A political activist is so disgusted by her country that she tries to forget her native tongue. She stares at the letters on the spines of books, trying to forget what words they spell out or, rather, that they even spell anything at all. She searches for a language that has many synonyms for expressing the concept of 'peace'. Researching this at the library, she meets and falls in love with the scion of a family infamous for having led purges in Maoist China. He coos into her ear that if that was not his family, it would've been some other. But her loss of language is so far gone that she can no longer make out what he said.