Letter from 1996

On Yu Sheng's twentieth birthday, his father handed him a manila envelope: "This was written to you by many people the year you were born." There was no greeting card in the envelope, just a dozen pieces of yellowed paper. The midwifery nurse wrote that the winter of 1996 was extremely cold, but the baby boy's cry was particularly loud. Grandma Wang across the street said that the stitches of the small sweater knitted for the child should be thick and not too prickly. The workers in the father's brick factory gathered together to sign a piece of paper, saying that when the child grows up, they will show him the big chimney in the factory. The last piece of handwriting was light and airy: "I heard your name is Yu Sheng. Sheng is a musical instrument, right? From now on, you should live louder like music." The signature was only a small note graffiti. Yu Sheng took the letter and searched slowly along the road in the old city. He found the nurse from that time. The retired nurse pointed to the old photo of the hospital: "It's the incubator by the window. You stayed in it for half a month, and your dad squatted in the corridor every day to smoke." Knocking on Grandma Wang's door, Grandma Wang touched his hand and smiled: "Back then, your mother always held you outside the hospital gate waiting for your dad to get off work." Walking to the old site of my father's brick factory, the big chimney had been demolished long ago and turned into a row factory. The gatekeeper recognized the signature on the letter: "That's the workshop director. His daughter is the same age as you. Before she moved to the south, she asked you what your name was." Yu Sheng put the letter into his pocket. It seems that the wind of 1996 has not yet dissipated. Those concerns that he has never met before and those expectations hidden in words have become the path under his feet. It turns out that since birth, there have been so many people silently writing the story of "living" for him.