The day Chen Jian's passport arrived was an anticlimax of profound significance. It was delivered by a bored-looking courier on a perfectly ordinary Tuesday afternoon. The small, dark blue booklet felt flimsy in his hands, a negligible weight for an object that contained the permission to cross worlds. He sat at his small table, turning its pages. His solemn photo stared back, a stranger with his name. The visa page held the American consulate's stamp, a splash of ink and authority that felt both intimidating and miraculous. The return date was left open, a blank space full of terrifying, exhilarating possibility.
He video-called Li Na immediately, holding the passport up to the camera like a child with a perfect test score. Her joyful shout echoed in his quiet room, a sound that belonged to the new world he was about to enter.
The final week in Suzhou was a tapestry of farewells and quiet realizations. He told his few students he would be traveling "for some time." He settled his small accounts with the printing house and the neighborhood market. He asked Old Wang from the noodle shop to collect his mail and keep an eye on the room. "Don't let the pipes freeze," he said, and Old Wang had laughed and said, "You sound like you're going to the moon, Lao Chen! It's just America. Bring me back a baseball cap!"
But to Jian, it might as well have been the moon. The most daring journey of his life had been the planned, abortive trip to Guangzhou with Wei Lin. This was leagues beyond.
He visited the bridge one last time before his flight, not at sunset, but in the soft, grey light of mid-morning. The canal was busy with tourist boats and barges carrying gravel. He stood at his usual spot, his hands resting on the sun-warmed stone. For decades, this parapet had been the altar of his longing. Now, he was leaving it. He wasn't abandoning the memory; he was following its thread to its source. He whispered a silent farewell, not to Wei Lin, but to the ghost he had kept here. "I am going to find the rest of you," he said to the air. "I am going to see what our love built."
The journey itself was a surreal, exhausting dream. The scale of Pudong Airport, the immense, bird-like silence of the Airbus A380, the endless expanse of the Pacific seen from 40,000 feet—it was a sensory overload that pushed him deep into himself. He read a little, dozed fitfully, and mostly watched the flight map on the screen in front of him, the little icon of the plane creeping infinitesimally across the vast blue. He was a speck moving between two points on a map, a map that had once held only one point that mattered.
Li Na, on the other side, was a bundle of nerves. She cleaned the already-spotless guest room again. She bought groceries she thought he might like—rice, simple greens, tofu, good tea. She rehearsed simple English phrases to teach him. She stood in the living room, looking at his poem on the wall, her stomach fluttering. Would he find peace here, or would it be a museum of fresh pain?
His flight landed at San Francisco International Airport in the early evening. As the plane taxied, Jian peered out the window. The light was the same golden-hour glow as in Suzhou, but the landscape was alien: flat, grey tarmac stretching to the horizon, giant, skeletal jets, signs in bold, blocky English. His heart hammered against his ribs. He followed the stream of passengers, a slow-moving current of humanity, through the maze of corridors to Immigration.
The line was long, a cacophony of languages. He clutched his passport and the blue customs form Li Na had helped him fill out. When it was finally his turn, he stepped up to the booth. The officer, a large man with a kind face, took his documents.
"Purpose of your visit, Mr. Chen?"
"Visit family. My daughter." The words, practiced, came out clear.
"How long will you be staying?"
"I… do not know. Some months." He indicated the open return on his visa.
The officer stamped his passport with a definitive thud. "Welcome to the United States."
Those four words were the final lock clicking open. He collected his single, worn suitcase from the carousel and walked through the doors marked "Arrivals."
And there she was.
Li Na stood behind the barrier, holding a simple sign she had made on white cardstock. In careful, beautiful Chinese characters, it read: 欢迎回家,爸爸 (Welcome Home, Dad). When she saw him, her face broke into a smile so wide and bright it seemed to light up the fluorescent-lit hall. She waved frantically.
All the anxiety, the surreal distance of the journey, collapsed in that instant. He was here. She was there. The ocean was behind him. He walked toward her, his steps quickening of their own accord. They met in an awkward, wonderful collision of suitcase and carry-on bag and arms. He hugged her tightly, this tall, capable American woman who was his flesh and blood, his bridge, his miracle. He smelled her shampoo, felt the solid reality of her shoulders. He was not dreaming.
"You're here," she kept saying, her voice muffled against his jacket. "You're really here."
"I am here," he said, the truth of it settling into his bones.
The drive into the city was a silent spectacle for Jian. He stared out the window of Li Na's car as she navigated the freeway. The sheer verticality of it all stunned him—the soaring overpasses, the dramatic hills of the city stacked with houses, the sudden, breathtaking glimpse of the Bay Bridge, a necklace of lights against the indigo twilight. It was bold, muscular, a world carved by ambition and force. So different from the horizontal, water-softened embrace of Suzhou.
"That is it?" he asked, pointing at the famous rust-red towers of the Golden Gate, visible in the distance as they crested a hill.
"That's it. The Golden Gate Bridge."
He nodded slowly. "It is very… bold." He did not say it was beautiful. It was too imposing for that word. It was a statement.
When they pulled up to the house in Pacific Heights, a different kind of awe took hold. The house was modern, all sharp angles and vast planes of glass, glowing from within. It looked like a geometric sculpture. It looked expensive and cold. This was her fortress. He stood on the sidewalk, his small suitcase at his feet, gazing up at it.
"This was her house," Li Na said softly, coming to stand beside him.
"It is… formidable," he said, echoing her own long-ago thought. "It suits the woman she became."
"Come inside," Li Na said, taking his arm. "I want to show you your room."
The interior was both what he expected and not. It was indeed minimalist, cool, a space that seemed to prioritize order over comfort. But then his eyes were drawn to the living room wall. There, elegantly framed and lit by a small, discreet light, was his poem. The one he had written for her in the Humble Administrator's Garden, a lifetime ago. His breath caught. He walked over to it, his fingers hovering just above the glass, not daring to touch. He saw the faint bleed of the ink where his youthful hand had paused, the slight smudge in one corner. She had kept it. She had framed it.
"She had it," Li Na said, her voice hushed. "In a box. I found it."
He could only nod, emotion robbing him of speech. His words, his youthful heart's offering, had been here all along, in this silent, strong house. It was the first crack he saw in the fortress wall.
She led him to the guest room. It was simple, clean, with a large window. And on the nightstand, next to a reading lamp, was a small, carved wooden box. He recognized the style instantly. It was from Suzhou. From their time.
"This…" he began.
"Open it," Li Na said.
With trembling hands, he lifted the lid. Nestled inside was a simple silver ring. He picked it up. It was cool, light. Memory flooded back—the shy young poet saving for months from his tutoring wages, buying this modest band from an old silversmith, presenting it to her not as an engagement ring, but as a promise ring. A pledge of his constancy. She had accepted it with tears in her eyes, had worn it on a chain under her blouse for a while. He had thought it lost to time.
"She kept this too," he whispered, the ring a tiny, perfect circle in his palm. "All this way."
"She kept you," Li Na corrected gently. "In every way she knew how."
That night, after a simple meal of congee and tea that Li Na had prepared (and which he praised perhaps too effusively, touched by the effort), they sat in the living room. The fog had rolled in, shrouding the city lights, making the world outside the vast windows a soft, grey void. It felt cozy, intimate.
He told her about the flight, about seeing the curve of the Earth from the plane. She showed him the ledger, the dry entries springing to life as he recognized the incidents behind them. They talked until his jetlag finally overwhelmed him, his head nodding in the comfortable armchair she had bought for him.
Before he went to bed, he stood again before his framed poem. In the quiet, dark house, with his daughter sleeping down the hall and the ghost of his love finally at rest in the artifacts she had left, Chen Jian felt a profound, settling peace. The journey was over. The waiting was done. He was not in Suzhou, but he was, for the first time in thirty years, home. The bridge had not been a place to stay, but a path to follow. And it had led him here, to this morning light on an unfamiliar shore, which was, at last, his to explore.
End of Chapter 10