Morning in the single room above the tailor's shop arrived as a slow, grey light seeping through the high window. Li Na woke to the soft, rhythmic sound of a brush on paper. She lay still for a moment, disoriented, the events of the previous day crashing over her like a slow, profound wave. The narrow bed, the smell of books and ink, the soft scratching sound—it wasn't a dream. She turned her head.
Chen Jian was already at his small desk by the window, his back to her, bent over a sheet of rice paper. The early light silhouetted him, a study in quiet concentration. He was writing. The scene was so peaceful, so utterly normal, that the enormity of who he was to her—and the decades of absence that normalcy concealed—felt surreal.
She shifted, and the floorboard creaked softly. He paused, the brush hovering above the paper, then set it down carefully and turned. His face, in the soft morning light, looked both older and younger than it had the night before. The lines of grief and solitude were still there, etched deep, but there was a new lightness in his eyes, a tentative openness that hadn't been present when she first saw him on the bridge.
"You are awake," he said, his voice a gentle rumble in the quiet room. "I did not mean to wake you."
"You didn't," she said, sitting up. "I always wake early." It was true, a habit inherited from her perpetually busy mother. The thought of her mother, here in this room with them, was a palpable presence. "What are you writing?"
A faint, almost shy smile touched his lips. "A poem. Or the beginnings of one. It has been… a long time since words came to me like this. Not as elegies, or exercises, but as… something alive." He gestured vaguely towards his heart. "They are clumsy. First words after a long silence often are."
"May I see?" she asked, the art historian in her curious, the daughter in her yearning for any piece of him.
He hesitated, then nodded. "It is not finished. Only a feeling trying to find its shape."
Li Na rose and walked over to stand behind him. The characters on the paper were bold yet graceful, the ink still damp. It was a short, four-line classical-style verse. She read it slowly, translating in her mind:
An empty bridge holds thirty autumns of rain,
A single thread, unseen, endured the strain.
From across the silent sea, a crane takes flight,
Bringing dawn to a shrine built for night.
Her breath caught. It was about her. About the bridge, the waiting, her arrival. It was raw, beautiful, and devastating in its simplicity. "It's not clumsy," she whispered, emotion thickening her voice. "It's perfect."
He made a small, dismissive sound, but a flush of pleasure colored his neck. "It is a start." He turned in his chair to look up at her. "Did you sleep?"
"Better than I have in weeks," she admitted, and it was true. The emotional exhaustion had been total, leading to a deep, dreamless sleep. "You?"
He considered the question. "I slept. And for the first time in many years, I did not dream of the bridge. I dreamed of… a library. A quiet, sunlit library. It was a good dream." He stood, his joints creaking slightly. "I will make tea. Then, if you wish, I can show you… some of her places. The places we loved."
The morning passed in a gentle, exploratory haze. Over simple tea and steamed buns bought from a street vendor, they talked of practicalities with a newfound, tentative ease. He learned of her life in San Francisco, her apartment near the Presidio, her work at the museum. She learned of his routines—the students he tutored in the afternoons, the small printing house that gave him copyediting work, the garden he sometimes volunteered at for quiet and greenery.
Then, he took her walking. This was not the Suzhou of postcards and guided tours. This was the secret, intimate Suzhou of his—and her mother's—youth. He showed her the dilapidated, now-closed silk mill where they had dreamed of running away together, its red bricks faded to pink, its windows boarded up. He took her to a tiny, hidden courtyard behind a bustling noodle shop, where a single, ancient plum tree grew. "We planted this," he said, his hand on its gnarled trunk. "A foolish, hopeful act. Two kids with no land, planting a tree behind a shop. The owner was a friend. He let us. It has bloomed every spring since."
He pointed out the second-story window of a now-modernized building that had once been a cheap boarding house where they'd spent hours talking, dreaming, reading poetry to each other. He showed her the spot by a lesser-known canal where he'd first kissed her, a moment he described not with florid romance, but with a poignant specificity that made it more real than any film: "She had a smudge of ink on her nose from helping me with a poster. I reached to wipe it off, and then… I just couldn't not kiss her."
With each location, Li Na felt her mother come alive in a new dimension. No longer just the formidable businesswoman or the heartbroken exile, but a vibrant, laughing, ink-smudged young woman full of fire and dreams. She was seeing her mother through the eyes of the one person who had truly, wholly loved her. It was a sacred gift.
As they walked back towards his neighborhood in the late afternoon, a comfortable silence settled between them, punctuated by his occasional, soft-spoken commentary on a carving over a door, or the history of a particular bridge. The ease was growing, but beneath it, Li Na felt the tug of the inevitable. Her return flight to San Francisco was in four days. Her life, her job, her unfinished business with her mother's estate—it all waited across the ocean. The idyllic, painful bubble of discovery in Suzhou could not last.
They stopped at a small park overlooking a quiet stretch of water. Sitting on a weathered stone bench, the unspoken question finally surfaced.
"You will have to go back soon," Jian stated, not looking at her, his gaze on a pair of ducks paddling in the murky water.
"Yes. In a few days." The words felt heavy. "There's… there's so much to settle. The business, her house… everything."
He nodded slowly. "Of course. Your life is there." He said it without accusation, but the resignation in his voice was a physical ache in her chest.
"It doesn't have to be the end of this," she said quickly, turning to him. "We have phones. Video calls. I can come back. You could…" She trailed off, the next words feeling both presumptuous and desperately necessary. "You could visit. Come to San Francisco."
He looked at her then, a world of sadness and wonder in his eyes. "San Francisco. I have seen it in films. The red bridge, the hills, the fog." He paused. "Her city. The city she built her life in." The idea seemed to both attract and terrify him. To walk the streets she had walked, to see the world she had created without him—it would be the final, overwhelming chapter of a story he had only just learned the truth of.
"It's my city too," Li Na said gently. "And it's full of her. Her house, her things… her memory. It's a different part of the story. Your part of the story is here, in these canals, with the young Wei Lin. My part… our part… is there, with the woman she became. Maybe to understand it all, you need to see that too."
He was silent for a long time, watching the ducks. "A passport," he said finally, a practical, almost comical concern breaking the profound mood. "I do not have one. I have not left Suzhou, not truly, since…" He didn't finish the sentence. Since she left.
"We can figure that out," Li Na said, hope sparking in her voice. "It takes time, but we can start the process. I can help. I have… resources." Her mother's words, her mother's pragmatic tone, echoed in her own. The irony wasn't lost on her.
He gave a soft, almost imperceptible chuckle. "You sound like her just then. 'We can figure that out.'" He sighed, a long, slow release of breath. "To see where she lived. To see where you grew up." He looked at her, his eyes searching her face as if memorizing it. "It is a very big world to step into, for an old man who has grown used to a small room and a familiar bridge."
"You're not old," she said, the fierceness of her tone surprising them both. "And the bridge will still be here. But I won't always be there. And neither will her ghost. They're waiting for you, across the sea. Not as shadows, but as… as places. As real things."
The word ghosthung between them. He had lived with a ghost for thirty years. The prospect of confronting the physical reality of her life—her home, her city, the empire she built from their shattered dreams—was daunting in an entirely new way.
"Let me think," he said quietly, not a refusal, but a request for space to absorb the monumental shift. "For thirty years, my world has been bounded by the sound of this water, the view from that bridge. The idea of an airplane… of America…" He shook his head slightly, not in negation, but in awe at the scale of it.
"Just think about it," Li Na said, placing her hand over his on the cool stone of the bench. It was a gesture that was becoming familiar, a point of contact that grounded them both. "No pressure. Just… know the invitation is there. Always."
He turned his hand to grasp hers, his grip surprisingly strong. "You have given me back my past," he said, his voice thick. "You ask me to consider a future. It is… a generous earthquake."
They sat there as the afternoon waned, the father who had been a monument and the daughter who had become a bridge, watching the water hold the reflection of a world that was, for both of them, irrevocably changed. The outlines of San Francisco's hills and the towers of its bridges seemed to shimmer, mirage-like, in the distance, a new world waiting to be explored, not alone, but together. The journey across the ocean was no longer just a return flight for Li Na; it had become a potential voyage for two, a crossing from the land of memory to the land of legacy.
End of Chapter 6