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      By Gina Chen (Taiwan) 文:陈雅琪(台湾)    Health – The Best Gift For My Father 最想送给父亲的礼物是健康 After my father’s cancer diagnosis, I realised that health was the gift I really wanted for him. 少年不识双亲意,养儿方知父母恩。父亲患癌 才知道健康是我最想送出的礼物。      Throughout 13 years of working at POPULAR, I have always followed my father's teaching to be conscientious and diligent in work, and to be kind to others. 30 November 2021 was a day that I will never forget. What started off as an ordinary day ended up anything but, for it was the day when I learnt of my father’s illness. I visited my parents after work as usual. However, my parents were sitting in the living room and my mother was in tears. My father had been diagnosed with stage 4 lymphoma. Changes to My Father's Bedroom Decor A veteran of the Army’s Special Forces, my father had always maintained the diligence and thriftiness that he had learnt in the early 1940s. Eventually becoming a tailor, I often saw him standing over his cutting machine with his reading glasses through the years. However, it had been a while since we last heard his shears in action. I walked into my father's bedroom after learning about his diagnosis. Everything looked the same at first glance. His shirts were still neatly hanging outside the closet, but the pile of work documents on top of his bedside cabinet was missing. In its place were ointments, medicinal patches, fan, herbal medicines, and a thermal cup. Pasted on my mother's dressing table were many sticky notes reminding them of the appointments at the hospital. Because of the presbyopia of my parents, the handwriting on these notes was exceptionally large. Temporarily Closed My father's workshop was my childhood playground, and the various threads in his collection were my toys. Found in every colour of the rainbow, these threads would transform into the transmission lines of our self-made telephones. Climbing the stacks of fabrics was like climbing a mountain. I would conquer one fabric mountain before moving on to the next. Even his cutting board would become a prop for my imaginary opera performances. The workshop is full of such memories. I saw stacks of papers, cardboard, and newspapers when I went into his workshop this time. Some newspapers had already turned yellow. There were also stacks of patterns that my father had produced painstakingly with his ruler, 142 popularnews - 31 


































































































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