This is a story about love that ordinary people cannot grasp, and regrets hidden in fireworks. There is no intense tragedy of ups and downs, only rounds of small daily routines, slowly turning love and waiting into a silent confession for half a lifetime. Guilan has gone far in the fog of Songhua River, and Daqiang has stayed behind in the sweetness of frozen pear water. They never met again after all. But when my daughter Nier stood under the ice lights of Harbin and clicked the shutter, when the faded red cotton-padded jacket was wrapped in pages of old letters, when the scratches on the old elm tree were tenderly covered by the new bark - all the unsaid words turned into snow and fell all over the small town of Yilan.
"Will you not come back?"
"When it snows. When the snow falls, I will be back."
And Yilan's snow lasts thirty years at a time.
