yunnan. Chen Qingyang was twenty-six, working as a doctor in the same place. One day, she came down from the mountain to ask me whether she was a loose woman, a so-called old shoe – even though everyone called her an old shoe, she didn’t think it was true. ‘Golden Age’ tells the hilarious and absurd story of Wang Er, exiled as a young man during the Cultural Revolution to a remote part of China, and his love affair with Chen Qingyang. When they are caught by Communist Party officials, Wang Er is forced to write endless confessions of his ‘crime’, which then become very popular indeed with his punishers. Later, as a lecturer at a chaotic, newly built university, Wang Er navigates the bureaucratic maze of 1980’s China, lampooning the realities of government control along the way.