[China File] In early July 2020, Xu Zhangrun was detained for supposedly having "solicited prostitutes" during a trip with friends to Sichuan in late 2019. He was being persecuted for his unsparing critiques of Xi Jinping, starting in July 2018. The charge against him was spurious and the kind of legalized calumny often used by the authorities to silence critics. While he was held in custody, Tsinghua University fired him from his position as a professor of law, a job that he had held for two decades. The university also notified Xu that he had been stripped of his pension and all accrued benefits; the authorities even canceled his accreditation as an educator, meaning that he was no longer employable. To add insult to injury, Tsinghua ordered him to vacate his apartment on the university campus. An outcry both in China and internationally possibly influenced a decision to release him a few days after he was detained, and as soon as he regained his freedom Xu issued further broadsides aimed at the authorities. Over the following eight months—part of the Lunar Gengzi Year of the Rat, according to the traditional Chinese calendar—he published a series of uncompromising essays written in an epistolary style. On February 11, 2021, the eve of the Xinchou Year of the Ox, he posted the introduction to a collection of those essays titled Ten Letters from a Plague Year.ChinaFile has previously published two letters in the series: "A Letter to My Editors and to China’s Censors" and "A Farewell to My Students." The following letter is addressed to the writer’s daughter, who, having just completed her doctoral studies in Australia, was about to return to Beijing. In July 2022, Xu Zhangrun was still waiting for a response.