I look up again at the tree above me—the kind that seems to appear only in childhood. Parisian spring light filters through its young branches and lays itself across my body. I have no wish to disparage Paris in spring; her sun is warm, dazzling even, and yet she feels cold to me—not in temperature, but in tone. This season’s light carries no golden filter, no floating motes of dust. It is clean, aesthetic, and it does not move me. My indifference is not because Paris is unkind; it is because she is too externalized, arranged to be viewed, and I am long tired of a beauty constructed for the gaze.

Beijing, in my memory, has spring as well. I am seated in the little garden beneath rows of apartment blocks, a bottle of Yanjing beer hanging from my hand. In the distance, cars press over newly resurfaced tarmacs; from a radio comes a faint strand of the evening news bulletin; light falls at the same angle through gray-white gaps between buildings, onto a face that has yet to understand anything. For the first time, I sense the world still keeps a tenderness. Beijing’s spring light is shy and inward—hope suspended in dust, a warmth that can no longer hide under air held to pressure. It is not a vista, but a reality—a reality that bears the imprint of institutions and yet still dares to warm me.

Set beside that, Parisian spring is a spectacle. She belongs to postcards, to photographic filters, to the concept of a tea party; she does not belong to someone like me, who lives in the narrow seam between iron collectivism and the soft sentiment of the petite bourgeoisie.

I smile without quite intending to, as if speaking under my breath to someone—not to anyone present now, but to those girls I once met and lost and never truly bid farewell to. They used to wait for me on the little bridge over the river in Beijing, or sit on winter concrete steps, laughing, teasing, calling me “comrade.” They were not idealized lovers; they were daughters of a particular time. In the afterglow of socialism, they covered shy eyes with their hair and waited beneath the work-unit dormitory for me to hand out a postcard plastered with stamps. I still remember one whose name so closely resembled Dostoevsky’s Sonya Semyonovna. There was always a trace of stubbornness at the corner of her mouth, a faint protest against that era. She was a mirror to my subjectivity then; beneath her short hair lay the contradiction I could not voice—wanting to escape, fearing betrayal.

I was so young then. I did not know how to love, but I knew how to be loyal—to a blurred faith in country, in social class, in a future only half seen. They knew better than I that the era would not be gentle with those who loved it so. Their tenderness came from that knowledge. The world I pursued in memory would never return the answer I hoped for, so they chose to be only a syllable within my question, light enough to carry.

Afterwards, I met many others—in Paris, in Naples, in New York and Berlin; at train stations, in galleries, in the smoke of marches. They were all admirable, speaking of freedom, of the body, of the future. And yet none of them could do what Sonya once did: place a hard candy in my palm and whisper, “Don’t tell anyone. It’s only for you.” I have not met that kind of love again…not because they did not love me, but because I had become someone who could no longer be loved in that way. I left Beijing; I left them. I passed through so many conversations, learned so many languages, and still I could not—or would not—learn how to take my leave. Perhaps they married; some went far away; some may have died. Yet they go on living in my memory, in that tree by the Seine that impressed itself upon me, in the silence I refuse to set down when I walk alone through the cold night.

I no longer love them; their faces have blurred, their names have faded. What I love is the time in which they still existed, the self not yet thinned by modernity—the one who would cross ten alleys for a single “I’ll wait for you,” the one who, hearing in the evening broadcast that “the lights on Tiananmen have come on again,” could not help but weep.

I walk to the bridge by the Musée d’Orsay. The slow surface of the Seine returns my outline as a blur. Suddenly I am afraid—afraid that one day I will no longer be able to recall their faces, that there will be only myself and a monologue destined to find no echo. And then I understand this will not happen. They are no longer merely memories; they have entered my body. In every hesitant step, when I slow my speech and fall into quiet thought, they are still there.