At Qingcheng High School's hundred-day countdown rally, repeat student Chen Yu wrote her mother Su Wan's old dream on a sheet of scrap paper: I want to get into the Chinese department at Hunan Normal University and finish the books she never got to read.
It was an obsession she had kept hidden for sixteen years. Seventeen years ago, during a flash flood in western Hunan, Su Wan gave up her chance to survive so that her baby daughter could live. Chen, the father who raised her, fell gravely ill and gave her an old silver ring Su Wan had left behind. Carrying this half-understood connection to her past, she gritted her teeth and endured year after year of hard study.
Then she met Lu Zhiheng, who sat in the row ahead of her.
He was the top student's leading contender. He would quietly gather up her scattered practice papers, walk laps around the track with her after evening study as they counted the stars, and save up three months' pocket money to polish the old silver ring and hang it on the red cord around her neck. When the first snow fell over Weiming Lake, he took her red, frozen hand and said, “You can fulfill your mother's dream, and I'll help you fulfill yours. We'll go to Changsha together.”
When the college entrance exam results came out, their names appeared one after the other on Hunan Normal University's admission list.
When the camphor trees on Lushan South Road turned green again, Chen Yu held the blue-covered notebook her mother had left in the archives and finally stood before the graduation messages of the Chinese department's Class of 1977. The wish that had remained unfulfilled for forty years, “May you nurture and inspire generations of students across Mount Lu,” finally found its continuation in her twentieth year.
From the dim desk lamp in the mountain town of Qingcheng to the bright sound of reading aloud by Peach Lake, an old silver ring links the youth and dreams of two generations.
She walked the road her mother could not finish; he stood by her and helped her bear the fears she had never voiced.
