The South Wind Has Not yet Arrived

In the late autumn of 2019, when 33-year-old Chen Yu was moving in Guangzhou, he dug out an old photo that had been folded twice from an iron box that had been sealed for 13 years. It was a group photo of eight teenagers taken under the old banyan tree of Lianzhou No. 1 Middle School on the day after the college entrance examination in 2006. Some smiled openly, some had expressionless faces, and some deliberately turned their faces away. On the back of the photo, someone wrote a line of words with a blue ballpoint pen: "The south wind knows my wishes and blows my dreams to Lianzhou." Chen Yu looked at the photos, and memories came back like a tide. It was the fall of 2004, and eight of them were assigned to the same class for various reasons: Grade 2 (7). They were 17 years old that year. At that time, there was only one decent road in the small town in western Guangdong. At that time, no one thought that the fate of the people in this photo would be so entangled, so bifurcated, and so reunited and missed.