The author reflects on an inspiring photograph taken soon after her parents were released from Mao Zedong’s labour camps
In 1971, Lin Biao, who controlled the Chinese army for Chairman Mao and was his right-hand man in the Cultural Revolution, fell out with his boss and tried to flee to Russia, but his plane crashed in Outer Mongolia and he was killed. Suddenly, Mao had to make concessions to the victims of his purges. My parents, who had been in the camps, came home.
They came back separately. When I saw my father I was very sad and happy at the same time. Happy, because I hadn’t seen him for so long; sad, because he had aged tremendously, and had suffered so much, living in isolation in the mountains of Miyi, on the edge of the Himalayas in south-west China, for three and a half years.
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