At that moment, the image of ocean waves on the inside of the canvas bag, the blue-gray morning mist of Namtso Lake, his grandmother's barley wine recipe, the angle of the sunrise over the mountains in Yubeng Village, and the inscription "Go to Qinghai" suddenly connected in his mind. It was a morning in 1992 when a woman named Lin Lan, carrying this canvas bag embroidered with ocean waves, carved words in front of a locker in the waiting room. Inside the bag were recipes passed down from her mother, with illustrations of the snow-capped mountains and sunshine she longed for drawn on the page margins. Then she boarded the train to Qinghai, perhaps to see migratory birds, or perhaps to fulfill some unspoken promise.
Thirty-three years later, he picked up the bag in a renovated waiting room. The color of the strap was the morning mist he had seen, the embroidered waves were the coral reefs he had dived in, the recipe was the flavor passed down from his grandmother, and the sun was the snow-capped mountains he had climbed. Zhong Hua stood up, picked up the bag, and walked out of the old waiting room. In the distance, the glass curtain wall of the newly built subway station reflected the city lights, while the canvas bag in his arms exuded a faint scent, a mixture of wheat and dust, as if it had locked the wind of the entire Qinghai-Tibet Plateau into the blue-gray morning mist.
He took out his phone and called Ayu. Her voice, just waking up, came through the receiver. "Ayu," he said, gazing at the newly appearing stars on the horizon, "I found something. Do you remember the coral reefs of Weizhou Island? And the morning mist of Namtso Lake? It's the exact same color as the strap of this bag..."
There was a few seconds of silence on the other end of the phone, then Ayu said softly, "Zhonghua, my maternal grandmother's name is Lin Lan."
The evening breeze suddenly picked up, causing the strap of Zhong Hua's canvas bag to sway gently. He looked down at the waves inside the bag; the indigo threads shimmered under the streetlights, and the crest of a wave caught a falling star, much like the moment on Weizhou Island when the last rays of the setting sun swept across the coral reefs as the sun dipped below the horizon. In the distance, in the ruins of the old waiting room, locker number 7 stood silently in the shadows, the inscription "Waiting for the wind, to Qinghai" on the locker door slowly filling in the moonlight.
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