After an all-nighter at work, 42-year-old programmer Li Shu fell asleep at his desk. When he opened his eyes again, he was slumped over a wood-grain desk in Class 3, Grade 8. Phoenix blossoms drifted past the window. A ponytailed girl in the seat ahead turned around and offered him a mint, the little bell on the red cord around her wrist jingling softly. It was Wang Xin at seventeen, the girl he had kept in his graduation album for thirty years, his one unforgotten love.
The chalk words “Welcome Hong Kong’s Return” still lingered on the blackboard, and a Hero fountain pen and an unsent love letter lay inside his metal pencil case. When Li Shu instinctively caught Wang Xin’s homework as the wind lifted it, the note on its yellowed pages, “How to Draw Function Graphs,” made his pupils tremble. It was clearly the example problem he had casually sketched the night before he transmigrated, when his son asked him about middle-school functions.
Fate had given him the chance to rewrite his youth. In math class, Li Shu accurately predicted exchange-rate fluctuations on the day Hong Kong returned to China. During recess, he secretly slipped a fever patch into Wang Xin’s desk. But when it came time to sign up for the school’s talent show, he hesitated. In his previous life, he had watched Wang Xin get heckled by a gang of hooligans onstage while singing “You at the Same Desk.” Now, his clenched fist was slick with sweat. When Wang Xin turned and asked if he wanted to partner with her for a recitation, Li Shu looked into her clear eyes and suddenly realized that this time, he wasn’t meant to be her savior. He was meant to become someone worth remembering.
Amid the cicadas’ cries, he took the worn copy of Stray Birds and wrote on the title page, beneath “Let life be beautiful like summer flowers”: This time, I’ll be the first to tell you I like you. Far away, the shade of the plane trees fell in dappled patterns. The summer of 1995 was just beginning to unfold in the evening breeze.
