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My daughter Meiping was an attractive and intelligent young woman of 23. Growing up in Communist China, she had seen a society in which the children of the educated and affluent had enjoyed many advantages replaced, not by an egalitarian society but by a new system of discrimination against children like herself and their families. For instance, to be admitted into a good middle school, she had to score 80% on the entrance examination while children of workers and peasants got in with 60%. ''This is unfair!'' I had exclaimed at the time, indignant that my child was being discriminated against. ''But Mommy,'' said Meiping, ''the teacher told us the children of workers and peasants have to do housework or cook the evening meal after school, and their parents can't help them with homework. The treatment I get is fair if you consider all that.'' She had learned to be philosophical at a young age. ( Because my daughter had to try harder, she did well. In middle school, she was a student leader and won honors and prizes. She seemed happily adjusted. Although we lived in the midst of periodic political turmoil, I took it for granted that she would go to one of the better universities, be given a fairly good job because of her good marks and marry a nice young man. Instead of a university, she went to the new Film School of Shanghai. The acting profession was somewhat glamorous even in Communist China, but those who worked in it did not receive higher pay or enjoy better working conditions than factory workers or teachers. The function of an actress was primarily to entertain the masses, so besides appearing in films, she often gave performances in factories, rural communes, coal mines and oil fields, traveling with her unit all over China. It was an arduous life, but she believed she was rendering service to her country and its people. Now, as she munched her sandwiches, she told me about the day's events at her film studio. ''I spent the whole day writing Big Character Posters for the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. We were told that the more one writes, the more revolutionary enthusiasm one demonstrates, so everybody wrote and wrote.'' ''Was that why you didn't come home for dinner?'' ''We gave up having lunch and dinner to show our revolutionary zeal. Actually everyone was hungry, but nobody wanted to be the first to leave.'' ''What did you write about?'' ''Oh, slogans and denunciations against all China's enemies -- Taiwan, Japan, Britain, the U. S. and the Soviet Union.'' On the night of Aug. 18, my daughter's 23rd birthday, I invited Li Zhen, a woman professor at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, to dinner. Things were bad there, she told me. ''All classes have stopped. Everybody has to write Big Character Posters. Do you know, one of my students told me quietly that they had to write posters against me to protect themselves?'' At that juncture we did not know that the Cultural Revolution was in fact a struggle for power between the Maoists and the more moderate faction headed by Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. It later became known that the chief party secretary at the conservatory, who belonged to Liu Shaoqi's faction, was murdered when Jiang Qing, Mao's wife, decided to replace him with one of her favorite young men. While we were sitting out in the garden afterward, our conversation was < suddenly drowned out by a burst of noise from drums and gongs in the street. ''There's a parade of students passing the house,'' one of