Having got safe and sound through that first six months, I felt as though I must have a guardian angel somewhere looking out for me. Everything was going well, and I don’t need to tell you how pleased I was. The only thing that wasn’t going according to plan was the search for a husband for Huang Yiyi. The whole thing went completely wrong: the Party came up with a list of suitable men and asked her opinion, but she very tactfully said no to all of them. She had good reason to do so: everyone in the unit knew that she was having an affair with Zhang Guoqing, gossip had seen to that. The only person who didn’t know was Zhang Guoqing’s wife. In the circumstances, picking someone from within the unit really wouldn’t work – after all everyone needs a bit of self-respect. So in the end the Party moved to Plan B: finding someone from outside. It is easy to say, ‘Oh, we’ll just find someone suitable for Huang Yiyi’, but there weren’t that many men of the right age with the requisite education and self-confidence.

Why did we want someone self-confident? Well, the first couple of candidates we found seemed OK on paper but when they actually met her, and saw how pretty Huang Yiyi was, and heard about how much she had done for the country – that was it; they didn’t dare have anything to do with her. It was as if they surrendered before they could lose. Later on we found another man, a colonel from the nearby garrison. The two of them seemed to get along all right, and they met three times in the space of a month, but there wasn’t a fourth time. It was over. We asked what the problem was, and the colonel said that she was far too free and easy; having met each other just three times and really not knowing each other at all well, she was already wanting to hug and kiss him, and in broad daylight too! What did she think that looked like? Clearly he had been scared off by Huang Yiyi’s manner. There was another one who Huang Yiyi liked, a professor from the university at the provincial capital. A few years earlier he had been denounced as a Rightist and his wife had divorced him. He was about the same age as Huang Yiyi and had studied abroad. They enjoyed each other’s company a lot, to the point where you could almost say that they fell in love at first sight. The professor also had plenty of gall: the second time they met they spent the night together. They carried on like that for a couple of weeks and then Huang Yiyi came running to see me and said, ‘He’s the one.’ She told us to get on with the security check.