The world, for Chen Jian, had suddenly acquired a new axis, and it pointed west, across an ocean he had never seen. The decision, once spoken aloud to Li Na on the flickering screen, took on a tangible, daunting weight. It was no longer a phantom possibility, but a series of concrete, bewildering steps.
The day after that momentous call, he stood in line at the Suzhou Public Security Bureau, a place of echoing halls and stern-faced officials behind glass partitions. He clutched a folder containing documents he had gathered over a lifetime—his household registration booklet, his national ID card, proof of no criminal record (a simple matter for a man whose greatest rebellion had been loving one woman for thirty years), and the hardest to obtain: a letter from his neighborhood committee verifying his residence and character. The man who wrote the letter, Old Wang from the noodle shop, had clapped him on the shoulder. "Going to see the world, Lao Chen? About time!"
The world. The word felt vast and hollow. His world had been this city, its waterways his veins, its bridges his joints. The thought of a 13-hour flight in a metal tube, of airports like miniature cities, of a place where the language was a torrent of unfamiliar sounds, sent a quiet tremor through his hands as he handed his papers to the clerk.
The clerk, a young woman with tired eyes, flipped through his documents. "Purpose of travel?" she asked without looking up.
He hesitated. To see my daughter. To walk the streets my lost love walked. To understand the shape of her other life.None of these seemed like acceptable answers on a government form. "Tourism," he said, the word feeling foreign on his tongue. "Family visit."
She stamped a form, slid it back under the glass. "Photo booth in the corner. Come back with two passport photos. Next."
The process was a ritual of mundane anxiety. The photo booth, with its harsh fluorescent light, captured his face—the deeply lined, solemn face of a Chinese scholar, a face that spoke of books and quiet canals, not of trans-Pacific journeys. He looked at the tiny prints, four identical images of a man who seemed startled by his own audacity.
Meanwhile, in San Francisco, Li Na's preparation was of a different kind. Her mother's house, once a museum of silence, became a site of archaeological excavation. Armed with the knowledge from the ledger, she began searching for other fragments, other testaments to the hidden life within the fortress.
She started with the sleek, modern filing cabinets in the home office. Behind folders marked "Tax Returns," "Business Licenses," and "Property Deeds," she found a plain, unlabeled manila folder tucked at the very back of the bottom drawer. Inside were bank statements, old and faded, for an account at a small local credit union. The account was in her mother's name, but the transaction history told a silent story. Regular, modest deposits from her primary business account, followed by periodic transfers to banks in China—the same amounts and dates that corresponded to the entries in the leather-bound ledger. It was the financial skeleton of her secret vigil.
But Li Na wanted flesh. She wanted the heart behind the numbers.
She returned to the closet, to the hatbox. Beneath the ledger, her fingers touched something stiff and flat. She pulled out a large, yellowing envelope. Inside was not a financial document, but a single sheet of rice paper, the kind Jian used. It was a poem, handwritten in a youthful, slightly less controlled version of the script she now knew so well. The ink was faded to sepia. At the top, it was titled: First Snow on the Humble Administrator's Garden, for Wei Lin.
Her mother had kept one of his poems. Not a copy. The original.
Li Na sat on the closet floor, the delicate paper trembling in her hands. She could imagine him, young and earnest, presenting it to her. She could imagine her mother, the fierce young intellectual, accepting it, her heart swelling with a love she couldn't yet afford to fully show. She had carried it across an ocean. She had hidden it away, a piece of his soul kept safe, a secret treasure in her fortress of practicality.
The discovery changed the energy in the house. The cold, minimalist spaces began to feel not empty, but pregnant with unspoken stories. Li Na started making changes. She took down a large, impersonal abstract painting from the living room wall. In its place, she carefully framed the poem, placing it where the light from the bay window would catch the texture of the paper. It was a small act of rebellion against her mother's curated anonymity, a way of declaring that the poet's voice would finally have a place in this house.
Her video calls with Jian became planning sessions, infused with a nervous, hopeful energy.
"The form asks for an 'invitation letter' from the host in America," Jian reported one afternoon, squinting at a document. "What does this mean?"
"I'll write one," Li Na said. "I'll say you're my father, visiting for family reasons. I'll include a copy of my passport and a bank statement. I'll send it by the fastest service."
"You do not have to…" he began, the old independence surfacing.
"I want to," she said firmly. "This is part of it. Let me help."
He acquiesced with a grateful nod. "The lady at the photo place said my ears were not even in the picture. She made me take it three times."
Li Na laughed, a sound that felt good in the quiet house. "They're very strict."
"They are," he agreed solemnly. Then, a pause. "Li Na. When I come… where will I stay?"
The question hung in the digital space between them. Her small apartment was barely big enough for her. Her mother's house was vast, empty, and fraught with history.
"Here," she said without hesitation. "At Mom's house. It has plenty of room. And… I think she would want you here. I think, in her way, she always meant for you to see it."
He was silent for a long moment, looking down at his hands on the small table in his room. "To sleep under her roof," he murmured. "To walk on her floors. It is a strange thought."
"It's your roof too," Li Na said softly. "In a way you never knew."
A few days later, another discovery. While cleaning out a neglected cabinet in the garage—a place her mother, who never drove, had rarely visited—Li Na found a small, dust-covered suitcase. It was an old, hard-sided Samsonite, the kind people used in the 80s and 90s. It was locked. With a sense of inevitability, Li Na fetched the jade hairpin from her purse. The slender end fit into the old, simple lock. It turned.
The suitcase was not full of clothes. It was a time capsule. Neatly folded inside were the things her mother could not bear to use, but could not bear to throw away when she left China. A few simple cotton blouses, faded with age. A pair of well-worn cloth shoes. A small, hand-painted fan. A notebook filled with engineering diagrams and economic theories in a young, vigorous hand—her mother's university notes. And, wrapped in tissue paper at the very bottom, a small, carved wooden box.
Inside the wooden box was a ring. A simple, silver band, unadorned. It was too small for her mother's fingers in later life. An engagement ring? A promise? There was no inscription. But Li Na knew, with absolute certainty, that it was from Jian. A poet's offering, not of diamond, but of silver. Of moon-metal. Of constancy.
She didn't tell him about it on their next call. She wanted it to be a surprise. A physical token, waiting for him in this new world, a tiny circle of proof that his love had been received, acknowledged, and kept secret for a lifetime.
The weeks passed. Jian's passport application moved through the bureaucratic maze. Li Na transformed her mother's house. She didn't redecorate, but she populated it. She placed the framed poem in the living room. She set the old, carved wooden box with the silver ring on the nightstand in the guest room she had prepared for him. She bought a new, comfortable armchair and placed it by the large window with the best view of the city and the distant, often fog-shrouded Golden Gate Bridge. A scholar needed a good chair for reading, for thinking.
One evening, as they talked, Jian seemed quieter than usual.
"Is everything okay?" Li Na asked. "With the passport?"
"It is progressing," he said. "They say maybe two more weeks." He paused. "I went to the bridge tonight."
Li Na's heart clenched. "And?"
"It felt different," he said, his voice soft with wonder. "For thirty years, I stood there facing the west, looking toward where I thought she had gone. Tonight, I stood there, and I knew where she had gone. I knew the name of the streets, the color of the fog. I knew her daughter was there, preparing a room. I was not looking into an unknown void. I was looking toward a specific point on the map. Toward you." He took a deep breath. "It made the bridge feel smaller. And the world feel… knowable."
Li Na swallowed the lump in her throat. "I'll be at that specific point on the map, waiting for you."
The preparations—his bureaucratic rituals, her acts of archaeological love—were more than just practical tasks. They were a joint ceremony of healing, of weaving two separate histories into a single, forward-looking narrative. He was gathering the documents of his old life to embark on a new one. She was uncovering the artifacts of a hidden love to make a home for it.
The fortress in Pacific Heights was no longer a monument to solitary success. It was becoming a museum of a reconciled past, and a home for a future neither Wei Lin nor Chen Jian had dared to imagine. The bridge was being extended, stone by stone, form by form, poem by poem, across the ocean. And at its end, no longer a lonely figure in the sunset, but a daughter, waiting in the fog, ready to welcome her father home.
End of Chapter 9