When I was writing this book, the same drizzle was falling outside the window as it was when I was in college. I am 42 years old and have been a mother for a long time, but when I dream back at midnight, I always go back to the sunny playground, to the chalk dust-filled podium in the high school mathematics classroom, and to the gentle and restrained eyes of the man named Chen Xun. He was my advanced mathematics teacher, the first person to hold me in his hands and feel sorry for me, the person who loved me to the point of restraint and pain to the point of letting go, and who never married in the end. We once loved each other cautiously, hugged each other in uninhabited corners, and thought we would be upright after graduation. But in the end, my parents threatened to take me home, and he was forced to be transferred from his post. From then on, we never saw each other again. I have hidden this love hidden in secular taboos for more than twenty years. Today, I wrote it all down, for my youth, for his failed life, and for our regret that we could not get together after all.
