When Su Yan was six, she left her rural home in Anhui for Beijing and transferred into an elementary school. On the day she collected the homework, she met Shen Yu, the class monitor and the only other child in class who ate at the after-school lunch program.
He brought her books from his family's study, and kept doing so for six years. She ate all the overly sweet dishes from the cafeteria for him. From the courtyard compound to Yanjiao, from Beijing Language and Culture University to Cambridge, the two of them grew in the same direction, separated by a desk, a fence, and seven time zones.
When she was twenty-two, her family fell apart. She marked the acceptance email from Edinburgh as “unread,” canceled her plane ticket, and pressed pause on her dream of studying abroad, and on herself.
She thought her time would stay frozen there forever.
But the roots of this wild grass, held down by force, had never died.
Many years later, she finally leaned against his shoulder and said softly,
“Shen Yu, my life has finally started moving again. I'm no longer stuck at twenty-two.”
