April | 2020 | A Mental Picture of Leland Wong

I certainly know what loneliness means and I really feel extremely sorry for you for what you’re going through now.
However you might not feel really that bad if you know the story of a guy called Bill Yim. He was locked up in solitary confinement for a whole year on espionage charges in China in 1959.
He was not allowed to talk or write to anybody and his mother in Hong Kong had no idea if her son was dead or alive for a long time.
He never had a chance to see any other prisoner throughout the 365 lonely days and the only company that surrounded him every night were mosquitoes in the cell.
There was no radio or music for him.The only reading materials were the People’s Daily and Chairman Mao’s books.
The window was high up on the wall, so out of reach he never got a chance to see anything outside.
He was allowed out of the cell for only five minutes every morning when the prison guard unlocked the heavy wooden door and ordered him to run down the corridor with his “toilet,” a wooden bucket, and empty the contents in a special room before running right back to the cell with an clean container for another day.
It was the most painful year of his life and a painful lesson that he will never forget. But life goes on and he never blames anybody.