Chen Jian's home was not in the picturesque, tourist-tended heart of the old town, but in a quieter, more worn neighborhood where the buildings leaned together like tired companions and the air smelled of coal smoke, frying oil, and damp stone. He led her up a narrow, unlit staircase attached to the side of an old, two-story house, to a single room above a small, shuttered tailor's shop.
"It is not much," he said, fumbling with an old-fashioned key. His voice held no apology, only a statement of fact.
The door opened into a space that was, indeed, simple. A single room served as living, sleeping, and dining area. A small, partitioned corner hid a basic kitchenette and a sink. The furniture was sparse, old, but meticulously clean: a narrow bed neatly made, a wooden table and two chairs, a bookshelf made of planks and bricks sagging under the weight of hundreds of books, and a worn but comfortable-looking armchair by a small, high window overlooking the tiled roofs. The walls were bare save for a single scroll of calligraphy—a poem, Li Na guessed, in his own elegant hand. The dominant feature was the books. They were everywhere—stacked on the floor, lining the shelves, piled on a small desk under the window. The room smelled of paper, ink, old wood, and a faint, clean scent of green tea.
It was the home of a scholar-ascetic. A monk of memory. There was no television, no computer. A small, old radio sat on a corner of the desk. The austerity of it struck Li Na with a profound, poignant force. This was the material cost of his thirty-year vigil. While her mother had built an empire of things, he had pared his life down to the essentials: a roof, sustenance, and the world of words and remembrance.
"Please, sit," he said, gesturing to the armchair. He moved to the kitchenette, his movements slightly stiff, as if the emotional cataclysm of the afternoon had settled into his joints. "I can make noodles. It is simple, but…"
"Noodles would be perfect," Li Na said quickly, sensing his need to dosomething, to offer hospitality in the only way he could. She settled into the armchair, her body humming with a strange exhaustion that was more emotional than physical. She watched him fill a kettle, take out a packet of dried noodles, a few limp greens, a single egg from a small bowl. His world was so small, so contained. And she had just exploded a universe-sized truth into the center of it.
As he cooked, a focused, quiet activity, the initial, overwhelming intensity of their meeting began to recede, leaving behind a complex, delicate space. What did you say to the father you'd just met, whose entire life was a monument to a love for your mother? The questions that now arose were terrifyingly mundane, and therefore, somehow more profound.
"You… you live here alone?" she asked, then immediately felt foolish. The room screamed of solitary existence.
"Yes," he said, not turning from the small stove. "It is sufficient. Quiet. Good for reading, for thinking." He paused. "And for listening to the city breathe at night. It has its own music."
"The books… you've read them all?"
"Most. Some, many times. Old friends are the best kind." He glanced at her over his shoulder, a flicker of the young scholar's humor in his eyes. "They do not change their story halfway through, and they never leave without being asked."
The simple meal was ready quickly. He brought two steaming bowls to the small table, and they sat facing each other. The noodles were plain but flavorful. They ate in silence for a few moments, the simple act grounding them.
"Your mother," he began, then stopped, setting his chopsticks down carefully. "The business she had. It was successful?"
Li Na nodded. "Very. Silk Roads International. She started with nothing. Built it into a major importer. She was… formidable. Respected. And very lonely, I think, though she would never have admitted it."
Jian absorbed this, nodding slowly. "She was always the most brilliant person in any room. Fierce. She had a mind like a diamond—sharp, clear, catching the light in unexpected ways." He looked at Li Na. "You have some of that. In the way you held my gaze in the teahouse. In the way you crossed an ocean with a hairpin and a question."
Li Na felt a flush of warmth that had nothing to do with the noodles. It was the first time he had connected her directly to her mother in a positive, observed trait. "She was also… closed off. Hard to reach. I loved her, but I never really knewher. Not until I opened that box."
"The box," he said softly. "May I… would it be an intrusion to see it? The letters?"
"Of course not. They're yours as much as hers. Ours." She fetched her bag and took out the bundle, retied with its faded ribbon, and the photographs. She handed them to him as if passing over holy relics.
His hands trembled only slightly this time. He untied the ribbon with infinite care, as if undoing a butterfly's cocoon. He did not read the letters immediately. He held the stack to his nose, eyes closed, inhaling deeply. A small, heartbreaking smile touched his lips. "Cedar. And a trace of her soap. The one with the light floral scent. She could never afford the French perfume the other girls liked, but this soap… it was like a field after rain."
The specificity of the memory, preserved in scent after thirty years, brought a fresh lump to Li Na's throat. He then took the photograph of the two of them by the canal, the one where they were laughing. He stared at it for a long time, his thumb tracing the outline of her mother's youthful, joyful face.
"She was happy then," he whispered. "We both were. We were poor as temple mice, but we owned the world." He looked up at Li Na. "This is the gift you have given me. Not just the truth. But the return of this version of her. In my memory, she became frozen in the moment of leaving—sad, betrayed, turning away. You have given her back her laughter. You have given me back the girl I loved, not just the ghost I mourned."
Li Na could only nod, tears swimming in her vision.
He spent the next hour reading the letters, slowly, one by one. He did not weep again, but his face was a landscape of remembered emotion—a soft smile at a private joke, a wince at a moment of youthful angst, a distant look as a particular phrase transported him. He was visiting his own youth, a country he had long been exiled from.
Finally, he set the last letter down—the desperate, unsent one, the one that had never reached her mother. He looked utterly drained, but also, somehow, more whole. The ghosts had been summoned, acknowledged, and were finally beginning to find peace.
"All this time," he said, his voice thick. "We were both living in the aftermath of a battle that never happened. We were wounded by shadows."
The night deepened. They talked more, the conversation meandering like the canals outside. He asked about her life in America, her education, her dreams—questions that were startling in their normalcy, in their fatherlyconcern. She asked about his poetry, his life in Suzhou, the small rhythms of his days. He spoke of tutoring students in classical literature, of the copyediting work that paid his rent, of the solace he found in the city's ancient gardens. It was a life of quiet contemplation and profound isolation, a life he had chosen not out of bitterness, he explained, but because any other life felt like a betrayal of the love that had defined him.
"I could have married later," he admitted, sipping the tea he had made after their meal. "Some people suggested it. A good woman, a quiet life. But it would have been a lie. My heart was already occupied. It would not have been fair to her, or to me."
Eventually, exhaustion, emotional and physical, descended upon them both. Jian insisted she take the bed. "You are my guest. And my daughter," he added, the word still tentative, wondrous on his tongue. He would take the thin pallet he unrolled from a closet.
Li Na was too tired to argue. The narrow bed was hard, the pillow thin, but it was clean and smelled of sun and laundry soap. As she lay in the dark, listening to the soft, rhythmic sound of her father's breathing from a few feet away, a profound, quiet awe settled over her. Two days ago, he was a phantom, a footnote in a tragic story. Now, he was a man sleeping on a thin mat on the floor of his one room, for the first time in thirty years not alone.
The magnitude of it all—the wasted years, the parallel loneliness, the cruel, simple lie—should have felt like a tragedy. And it was. But lying there, in the silent, book-crowded room of the poet her mother had loved, a new feeling began to uncurl within her, fragile but tenacious. It was not happiness—that was too simple, too bright. It was a sense of profound, aching rightness. A circle, long broken, was trembling on the verge of closing. The two halves of her history—her mother's fierce, lonely ambition in America, and her father's quiet, faithful vigil in Suzhou—were finally in the same room. And she was the bridge between them.
Just before sleep took her, she heard his voice, soft in the darkness. "Li Na?"
"Yes?"
A long pause. Then, "Thank you for finding me."
The words were simple, but they held a universe of gratitude, of absolution, of a loneliness finally answered. She did not have words adequate in any language to reply. So she simply whispered into the dark, towards the man who was her father, "Goodnight, Baba."
The word, so long unused, so deeply yearned-for, hung in the air. From the floor, she heard a sharp, soft intake of breath. Then, a sigh that seemed to release the final hold of a decades-old tension.
"Goodnight, my daughter," he whispered back.
And in the quiet, book-lined room above a Suzhou alley, for the first time in thirty years, Chen Jian did not go to sleep thinking of the woman he had lost. He fell asleep thinking of the daughter who had been found. And for the first time in her life, Li Na fell asleep under the same roof as her father, the silent echoes of the past finally giving way to the fragile, living promise of a shared present.
End of Chapter 5