Letter from a China Labor Camp

Sir: If you occasionally buy this product, please kindly resend this letter to the World Human Right Organization. Thousands people here who are under the persicution (sic) of the Chinese Communist Party Government will thank and remember you forever.

This is from a letter a woman found stuffed inside a package of Halloween decorations sold at a Kmart in Oregon, which had apparently traveled 5,000 miles from a labor camp in China, according to The New York Times. A 47-year-old former labor camp inmate named Zhang said he had written the letter, and that it was one of 20 letters he had written and stuffed in packages headed West:

Barred from having pens and paper, Mr. Zhang said he stole a set from a desk one day while cleaning a prison office. He worked while his cellmates slept, he said, taking care not to wake those inmates — often drug addicts or convicted thieves — whose job it was to keep the others in line. He would roll up the letter and hide it inside the hollow steel bars of his bunk bed, he said.

His efforts worked — the letter has been receiving international media attention. [via]

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