Twenty-eight years after her mother died, Cheng Xiaoman, unemployed and back in her hometown, receives a pager message from 1998.
"Qiuyan, don't go to the night shift when you're breathing like that. I'll hold the baby. Mom."
Qiuyan is the mother she has only ever seen in a posthumous photograph. The one-month-old baby is Cheng Xiaoman herself.
Every night at 10:18, mother and daughter can exchange messages through the 126 paging service, with no more than thirty characters per message.
But in four months, the pager will fall silent forever. That is also the day her mother was supposed to die.
Cheng Xiaoman presses send:
"Mom, it's Xiaoman. Please live long enough to see my time."
What a novel story