chapter 1

The year I quit my job, I began asking every university classmate I was still in touch with for news of Ren Fei. I always brought him up as if by accident. Most of the answers I received were rumors, each vague enough to be true or false. We had studied under a credit-based academic system, and our class had never been especially close. After graduation, everyone went their separate ways, and classmates often vanished from one another’s lives altogether.

But I had always thought Ren Fei would be the exception.

Back in university, he had been one of the eight most talked-about figures in our school.

Some said he had gone to Australia after graduation and stayed there all the way through postdoctoral work. Others said they had run into him recently in City C; apparently he had returned to China and joined a securities firm as an investment analyst. That afternoon, I ran into Xiao An on MSN. From thousands of miles away, she typed a line of enormous bold text at me: Ren Fei? I heard he got married recently. The bride is the girl he was with at the end of senior year—what was her name again? Oh, Michelle.

She sent an enormous smiley face. After years abroad, Xiao An—who had once spent most of high school failing English—had become thoroughly Westernized in style. Then she typed out the bride’s Chinese name for me: Mi Xue.

Yes. I remembered her. The girl really was called Mi Xue: Mi was her surname, and Xue meant snow.

That night, after hearing the news, I went downstairs to KFC and ordered a family bucket. I ate while sorting through my memories of Ren Fei. By the time I had polished off the entire bucket, even licking the grease from my fingers, my recollections had arrived at the eve of graduation. That unremarkable stretch of memory was nearing its end too.

In truth, the story was a rather sad one.

I had always had a crush on Ren Fei, just like many of the other girls in our school—only I was shyer, more insecure, and far less brave. The bolder girls would hand him towels and water when he rested during basketball games. They wrote beautiful, moving love letters. Some of them probably sent him suggestive text messages too.

The boldest thing I ever did happened during the autumn of sophomore year, when I traveled to Miyaluo. At a roadside stall selling colored postcards, I bought a set, chose the prettiest one, and mailed it to him. The card itself was not particularly fine, yet it did nothing to diminish Miyaluo’s famous red leaves. A rich, burning crimson filled the whole face of the card; behind it lay green-blue water and the shadow of emerald mountains, like a line from an old poem:

> At dusk, sweetgum blossoms rest in stillness;

> Brocade waters mirror the southern hills.

Before I wrote anything, I worried for a long time about what might sound special. Yet when the pen touched paper, all I wrote was this: “The sky in Miyaluo is very blue, and the red leaves are beautiful, but the food here is awful. If you ever come, remember to bring snacks, or you’ll suffer. Also, bring an umbrella. It drizzled suddenly yesterday. The weather here changes as unpredictably as our English teacher’s temper.”

Our shared English teacher was then in menopause. She was like some cryptic ancient text, her moods harder to decipher than the dreaded College English Test Band 6 (CET-6).

A postcard that read more like a travel tip than a confession was mailed in the end. Even now, I do not know whether he ever received it, or whether, if he did, he found it bewildering. I only remember that many years later, the moment I dropped it into the mailbox still felt strangely peaceful.

The wonder of nature lies in the courage it lends people. Perhaps that was why Du Fu could write, with such grandeur: “One day I shall stand upon the highest peak and see all other mountains small.”

Those clouds, those trees, that wind—they turned me, for one fleeting moment, into a girl brave beyond measure. For the first time, I wanted to send the feelings in my heart to him, to let him know.

And once I left Miyaluo, that courage left me too.