The scent of jasmine tea grew cold between them. The ginkgo leaves whispered overhead, a soft, indifferent chorus to the seismic shift in Li Na's universe. The photographs in her lap, the desperate words of the final letter—they were not relics. They were live wires, sparking through thirty years of silence, electrifying a past she never knew she inhabited.
"My… father," Li Na repeated, the word foreign and heavy on her tongue. She had never spoken it with intent. Her mother had dismissed the subject with a finality that brooked no inquiry. A mistake, a fleeting thing, best forgotten.The foundation of her life—her identity as the sole, determined creation of a single, formidable woman—cracked and splintered.
Auntie Mei's gaze was a pool of old sorrows. "His name is Chen Jian. He was—is—a poet. Not a successful one, by worldly standards. But his soul… his soul was a lantern. It lit up your mother's. And hers, his." She poured fresh tea, the steaming liquid a small anchor in the swirling moment. "Their love was a quiet rebellion. Wei Lin, so bright, so ambitious, a swallow wanting the whole sky. Jian, rooted like a willow by the canal, finding whole universes in a drop of water, a line of verse. They were opposites that made a perfect, fragile whole."
"What happened?" Li Na's voice was hoarse. "Exactly."
Mei sighed, a sound that seemed to carry the weight of the water-laden air. "1996. It was a different time. More rigid. Families were fortresses, and duty was the law within the walls. Your grandparents—my parents—were traditional. Proud, but afraid. The political winds had shifted, economic reforms were churning, and uncertainty made people clutch their status more tightly. The Chens were an old family, respectable but not wealthy. Jian's father had a small printing business. Our family were scholars, but with no money. Your mother had a chance to go to America, to study, to send money back. It was a golden ticket out of the struggle."
She paused, her eyes seeing a different time. "Jian's father arranged a marriage with the daughter of a more prosperous family. A business alliance, wrapped in tradition. Jian refused. He was gentle, but stubborn when it came to his heart. He and your mother… they made a plan. They would leave Suzhou, go south to Guangzhou, find work, build a life on their own terms. They were so young. They thought love was armor enough."
Li Na clutched the blue silk qipao. The embroidery of the cranes was exquisite, every stitch a promise. "They were betrayed."
"By fear," Mei corrected softly. "My father found their letters. He intercepted one of Jian's, pleading with Lin to meet him. He and my mother were terrified. They saw a daughter throwing away a secure future for a poet's fantasy, inviting scandal, cutting ties with a family that could have lifted them all. And Jian's father was furious, humiliated by his son's defiance. The two fathers… they spoke. They decided to end it. My father wrote a letter to Jian, in your mother's hand, saying she had chosen America, that their love was a youthful folly. Jian's father, I believe, told Jian your mother had already left, that she saw him as an anchor holding her back."
"The letter in the box," Li Na whispered. "The one that said, 'I will wait… until the canal runs dry.' He never sent it?"
"He tried. His cousin, sympathetic, smuggled it out. But my parents intercepted it. They showed it to your mother, yes, but they told her it was a guilt-ridden farewell, written afterJian had agreed to his arranged marriage. They told her he was letting her go gently. Her heart was broken, but her pride was shattered. She felt foolish. Betrayed. The fire in her went out. She took the ticket to America the next week, numb with grief. She did not know she was already carrying you."
The pieces, sharp and cutting, fell into place. Her mother's relentless drive, her emotional austerity, her deep-seated mistrust of vulnerability—they were not innate traits. They were scar tissue. Armor forged in the white-hot furnace of a double betrayal, fueled by what she believed was Jian's capitulation.
"And Jian?" Li Na asked, the question hanging like the mist over the canals. "What did he believe?"
Auntie Mei's face grew pained. "He believed she chose a new life over him. He refused the arranged marriage. His father disowned him, for a time. He lost his place in the family business, his standing. People said he was mad. A dreamer destroyed by dreams." She looked at Li Na, her eyes glistening. "But he kept one promise. Every evening, as the sun sets, he goes to the Great Canal Bridge at the edge of the old town. The place they first… understood their hearts. He stands there. Sometimes for minutes, sometimes for an hour. Rain or shine. For thirty years."
The image struck Li Na with physical force: a solitary figure, etched against the dying light, waiting for a ghost. A love story had not ended; it had been suspended, frozen in a moment of misunderstanding, its characters trapped in parallel prisons of pain.
"Why didn't she ever come back? When she knew the truth?" The question was a plea.
"By the time I learned the full story from my mother on her deathbed, years had passed," Mei said. "You were a teenager in America. Your mother had built her fortress. She was successful, formidable. To reopen that wound… to admit her parents' deceit, her own misjudgment… to face him after all that time, with a daughter he never knew… I think the shame, and the fear of causing him more pain, paralyzed her. She sent money, secretly, to help him at times when she heard he was struggling. But she could not send herself."
Li Na looked down at the photograph of the laughing young couple. The man, Jian, her father, had kind eyes. What did thirty years of waiting do to kind eyes?
"I have to see him," she said, the decision forming as the words left her lips. It was not a thought, but a compulsion, a biological and gravitational pull.
Auntie Mei nodded slowly, as if she had expected this. "He is not an easy man to find by day. He works odd jobs—copyediting, tutoring, sometimes writing funeral elegies for those who remember his way with words. He lives simply, near the Humble Administrator's Garden. But at sunset…" She glanced at the sky, where the afternoon light was beginning to mellow. "At sunset, he is a fixture. Like the stone of the bridge itself."
She gave Li Na an address, a simple description. "Do not expect the young man in the photograph," Mei warned gently, her hand covering Li Na's. "Life has carved him deeply. The waiting… it is not a passive thing. It is an active wound, kept open."
The hours until sunset stretched and contracted with a strange elasticity. Li Na wandered the streets of Suzhou, the city now rendered in a new, poignant dimension. Every arched bridge was thebridge. Every elderly man sitting by the water, watching the boats, made her heart lurch. The romantic canals she'd seen as picturesque now felt like veins pulsing with hidden history, carrying the echoes of a thousand lost whispers, her mother's and Jian's among them.
She found the Humble Administrator's Garden, a masterpiece of Ming Dynasty landscape art, a world of serene ponds, pagodas, and manicured harmony. It felt like a stage set for a peace her inner world could not fathom. Nearby, in a warren of old lanes, was the address Mei had given: a small, faded blue door in a whitewashed wall.
She did not knock. She was not ready for that collision. Instead, she retreated, her heart a drum in her chest, and made her way toward the Great Canal Bridge as the sky began to bleed orange and purple.
The bridge was broader, older than the delicate footbridges of the inner canals. It was a workhorse of stone, spanning the wide, murky green waterway where long, low barges still plied their trade. The setting sun glinted off the water, painting the world in tones of fire and gold.
And there, at the highest point of the arc, leaning against the weathered stone parapet, was a man.
From a distance, he was a silhouette, thin and slightly stooped. He wore a simple grey jacket, his hands in his pockets, his gaze fixed on the western horizon where the sun was melting into the haze. He did not move. He was a statue of attention, a monument to a single moment in time.
Li Na's feet carried her forward, each step on the ancient cobblestones echoing in the cavern of her ribs. She stopped at the foot of the bridge, her breath caught. This was him. The poet. The dreamer. The man who loved her mother enough to let a single sunset define his life for three decades.
As she watched, unseen, the last sliver of sun vanished. The golden light softened into twilight. The man—Jian—stayed a moment longer, as if committing the afterglow to memory. Then, with a slow, deliberate movement that spoke of a ritual performed ten thousand times, he pushed himself away from the parapet and turned.
He began to walk down the bridge, toward her.
Li Na froze. The distance closed. She saw his face now, illuminated by the dusky light. The handsomeness of the photograph was still there, but it was a ruin of its former self. Deep lines carved his forehead and framed his mouth, not from laughter, but from weathering. His hair was more grey than black, swept back from a high forehead. But his eyes… they were the same as in the picture. Intelligent, deep, and hauntingly sad. They were the eyes of a man who spent his life looking at horizons, searching for something that never appeared.
He passed within three feet of her, his gaze turned inward, unseeing. He carried an aura of profound solitude, a quiet so deep it was louder than the street sounds around them. He smelled of old books, ink, and the faint, clean scent of laundry soap.
A thousand words crowded her throat. Father. I'm Li Na. Wei Lin's daughter. She never stopped loving you.They jammed together, a silent, desperate cacophony.
But her voice failed her. The sheer weight of his loneliness, the tangible reality of his thirty-year vigil, struck her mute. This was not a story in a box. This was a man whose life had been hijacked by a lie. To speak now, to drop the bomb of her existence into the still waters of his endured reality, felt violent, terrifying.
So she stood, a ghost herself, and let him walk past. He descended the far side of the bridge and was swallowed by the gathering twilight of the narrow lane.
Tears, hot and sudden, blurred the ancient stones of Suzhou. They were not just tears of pity, or sadness for her mother. They were tears of awe, and of a devastating, humbling understanding. This was love. Not the love of grand gestures in stories, but love as a stubborn, daily choosing of pain. Love as a standing post. Love as a wound that would not scar over because to let it heal would be to let her go.
Her mother had built an empire from her pain.
Her father had built a shrine from his.
And she, Li Na, stood between them, the living bridge they had never crossed. The truth was no longer a secret in a box. It was a living, breathing man walking away into the dark. And she knew, with a certainty that vibrated in her very bones, that she could not let him walk away for a thirty-first year.
But how do you hand a man back the life that was stolen from him? How do you introduce yourself as the daughter of the woman whose memory had been both his anchor and his chains?
The first star appeared over the canal, a cold, distant pinprick. Somewhere in the maze of white walls and black tiles, a single, aged poet was heating a simple meal in a quiet room, unaware that the past had not only caught up with him—it was here, weeping on his bridge, and it wore his daughter's face.
Li Na wiped her cheeks, the cool silk of her sleeve a soft shock against her skin. The mission was no longer about discovery. It was about delivery. She had to find the words. She had to find the courage her mother had lost. The sun had set on another day of waiting. Tomorrow, she vowed to the darkening water, she would be the sunrise.
End of Chapter 2