I'll Definitely Be There

September 1, 2002. Class 1, Grade 10, Beishan No. 1 High School. Forty-eight students. The forty-eighth name on the class list wasn't written in brush ink. It was a tiny line in ballpoint pen, crooked and squeezed outside the box. Shao Ye. Chen Yan was in Class 1. Shao Ye was in Class 1, too. They lived in the same factory compound, in the same building, on the fourth and sixth floors. That year, the factory's restructuring was nearing its end. The people on the sixth floor bought cars; the people on the fourth began setting up street stalls. Chen Yan had a notebook. Blue cover, two yuan and fifty cents. He'd written “Mistakes to Correct” on the cover in his first year of middle school, in neat, straight strokes. He copied out every mistake and corrected it. He spent his whole life correcting mistakes. That winter, the notebook fell onto the ice on the Sha River. Shao Ye saw it, said nothing, then went back and picked it up. He never returned it. Later, Chen Yan kept accounts in the notebook: every transaction, who gave what, and how much. He recorded it all as “owed.” In the early hours of May 14, 2005, Shao Ye went to the river wearing that coat. On the afternoon of June 8 that year, Chen Yan waited on the riverbank for two and a half hours. He called out once, but there was no one on the river. In the notebook, he wrote: Maybe he changed his mind. It took him eight years to learn that the man hadn't changed his mind.