Nothing much had happened, and there was nothing in particular that seemed worth commemorating.
That, of course, wasn’t really true.
Late Winter, 2026
On the twenty-third day of the twelfth lunar month in 2026, I was back at our old family house in Zhengzhou. The frost-laden wind moved through the courtyard like a blade, shaving across the dead limbs of the old scholar tree. And yet it could not take away the unusual clarity of the sky beyond the window. The temperature had risen to 8°C, and the evening clouds were still glowing in rich colors. By local winter standards, it was a rare bright day in Zhengzhou: a level-three northwesterly wind, humidity at just 21 percent, the air so crisp it felt almost crystalline.
My father had lit the fireplace in the corner of the living room, and the wood crackled softly. My mother brought out a yam porridge she had been simmering all afternoon. When I pushed open the door, I heard her reciting a line from Weilu Yuhua:
“On a cold night, to sit around the stove is the happiness of a farming household… What is written here is merely set down as it comes, without order, only to help pass the long night with one’s family.”
A self-description written by Wang Yongbin in the Qing dynasty, and somehow it overlapped perfectly with the three of us sitting there together.
Light in Ordinary Homes
My father switched on the television. The news was replaying a year-end roundup of ten major international science and technology events from 2025: China’s Tianwen-2 mission returning samples from an asteroid, the “artificial sun” setting a record by sustaining temperatures above 100 million degrees for 1,000 seconds, and more.
He suddenly put down his chopsticks. “Do you remember? When the Soviet Academy of Sciences was still working on fusion last century, your grandfather always used to say: Humanity chases light in the end so it can illuminate the road home.”
My mother picked up the thread and mentioned a neighborhood conversation from the day before. The local community had begun using large AI models to provide health alerts for elderly people living alone. She said it really echoed another old sentiment: technologies may be new, but their real measure is still people’s daily lives. Then she turned to me.
“You spend your time studying the light of the universe,” she said. “So tell me—behind all this excitement about technology, how should a person actually find a footing in life?”
I thought of European colleagues marveling at “China speed,” but what I said was simpler: even if the Zuchongzhi-3 quantum computer is powerful, it still can’t calculate how many dates should go into one pot of porridge.
They laughed immediately. They knew I was still allergic to dates. They also knew I had always been looking for something lasting in the gap between science and the humanities.
The Road Back Through Wind and Snow
Outside, the wind had started to weaken. My father pulled out an old photo album. There was a photograph of my grandfather arriving back in Zhengzhou from the Soviet Union in 1991, the train station behind him buried in falling snow. Another showed my grandparents returning from Tsuen Wan, Hong Kong, to retire in Zhengzhou in 2015; in that one, the old tree in the courtyard still carried some green.
“Winter wind cuts away last year’s branches,” my father said, tapping the table lightly. “What it strips off is ornament. What it leaves exposed is the frame underneath.”
This year, he went on, the world had been talking about black hole mergers and gravitational-wave observations that helped confirm Hawking’s theories. But our family’s three generations—from the Soviet Union to Hong Kong to the United States and back to Zhengzhou—felt less like a story of movement than one of continuity. Places changed. The lamp beside the stove did not.
As she refilled our cups, my mother spoke more softly: poverty is not shameful, she said; what is shameful is living in poverty while flattering others for gain. Wealth and status are not glorious by themselves; what gives them honor is whether they can benefit the world.
Then she looked at us—the ones doing research, always competing for first place on a global stage—and said it would be better to ask how technology might carry some human warmth with it.
She pointed outside. The shops were full of noise and people. After a year of toil, everyone seemed to be hurrying toward reunion.
For ordinary people in China, life really is hard. Those in government ought to pay far more attention to people’s livelihoods.
The River of Time
Later in the evening, we fed more wood into the fire. My father buried sweet potatoes in the hot ash to roast them. Their fragrance rose together with the smoke from our tea. Liszt was playing through the speakers, and the room seemed to fold different times into one another.
I suddenly thought of the distant starlight I had observed in a laboratory at Princeton. By the time that light reached Earth, it may well have been the same kind of night on which my grandfather sat bent over his calculations at the Soviet Academy of Sciences. The “light” each generation pursues, it turns out, always comes back down into ordinary human life.
As my mother cleared the bowls, she hummed a nursery tune. My grandparents used to sing it to me in their villa in Tsuen Wan. The wind struck the window frame, but it could not drive the warmth from the room.
There is another line that fits such a night well: when the spirit is unhurried, the breath calm, the mind deep, and the courage settled, one has the true disposition for doing great things.
But the great thing, for us, was nothing grand at all. It was simply this: on a night when the winter wind had pared away the old year’s branches, we could still sit together and talk—about the world, about daily life, about whatever came to mind.
Most important of all, when night fell, the whole family was there.
