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Taiwan Families Receive Goodbye Letters Decades After Executions

Guo Su-jen, whose father was executed during political repression in Taiwan in 1952, tending her garden in Taipei. Credit Billy H.C. Kwok for The New York Times

The New York Times
By Paul Mozurfeb

TAIPEI, Taiwan — The month before he was executed, in April

1952, Guo Ching wrote letters to his mother, wife and children to say goodbye.

The letters had only 140 miles to travel, but they would take 60 years to be delivered.

When his daughter finally received her father’s farewell after a protracted negotiation with Taiwan’s government, she was in her 60s, twice his age when he died.

“I kept crying, because I could now read what my father had written,” said the daughter, Guo Su-jen. “If I’d never seen his writing, I would have no sense of him as a living person. His writing makes him alive again. Without it, he would live only in my imagination, how I picture him.”     [FULL  STORY]

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