The story is about a Chinese man who had been smoking four and five packs of cigarettes daily. To no avail, his wife, his mother, his doctors pleaded with him to stop. Then one day he received a letter from his son asking him to give up his life-threatening habit. Immediately he did. "Anything my son asks," he explained, "I must grant, for unlike other men who have fathered sons, mine has returned to me countless times the gift of life."
His son had been seven years of age when the terrible Cultural Revolution swept through China. The father was suddenly imprisoned in his own office. For the next several years the father didn't know why he had been branded a class enemy or how long his sentence. He had no idea of what was happening in China or to those he cherished
Many a long night he contemplated suicide. Only one certainty prevented him. At dawn--summer, spring, winter and fall--he could peer through a crack in the boarded window daily and see a tiny vermilion kite in the sky. Sometimes it hovered at eye level. Sometimes it soared into the heavens. Sometimes it was barely visible. That familiar sight never failed to inspire hope. For always he knew...someone was sending him a message. Someone on the outside waited faithfully. Someone cared. And so the father held onto life as tightly as he had once taught his son to hold on to the tether of his kite.
--------Mosaics-a Chinese legacy, Bette Bao Lord (great name
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