as a senior intellectual, had been placed in the "stinking ninth category"; and my mother had been summoned by the Religious Affairs Office for "talk" or "lear-ning” several times. I looked for family letters every day, and usually one would come every week or two. Now over four weeks had elapsed, and there was still none. What happened? I was anxious and fearful, and my heart felt like a big ro-ck was pressing on it. Finally, one day as I passed by the mail room, Xiao Huan-g from inside called to me that I had a letter. I looked at the envelope which was from my younger sister instead of Yu-ou. What happened to Yu-ou? My heart p-ounded. I dared not open the letter but put it in my pocket and hurried back to the dormitory. I opened it with my hands trembling. My sister prosaically said a few words about our parents, her own situation, and the weather in Guangzhou. In the end, it seemed casually she wrote: Our cousin has been discharged from the hospital, now rests at aunt’s home. "Yu-ou is free? Ah!" I immediately knew the meaning of that last sentence. I was so surprised that I almost cried out.
I did have cousins and an aunt in Shunde County, dozens of kilometers away fro  Guangzhou. Because my uncle was a civilian member of the Kuomintang government, he had fled to Taiwan in 1949. During this extraordinary time, we dared not to have any contact with my aunt. And I had never heard that my cousin had any ser-ious illness and needed to be hospitalized. Now such a sentence suddenly popped up in my sister's letter, I took the hint immediately: "cousin" referred to Yu-ou, and as Yu-ou's parents were in Hong Kong, "now rests at aunt’s home" meant Yu-ou was now in Hong Kong. My sister really racked her brain to write this let-ter, which made the officer who secretly examined the letter ignore it, but for me, it was quite understandable because hearts which have common beats are link-ed! I raised my eyes to heaven: Thank God, thank God. A picture emerged in my m-ind: A seagull (Yu-ou means jade gull) is flying freely in the blue sky. Ibrace-d myself up. As Yu-ou had extricated herself, I myself would find it much easie-r now to deal with any difficulty. But I still worried about little Meng. Who would take care of her? It was not mentioned in the letter, but I thought there m-ust be arrangements. I put the letter back in my pocket and took it to the toil-et of the teaching building, read it again and again. "Letter from home is wort-h gold.” But reason told me: This letter must never be left behind. I gritted my teeth and with hands trembling shredded the letter and the envelope and flushed them away in the toilet. At that time there were toilets only in the teaching buildings, but the dormitories of faculty-staff and the students had only publ-ic trough latrines outside. I thanked Xiao Huang because letters were usually p-laced on the letter shelf of the faculty-staff cafeteria for everyone to pick u-p. But this time Xiao Huang called me when she saw me passing by. At that time because of my identity as "cow demon and snake spirit,” people avoided contact with me. Xiao Huang did so, obviously out of sympathy, although she didn’t say anything. More than 10 years later, after the Cultural Revolution was over, I visited my family in Guangzhou, there I bought packets of cashew for export which I had never seen before. Returning to Kunming, I gave one packet to Xiao Huang in gratitude although I didn't say the reason. During ten years of the Great Cultural Revolution I experienced a lot of calamities, had several narrow escapes from death, and was in a state of panic almost every day. But I also had three very pleasant surprises, and receiving this letter was the first of these.