來鴻

Received a belayed Christmas card from Detroit - it's from my cousin.

In fact I never met her. This was the first time she sent us a greeting; it used to be my uncle - who passed away last summer.

His story (history !) was all too common in those days but drastic to experience: He and his wife - the elder sister of my father - left the mainland in 1950s and went to the States. Parents, friends, country life, communism ... they wrote off everything, material and spiritual, and turned into another form of existence.

In an era without email and MSN, it was conceivably worse than migrating to Mars nowadays.

PS. My father left China a few years after his sister arrived at the States. His original plan was to work for my aunt in Detroit but, because of the corrupted emigration officer in those days, he could only manage to come to Hong Kong. Alas, this is probably the only time I have to thank a corrupted official - otherwise I will not exist to tell this story.