I began to write fiction in my second year at the Women's Normal School when I had just reached the age of 15. One day, together with two classmates of the primary-school days, I went to dinner at a fellow provincial's home. The host had just bought a 13-year-old slave girl. Short and slight in build, she looked thin and sickly with a tear-stained face. But her bright big ebony eyes were just lovely. The hostess, who was a division commander's wife, ordered the girl to show us her gait so that we could judge whether each and every of her postures befitted her position as maid in an official mansion. As my former classmates were focusing their eyes on the poor girl, I burned with fury at her gross injustice. I detested the hostess for her inhuman act of treating the girl like an animal. I was too angry to eat and left on some excuse. Back at the school, I immediately wrote a story entitled My Instant Response.