One afternoon, handing me a glass of iced tea, our fingers touched. It lasted less than a second. But in the economy of first love, that second was a treasury. I remember thinking: This is not a crush. A crush is noise. This is a frequency. She asked if I was okay. I said I was tired. She said, “You work too hard. Come sit.” And I did. On the porch swing, three feet apart, watching bees drown in the sugar water of a hummingbird feeder. That was our romance: proximity and silence.
I didn't. But the silence that followed was loud enough to wake the dead.
After her mother is fatally injured in 2001, Jia Xiaoling is transported back to 1981. She meets her mother’s younger self and becomes her best friend .