Abstract

Amid the convulsions of China’s Cultural Revolution, A Ghost Letter follows Yisun, a sixteen-year-old in the coastal town of Huigang, Fujian Province, whose youth is marked by political violence, betrayal, and the silences of survival. His father, once a proud literature teacher, has been reduced to writing letters for illiterate villagers, the only link to relatives long stranded abroad. When Red Guards close Yisun’s school, he begins secretly writing unsent letters to his imprisoned mentor, Mr. Ding, pouring into them his grief over family tragedies and his father’s quiet complicity.
Through his father’s work, Yisun meets Sister Hong, a Malaysian exile who entrusts him with a letter home — one he leaves unfinished until her suicide fixes her forever in his memory. Seeking escape, he joins the “Down to the Countryside” campaign, as his father is later imprisoned for “enemy collaboration.” On his deathbed, Mr. Guo confesses to signing the false testimony that condemned Mr. Ding; Yisun cannot forgive him.
After the Cultural Revolution, Yisun becomes a legal document writer for the poor, the powerless, and for Sister Hong’s ghost, still unreturned to her homeland. Decades later, as his ancestral home falls to the machinery of a new era, he comes to understand his father’s silence, and at last forgives him. Despite enduring loss and the persistence of political power, he tends to a small, enduring flame of hope.