Every Rise and Fall of the Wind Is a Dream

When Xia Xiaomo gripped the handle of her suitcase and stepped back onto home soil, she never expected to run into her old flame at the corner of a supermarket aisle. Su Muchen was holding the yogurt she had loved most back then. His “Long time no see” shattered the composure she had spent five years building. Even more disconcerting, at the law firm where she had just started, the former boyfriend she had left without a word was now her boss, a partner in a tailored suit.

A locked drawer in his desk held his secrets: a worn-out couple's keychain, train tickets covered in notes about “Xiaomo,” wedding dress designs revised year after year, and the same phone number he'd kept for five years, a silent message saying, “I'm waiting for you.” She caught him staring at an old photo one night while working late, accepted an umbrella from him in a downpour, and only understood when he was hospitalized with a bleeding ulcer that his deliberate late nights and “targeted” business trips had all been clumsy attempts to get close to her.

There was never any shortage of obstacles. His rival in love, Lin Wan, brandished a key given to her by his mother to make a show of things. His mother threw a check at Xiaomo and demanded she leave. And during their time apart, doctored intimate photos nearly drove a wedge between them just as they were finally growing closer. But whenever a crisis came, he stood between her and harm like a suit of armor. He gave up his partnership to protect her, then crossed time zones and stood in the snow outside her apartment. In the end, at the supermarket where they first met, he folded a shopping receipt from five years ago into a ring box. “I counted the three times you looked back as you ran away.”

In thirty letters he never sent, he wrote, “The winds rise and fall, and all of it is a dream.” Only when she opened them in old age did she discover the words hidden on the last page: “And you are the one dream I willingly lost myself in.” From their first meeting on the university track to their final look back from the nursing home, every wait in this love story finds an answer, and every bit of devotion conceals tenderness.