"The so-called "scar literature" first appeared in China in the late 1970s, when the men and women who survived the turmoil of Mao's Cultural Revolution began writing about their experiences in both fiction and nonfiction. Two of the best novels are Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie, the story of two young boys--children of the hated intelligentsia--who are sent to a remote mountain village to be reeducated, and Dai Houying's Stones of the Wall, one of the earliest (and still one of the best) novels about the effects of the Cultural Revolution, which is set in the late 1970s around a group of college professors who are trying to rebuild lives thrown into despair and uncertainty by the cataclysm. (This is a novel I've remembered vividly since I first read it in 1985.)" --