一位好友看完有关我父亲的帖子后，问了我一些问题。我拉拉杂杂写了一些，作为回答。现贴上。

The way I dealt with what happened to my family in the Cultural Revolution was to tell myself that my family, as a cell of the nation, had to go through the journey, together with the nation, towards modernity. It's an arduous journey, largely thanks to the legacy burden accumulated over millennia that arose from (a) a lack of generosity on the part of Nature and (b) the bondage imposed on the individual, as necessitated by the reality of being land-bound.

For me, it was a process of deliverance from bitterness and resentment. The person who helped me get there was none other than my father.

I remember the day he came home from prison.

We were living in a bungalow complex. It was more like a warehouse, divided into a row of rooms. We had a bedroom to ourselves, but shared the living room with a group of sent-down youth, whose bedroom faced ours. According to the villagers, our bedroom door had been taken from an unused coffin. They even showed my mother the holes in the door where coffin nails had been removed. Of course, they would have enjoyed seeing signs of terror in the eyes of this city girl, but they saw none. My mother later told me that she was horrified, but managed to mask her emotion at that point.

Right in front of the living room lay, from east to west, a chain of three grave mounds. We called them "The Three Big Mountains", alluding to Chairman Mao's famous metaphor. Beyond the "mountains" was a river and a bridge. I used to stand atop those mounds, a bamboo pole in hand, mimicking the boatmen punting their vessels in the river. That was my favourite pastime.

One day, I woke up from a siesta and heard his voice in the living room. I was trembling with joy and excitement, but didn't say anything. He was chatting with three villagers, who were obviously also happy to see him back and were curious about his experience, knowing that he had been released "not guilty".

Father was sitting on a low stool, back to the bedroom door. I sneaked up to him and sat down next to him. He turned round, acknowledged me, started stroking my head and carried on chatting with the visitors. I noticed he had a pair of nail clippers in his hand. I picked them up and studied them. They were tiny. On the front of the movable part (the reverse side of the file) was a glazed picture of a hammer, a sickle and Chairman Mao's quotation book. I noticed something unusual: The hammer was in the middle, the quotation book to its left and the sickle to its right. I remember saying to myself at that point - this is incorrect. Chairman Mao's quotation book should be the centrepiece!

That night, mother questioned father about some tiny, round scars on his face. They were faint, but visible. He said they were burns from lit cigarettes. It was part of the torture. He said it wasn't too painful. As far as I know, that was all he said about the torture.

Years later, we moved back to town and my parents were restored to their previous jobs. One evening, father said, "I saw Li Xiangyang in the street today."

Mother's face changed. "Did you go up to him and slap his face?"

"I didn't."

"What a wimp! I would have slapped him and spat in his face!"

Silence. Then father said, "They are also victims. I felt sorry for Li when I saw him."

After Deng Xiaoping returned to power, a campaign was launched to purge "Three Kinds of People". I cannot remember its definition. Li Xiangyang was one of the three kinds, I know, but father was very critical of that campaign. He said, "This is a case of repaying evil with evil. Most of those people were misled and now they are being singled out as fall guys. I think Deng is taking revenge on a huge number of people for the maiming of his eldest son, which was the doing of just a few."

That is why getting over the feeling of hate wasn't very difficult for me. In fact, the word "forgive" doesn't even apply here, because "forgive" necessarily puts "me" in the right and "him" in the wrong. But how do I know who's right and who's wrong? The trauma for me, as a child, stemmed from separation, isolation and despair. Full stop.