Oh, Father, why do we call them your golden years! Today, here, describing your last days to your only friend, I can’t help but feel how terrible those days were for you. How difficult it is for me to put this down on paper. Right now I have only written the beginning, but I already feel that I can’t go on, my heart weeps. I want to forget everything, I don’t want to remember it … but I am your daughter. And I think your friend deserves to understand, deserves to know you, the real you. It is only by seeing your end that he can understand the rest of your life. Your last years were so painful …

Day Two

Once he was fed up with tending to his flowers, for nearly two months he simply did nothing but sit upon the sofa, always with a dejected look on his face, his body slumped over, smoking cigarette after cigarette, punctuated only by fits of coughing. At the same time his health began to deteriorate and his blood pressure soared. It went as high as 200/90 when normally it’d stand at around 160/90; it really worried everyone. Then he developed chronic bronchitis: he’d cough and cough, so loud it seemed that the earth shook and the mountains trembled. For certain this was caused by all the heavy smoking he had been doing recently. Father’s love of tobacco had always been quite serious: normally two packs a day wouldn’t be enough, but during his retirement, he smoked even more, lighting one cigarette after another. We tried to tell him he should cut down, to which he replied that he bought his cigarettes with his own money, not ours, and so it was none of our business. Later we heard that he had been repeatedly contacting the work-unit supervisor requesting to be reinstated, to be permitted back inside those red walls. His requests were always denied. I couldn’t help but think all his requests must be becoming an annoyance to the authorities, and I was right. One day, Director Wang came to speak to me. He implored us to think of some way to deal with the situation, to find some way to placate Father so that he’d no longer bother them. I wanted to ask him what he thought we’d been doing. Nothing? We’d already tried everything we could think of; we’d exhausted ourselves trying to make him happy, all to no avail.