Fireflies

Grievance

It was summer vacation. My parents were quarreling at home over something or other again. I took my MP4 player, a few books, and a few simple changes of clothes, and left — off to my grandmother’s house. At that time I thought: why don’t they just get divorced, and spare us all this trouble?

I played at my grandmother’s for a few days — reading e-books, sunbathing, doing a little farm work. Then my parents came looking for me, wanting to take me home.

My grandmother, smiling, said: the child must have felt wronged.

I have always remembered that sentence of hers.

–

Mid-Autumn Festival

On summer nights, hot and restless, we ran across the open ground chasing fireflies, leaping from one pile of haystacks to another.

I thought: my dear ones, when Mid-Autumn Festival comes, it will surely be a night just like this — quiet and lively, ordinary and profound — and how good it would be for us to admire the moon together.

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Feathers

Winter vacation was almost here. In Inner Mongolia, when the sky clears, it’s an endless blue, with layer upon layer of feathery clouds. My mother called me very early on, saying that a little helper had come to help out at the shop, and urging me to come home quickly. For four weeks in a row, five weeks, she kept going on about it. So I went home, and met the child in the knitted woolen hat, unseen for so long.

–

Looking back at all these stretches of time gone by, there is so much that moves me — small, yet standing tall, like lighthouse after lighthouse. The people who have passed, the heart matters that have faded away — how they stir sorrow and longing. And yet, every one of them was once such an insignificant instant, not worth mentioning.