The wires in Shantou’s old alleys tangled into a dense web. Chen Mo sat coding in his studio near Chaoyang Vocational School. As he replied to Su Xiaoya’s message, his thoughts drifted back to his sophomore year at Lianbei Middle School: Lin Wei would sit outside the computer lab with a math workbook in her arms, waiting for him. The blue light from the screen washed over her face, as clear and luminous as she looked years later when she glanced up after finishing a financial report in an accounting class at Shenzhen Vocational University.
Su Xiaoya often lamented that “a top computer science student from Guangzhou Vocational University should be making a name for himself in Shenzhen.” But Chen Mo stayed in his studio, with the programming notes Lin Wei had lent him back in middle school still tucked in a drawer. In the margins, she had drawn childish accounting entries. His relationship with Su Xiaoya was like a perfectly written program, precise and logical, but missing a little spark. Meanwhile, in Shenzhen, Lin Wei’s pen paused as she checked the books. Suddenly, she heard the keyboard clacking in the computer lab at Lianbei Middle School, where Chen Mo had solved an Olympiad problem for her. Some connections, buried in lines of code and accounting entries, should have flowed between them again long ago, carried on the wind from the Pearl River Estuary.
