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Li Memorial in Hong Kong: "May there be no lies in heaven"
Photo:
Lam Yik Fei / The New York Times / Reudx / Laif
How are you?
Just this one question and Frau Lü bursts into tears.
'What do you think?
Such a good boy passed away, ”she sobs, her voice shaking behind the respirator.
“Always a hardworking student.
Respectful to his parents.
He was in his prime and had a bright future ahead of him.
And now he's dead. "
The months that have passed since her only son died have not eased her pain.
Ms. Lü, probably in her late fifties, with an ink-black perm, speaks the heavy dialect of the Chinese northeast.
She is a simple woman from the provinces.
How proud she must have been when her boy made it from his birthplace in Beizhen, a town in Liaoning Province that is characterized by heavy industry, to the metropolis of Wuhan.
To the University.
That he had become an ophthalmologist, husband, father.
Li Wenliang fulfilled the ambition of all Chinese parents, he had made something of himself.
When he was 34, he was living the dream of China's ambitious new middle class.
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