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The wife of a famous writer from a well-known family, after experiencing social changes from liberation, the Cultural Revolution, reform and opening up to today, she was forced to build an invisible wall in her heart. Behind the politeness, what causes indifference and alienation between relatives? There is a legend in my mother's hometown in the South: The souls of people who have experienced life-or-death illness are as likely to fly away as frightened birds. You must be careful, and you must pay even more attention, because when they return to the human world, there may be something else living in their bodies. My aunt Zhou Xuan underwent colon cancer resection at the age of 88. On the third day after being released from the intensive care unit, I came to the hospital. The half-closed curtains blocked the sunlight, and she lay there, her pale face shadowed in the darkness. I put a large bunch of lilies on the bedside and said hello to her. She was silent. The unusual silence made me wonder if she was sleeping.

I call him Tashi because I don't really know his name and have never met him. All I know is that he is a young Tibetan man who met my sister on a train. At that time, my sister was on her way back to the city where she worked after returning home from a visit to relatives. In my memory, it was a gray and overcast day, and there were many people on the platform. The Spring Festival had just passed, and the flow of people visiting relatives was like a giant octopus, extending its huge tentacles south, north, or east or west along the railways that extend in all directions. The train left at about four o'clock in the afternoon. I went to the station to see my sister off because she had brought too many things and had a son who was only four years old.

Uncle is finally coming! This time it's true. That's what the telegrams and letters said. At this time, it had been forty years since the uncle fled the mainland in a hurry with Chiang Kai-shek. Don't think that my uncle is an important person, no. In 1949, my uncle was only a nineteen-year-old child. It is said that the officers under Chiang Kai-shek took him away because he could carve a small plane out of palm-sized wood with a propeller clearly visible in the door and portholes. Looking through the window, there was a pilot inside. However, when he came back this time, he was already the "chief" of a certain radio station in the Air Force (of course the White Army). He was in his sixties and had retired. The eldest uncle also has two biological siblings born from the same mother in mainland China - the second uncle and his aunt. My aunt is still alive, but my second uncle died in 1969.