From my perspective, he has been imprisoned.

Every day, after he wakes up, the only exercise he gets is walking to and fro in the apartment. He spends most of the day sunbathing by the window and watching passers-by on the streets. If it is overcast, watching TV in his small bedroom becomes his main entertainment.

Family members seldom talk to him, as everybody has their hands full nowadays. Sometimes he has a strong desire to communicate, but the generational gap soon kills such conver-sations. He is not allowed to squander money on a phone, which forces him to place phone calls like a thief.

The friendly neighbours who had been living together for half a century have moved to different places, and now he has to live in a cold concrete enclosure, totally isolated from the outside world.

When he was much stronger, he would go outside for exercise in the morning, and then he would wander around in the after-noon, sometimes visiting old neigh-bours or relatives. His favourite activity then was attending the meetings for retired Party members, held every two weeks. He would count the days to the next one and go whatever the weather.

One day he fell over onto the pavement and hurt his face and hands. From then on, he was forbidden to go outside. ¡°You should bear in mind that you are 80 years old, not 18!¡± he was told. Then his bicycle was sold, and his stick was hidden.

Don¡¯t get me wrong by thinking that he has been persecuted. He lives with his son¡¯s family. They wouldn¡¯t let him do any housework, and he is only required to keep tidy, which means he cannot move freely. Every day at the dinner table, family members turn a deaf ear to his nostalgic words, or even laugh at them. They do not understand each other.

¡°An old person living like him is very lucky,¡± his son once said. ¡°We cook good meals for him, wash his clothes every day. He has nothing to worry about. When he becomes ill, we take him to see the best doctor. So far we have kept the death of his brother¡¯s wife a secret from him.¡±

But an undeniable fact is that his health has been declining since his retirement. He has grown irritable and upset, and developed ever more diseases. To add insult to injury, his memory has begun to fail.

This is a common phenomenon today and there are a lot of old people living in this way. Their sons or daughters take it for granted that they are content, and their collapse may well be the result of old age. But such complacency ignores the fact that human beings need more than food, clothes and shelter. In their material abundance, the elderly are suffering spiritual hunger, and that is fatal.

No one is to blame. The middle-aged sons and daughters are called the ¡°generation that suffered the most¡±. They experienced the famine in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the ¡°cultural revolution¡± (1966-1976) and now some of them have been laid off. They have lived quite turbulent lives and devoted themselves to earning their daily bread. In the prime of their life, they were deprived of the opportunity for education, as well as healthy growth. They cannot understand their elders¡¯ pain in today¡¯s stable time.

Actually some old people themselves feel guilty about their suffering. Their children show filial piety toward them. With retirement pension and medical care, they live much better than others who have to spend the rest of their lives in homes for the aged. Quite a few old people still think it shameful to live in old age homes ¡ª In their eyes, it means they have been abandoned by their children.

This is a tragedy of tradition.