Border Convenience Store—the Light Is Here

A letter thirty years late was delivered to the convenience store at the end of the Horgos National Highway on a snowy night. The envelope says "Received by Lin Guozhong" - that is my grandfather's name. He has been gone for twenty years. There was only one sentence in the letter: In the winter of 1973, someone made an appointment to see him. That person didn't come. So "I" decided to look for it. From Guozigou in Yili to the Irtysh River in Altay, from the jade market in Nanyang, Henan to the old banyan tree lane in Xinhui, Guangdong - "I" took my parents and walked backwards along my grandfather's footprints for 4,800 kilometers. The sixty-year-old father spoke for the first time during the trip about things he had never told before: the young man in Xinhui, Guangdong, the only maintenance worker at the Yuejin Steel Plant who did not need to wait for spare parts, and the first consignment point owner to "keep watch" at the border - three generations, using an old account book that had not been broken for 64 years, guarding the same light. And when the truth finally emerged - the "man who didn't come" fell down half a month before the Korean armistice, and it took the entrusted comrades fifty-three years to deliver the letter - my father was silent for a long time and put the letter in the stone room. The lights are still there. The pigeon recognizes the way and flies back. All those who are separated will, sooner or later, return to the place where the light is on.