DYING AT HOME: Hospice patients tell their stories about walking in the white light A LIVED EXPERIENCE.

A good many of the people who had been classified as capitalists along with him came under attack, their children were implicated in their crimes, and this often ended in suffering or death; but in my grandfather's case, apart from the decade of the Cultural Revolution, which he spent in prison, he lived in peace until he died aged ninety-seven, without a stain on his character, and all his children alive and well. YISHUJIA: Hmm, that's no easy thing. *** I felt that Yishujia was very guarded in the face of my questions, so I tried to elicit some fellow feeling with stories of my grandparents' generation: after my grandfather died, crowds of people came to express their condolences, nearly a thousand in the course of a week. My aunts and uncles were flabbergasted, none of them knew why so many people who knew my grandfather would come. *** YISHUJIA: Oh, I know why even your family didn't know. XINRAN: Why? [I thought she had started to open up, but I was wrong.] YISHUJIA: You say it, I like to listen! XINRAN: Many of the people who came to pay their respects knelt in front of his picture and talked to him, telling their stories ...»