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In a small room on a courtyard off Dry Well Lane in Beijing, a marriage is celebrated and a child is born. The people of the courtyard all know one another, and share joys and sorrows and food. They are ordinary, unsophisticated citizens; when a loudspeaker announces the death of Stalin, one of them asks, "Who is this Stalin person?" Into their lives during the next 25 years will come wave after wave of political hysteria, rendering all of their hopes and plans meaningless. "The Blue Kite" (1993) is nothing less than the attempt to show what it was like to live in times of ideological madness.

The boy is called Tietou. The name translates as "iron head." His mother is a teacher, his father is a librarian, and his childhood memories include playmates and family gatherings and the portentous comings and goings of an uncle and his girlfriend who have both joined the army. He remembers especially a blue kite that he treasures, and which is caught in a tree, and how his father promises to give him a new one.