Two letters
As the wind, carrying snowflakes, swept across the prayer flags in the Tibetan region, Ah Yu was squatting under the barley trellis, polishing a silver ring. The sunlight nailed his shadow to the frozen earth, like a stubborn Gesang flower. Zhong Hua came out of the wooden house carrying a freshly dried blanket, her hair still clung to the wool. When she saw the silver gleam on his fingertips, she suddenly remembered three years ago in the mudslide, when he had held her wrist in the same way, the calluses on his fingertips rubbing against her wrist until it burned.
“You’ve been in Tibet for so long, you’re practically a silversmith now.” She draped a blanket over his shoulder, her gaze falling on the wooden box on his lap. It was from an old silver shop in the county town, its edges polished to a shine. “Actually, you don’t need to be so particular.”
When Ah Yu looked up, a few snowflakes landed on her eyelashes. He didn't reply, but simply tucked the ring back into the wooden box, the soft clinking of metal startling the sparrows under the eaves. Zhong Hua knew his temperament; once he made up his mind, nothing could sway him—just like when she was in a coma in the ICU, he insisted on reading his interview transcript to the monitor for three days straight, and even the nurses remembered the line, "the person I want to thank the most."
Before dawn this morning, he ran into the ravine with the wooden box in his hand. Zhong Hua peeked through the window and saw him standing in front of the prayer wheel for a long time. When the crimson monk's robe swept past his feet, she suddenly remembered the Paris map that Lin Wanqing had sent her. In the corner, there was a line of small print: "The wind in Tibet will blow your thoughts into prayer flags."
The postman's motorcycle rumbled into the yard around lunchtime. A little girl with a red hair tie held up two kraft paper envelopes, and the green mailbag in the basket was still damp with snow. "Mr. Ah Yu, Ms. Zhong Hua, international mail and registered mail." Her Mandarin had a Tibetan-accented retroflex sound, like a small brush gently sweeping across the ear.
When Ah Yu took the envelope, her fingertips first touched the wax seal on the international mail—a dried lavender flower, exactly the same as the one Lin Wanqing had hidden in the plane ticket she sent from Paris that year. Zhong Hua's fingertips, on the other hand, rested on the stamp on another letter, a picture of the corner tower of the Forbidden City, with the postmark in the lower right corner bearing the name of her hometown county.
"Who sent it?" Ah Yu handed the international package to her, his Adam's apple bobbing. He remembered Lin Wanqing saying in the last video call that she was chasing wildebeest on the African savanna, the signal was intermittent, and the background noise was always mixed with the howling of hyenas.
Zhong Hua didn't take it, but stared blankly at the corner tower stamp. She could recognize her mother's handwriting at a glance; the strokes always carried a hint of the sluggishness of a pen nib gliding across rough letter paper—like the little hole her mother had poked in the envelope when she locked her college acceptance letter in the drawer.
"Take yours first." Ah Yu turned the international parts around so that the sealing wax seal was facing her. Sunlight streamed in through the wooden window lattice, casting a golden thread through Zhong Hua's hair. He suddenly remembered the day they reunited in Montmartre, when she turned around with her camera in hand, and the sunset in the lens had also swept across her brow bone in the same way.
Zhong Hua's fingernails dug into the seal of the registered letter, but she hesitated to apply pressure. On the day the Gu family inheritance case was pronounced last year, she received a text message from her mother with only five words: "Mom misunderstood you." There had been no further news since then, until now, when this stamp, which had traveled across most of China, suddenly burned a scalding circle in her palm.
“How about…” Ah Yu was about to say “I’ll open it first” when she heard a “rip” sound, and Zhong Hua had already torn open the envelope. The pale blue letter paper fluttered onto the blanket, revealing a red silk bundle wrapped underneath, with the outline of a jade pendant vaguely visible at the corner.
“It’s my maternal grandmother’s jade pendant.” Her voice was a little shaky, like a prayer flag being tossed about by the wind. “It broke once when I was little, and my mother had an old craftsman repair it for three years.” As the red silk cloth was unfurled, the sunlight fell precisely on the crack in the jade pendant. The gold-painted patch looked like a coiled little snake, suddenly biting into Ah Yu’s memory—he had seen this jade pendant in Zhong Hua’s mother’s old photo album, when it was still hanging on the chest of an old lady wearing a cheongsam.
The letter unfolded softly, but Zhong Hua's breathing grew heavier. Ah Yu noticed that her knuckles, which were gripping the letter, had turned white. She suddenly remembered that at the truth-revealing press conference, her hand holding the microphone had trembled just like that, until he placed the lost recording pen into her palm.
“My mom said…” Zhong Hua’s eyelashes trembled, and snowflakes of tears fell onto the jade pendant. “She said this jade pendant recognizes its owner. My grandmother wore it to escape the famine back then, and now… now it should be passed on to someone who can protect me.” She suddenly looked up, her eyes shining brightly. “Ah Yu, do you think she… does she forgive me?”
Just as Ah Yu was about to speak, the international mail in his arms suddenly poked him. Only then did he remember Lin Wanqing's letter. When he hurriedly opened it, a handful of pale purple dried flowers fell onto the blanket, mingling with the scent of Tibetan cedarwood, and suddenly it smelled like Provence.
“It’s lavender.” Zhong Hua reached out and picked up a flower, its petals as brittle as dried moonlight. “Last year in Africa, she said she wanted to plant a lavender field to make calming tea for refugees.”
Ah Yu's fingertips touched the cardboard lining the envelope. Pulling it out, she discovered it was a photograph. Lin Wanqing stood amidst a sea of purple flowers, her face mostly obscured by a wide-brimmed hat, but her lips curled into a high smile. Behind her, the French inscription on a wooden sign could be faintly seen: "Grow Freely." On the back of the photograph were lines of handwriting in Lin Wanqing's signature rounded style: "I heard someone wants to put the stars of Tibet on Zhong Hua's hand?"
Zhong Hua suddenly burst out laughing, but her tears flowed even more fiercely. She pointed to the corner of the photo: "Look at that cat, doesn't it look like the one that stole champagne at the party back then?" Ah Yu leaned over to look, and sure enough, there was an orange cat curled up in the flower bushes, with a lavender leaf still stuck to the tip of its tail.
The wind suddenly picked up, and the sound of the prayer flags drowned out their breathing. When Ah Yu looked down, he saw that his left hand was holding the bunch of dried flowers, and his right hand was cradling the jade pendant. The two temperatures intertwined in his palms, and he suddenly remembered the plane ticket Lin Wanqing had sent him. The note in the tucked compartment read, "Go after the person who fills up your phone's photo album"—now, his phone contained photos of Zhong Hua sleeping in the ICU, of her back as she circumambulated the prayer wheels in Tibet, and of her sun-reddened nose as she held up a camera.
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