Zenith Book Novels & Stories

Elder Wen Zhaoqing was eighty-one years old and he was ill and he knew it and he had decided, apparently, to write certain letters before he ran out of time to write them. The letter was short. Four paragraphs. The first was formal — acknowledgment of her position, acknowledgment of the Reservoir, acknowledgment of what she had achieved. The language of an elder who had not fully stopped being an elder even in a personal letter. The second paragraph was the one she read twice.