Recently, Chinese lawyer Cai Yaqi revealed a letter from a high school student, exposing a similar dilemma spanning two generations over fifty years: in the grandfather’s generation, food airdropped from Taiwan was classified by the authorities as “toxic”; in the grandson’s generation, the father secretly circumvented the official mandatory vaccination for his son to “avoid toxicity”. The experiences of these two generations separated by half a century have sparked heated discussions among netizens.
In a recent self-media program, Lawyer Cai Yaqi mentioned a letter from one of his fans, a high school student whose grandfather had just passed away. He said, “According to our family tradition, we need to burn the belongings of the deceased. To keep a memento, I secretly kept the memoirs my grandfather wrote before his death, and this was unknown to anyone else.”
“The stories in my grandfather’s memoirs are mostly ones he told me before he passed away, but recently, while organizing the memoirs, I came across something that greatly puzzled me.”
In the letter, the high school student recalled that his grandfather’s memoir mentioned that in the 1960s, balloons released from “across the sea” often drifted to the coastal areas, carrying biscuits, canned food, and pamphlets.
During that time, there was a prevalent belief in the village (mandated by the village cadres) that “the biscuits and canned food were all toxic,” and if someone found them, they had to be turned in to the production brigade and could not be kept privately; if pamphlets were found, they were “not to be read.”
However, during the years of the great famine, many people struggled to have enough food. The student’s grandfather wrote in his memoir that for survival, he had secretly eaten the biscuits and canned food he found on multiple occasions, and “he ultimately did not die.”
Later, due to someone informing on him, he was taken away in the middle of the night by brigade members (village cadres) and interrogated for three consecutive days, with a focus on questions like “whether he had read the pamphlets, whether he had eaten the canned food and biscuits.” He managed to get through it by claiming he was illiterate.
What puzzled the student the most was a subsequent event: after the grandfather once again found food and chose to turn it in as required, the people in the brigade secretly ate the biscuits and canned food.
The student wrote in the letter, “I don’t understand why, in that era of famine, people would play such tricks on those who were starving.”
According to historical records, Taiwan used methods such as airdrops and balloons floating in the 1950s to 1980s (especially during the three-year famine in mainland China) to send “relief foodstuffs” containing rice, nutritional biscuits, and essential supplies to mainland China. For many coastal residents, those canned food and biscuits sent signified both food and risks.
The student later connected this story to his own experience during the pandemic. He mentioned that in 2021 (the second year of China’s pandemic lockdown), the school required students to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. His father managed to communicate with the teacher to have him vaccinated at home.
However, upon returning home, his father strongly opposed him getting vaccinated and instructed him to unify the narrative externally by saying, “I have already been vaccinated at home.” Later, his father specifically took him back to their hometown and obtained a certificate stating that he had been vaccinated.
The student admitted that during that time, he was “constantly uneasy due to not receiving the vaccine,” fearing consequences if he got infected. But his father kept emphasizing, “This is for your own good.”
It was only later, as discussions arose in society about vaccine side effects, controversies regarding vaccination, that the student recalled this incident, “I always feel there is a certain connection between these two cross-generational events, but I can’t express this connection.”
One weekend, after expressing this feeling to his father, his father said one profound sentence, “Some things are simply inexplicable and incomprehensible. At my age, either you understand it, or you will never understand it in your lifetime.”
Some netizens commented, “The Communist Party has never considered the lives of the lower-class people, in the past and now. This is why, despite knowing that the ‘zero-COVID’ policy contradicts science and leads to many deaths, they continue it, causing many casualties, and knowing that there is no reserve of antipyretics, they end the ‘zero-COVID’ policy abruptly, resulting in many casualties.”
Another netizen said, “His grandfather endured the hardships, hence the father became awakened and didn’t let him get vaccinated.”
Mr. Yang, the owner of a paper shop in Jiaozhou, Shandong, recently revealed to Epoch Times that in recent years, there has been a notable increase in deaths of individuals under forty due to heart attacks and strokes, “It is estimated that most people have already understood the connection—vaccines.”
(Extended Reading: [China Watch] The Suffering and Anger of COVID-19 Vaccine Victims)