Missing “Home”

Missing his home and his loved ones who were left behind in China, translated…

I’d never imagined I would have an older half brother by my father still in China.  Until that heated late summer afternoon, when the mail carrier brought a letter from across the straits, the secrets my father kept in his Pandora’s box finally, revealed.

In our eyes, our father is someone who’s strict, and never smiled or laughed aloud, but as he’d clenched tightly to that letter, trembling all over, his minced lips, attempted to keep his silent sobs to himself, that, was the very first time I ever saw my father cry.

My father came to Taiwan with the troops, and ever since, he’d lost contact with everybody from back home.  Every New Year’s, he’d always sat on the chairs in our living room, and stared into space.  But ever since he’d received that letter from across the straits, his life seemed to have changed, he’d excitedly, opened up the letter, and started grinning ear to ear, and would shake his head and sigh at times.  My father’s life gained a brand new focus, other than his cherished grandchildren, his most favorites were probably these letters, as well as the mail carriers, dressed in their green uniforms.

A couple of years ago, my father died from illness, after his funeral, we’d started, sorting through his things.  Seeing how my father had, carefully, bundled up and classified the yellowed letters, with the stains on the sheets, I’m inclined to believe, that these were, caused by his tears as he’d read them.

With those yellowed letters, he’d, recalled the times of trials in his life, along with that inerasable love he had for his families back home.  Looking back in the long river of history, my father and my eldest brother can only connect with one another with the letters sent, and through the man in green, pass their nostalgia to one another; and now, my father’s gone, and my eldest brother already in his golden years, and those years of hardship became, nothing more than distant memories.

As I was spacing out, it seemed, as if, I was seeing my father, taking the letters from the mail carriers dressed in green, with that slight smirk off of the corners of his lips.

These were, the difficult times that the elderly generations had weathered through, because of the Communist takeover, they’d come with the national army over to Taiwan, and settled here, leaving behind their original families, and many of these elderly people had that one simple wish, of going back “home” to China, to see their old homes again, but things had changed completely, and, these elderly people are in search of those lost memories, never to be found again…