A courtyard house; Li Yunlong, a subordinate of the deputy director of Harbin Military Engineering I

Just as the couple embraced and wept...

Mr. Qian's gaze was suddenly drawn to a crumpled piece of paper peeking out of the vegetable basket.

He released his wife's shoulder, bent down to pick up the wad of paper, and his fingers trembled slightly as he unfolded it. The paper was thin, as if it had been torn from a notebook, with rough edges.

There was only one line of text on it, and although the handwriting wasn't very neat, every stroke showed a serious effort:

"Your mother hasn't forgotten you, come back, my child."

With just these eleven words, Mr. Qian clutched the paper, stood in front of his desk, and the vein on the back of his hand throbbed.

His lips trembled, and he first laughed silently, then the smile lines spread from the corners of his mouth all the way to his eyes.

Tears fell onto the paper with a patter, blurring the last dot of the word "come back".

He tried to wipe it with his sleeve, but it only got wetter. In the end, he gave up, stuck the paper to his chest, looked up at the ceiling, and his Adam's apple bobbed several times.

That year, when he gave a lecture at Caltech, there were hundreds of blond-haired, blue-eyed students in the audience. No matter how brilliant his speech was, he was still speaking for someone else.

Now, each of those dozen or so words, "motherland," feels like a red-hot nail, driven into his spine, which had been hunched over for years.

On the surface, Zhang Renfeng's two battles in Korea resulted in the annihilation of two American divisions, but in reality, they destroyed the very foundation of the Chinese people's knees, a ingrained fear that had plagued them since the Opium Wars.

Mr. Qian felt his back suddenly straighten up, so straight that even when he stood by the window looking at the black FBI sedan across the street, his eyes were straight, and his gaze carried a kind of openness he hadn't felt in decades.

He turned around, wiped his face hard with his sleeve, and said in a hoarse but amused voice, "Little Jiang, you saw it right, our motherland has stood up."

It's Mother... Can you hear me? Can you see me? It's Mother calling us back...

Mrs. Qian stood by the window and read the words on the crumpled paper three or four times.

While watching, he pressed his palm against his chest, as if trying to calm his heart which was about to leap out of his chest.

For the first time, she felt that the secret service vehicles outside the window, which had once frightened her, were like a row of dilapidated metal boxes parked on the side of the road, utterly insignificant...

Just as excited as the Qian family was Mr. Guo, who lives in Ithaca, New York.

He lived in an apartment near Cornell University and had been under FBI surveillance for over six months, even being followed when he went out to buy groceries.

Recently, however, those special agents were ambushed and beaten up by local residents at street corners, and the patrol density has obviously decreased.

He was able to go for a walk today; it was very cold, but he walked farther than usual.

I walked all the way to the old oak tree at the entrance of Cornell University.

From afar, I could see a group of people gathered around the bulletin board.

There were students and faculty members, all looking up at something.

He went closer and saw a huge photograph posted on the bulletin board, taken from some videotape.

The image shows a young man in military uniform standing on a convertible, saluting.

The brim of his hat was pulled low, but his eyes were piercingly bright.

Below the photo was a short handwritten text:

"This is footage from last year's Chinese military parade, which the Soviets played in shopping malls and schools. It was said to be the most impressive display of power China had ever made since the founding of the People's Republic..."

Mr. Guo stood under that old oak tree, watching it motionless for nearly twenty minutes.

He noticed that among the onlookers were not only Chinese faces, but also several white students whispering amongst themselves, their voices carrying something he had never heard before—

Mr. Guo had seen that kind of thing in Beiping when he was young. At that time, the students' eyes shone with the same light, but that connection was broken later.

Today he saw it again, across half the globe, across that photo on the bulletin board.

He didn't look any further, turned around and walked back, his pace much faster than when he came.

Upon entering the apartment, he didn't, as usual, head straight to the study to flip through the well-worn German journal.

Instead, he went straight to the window, pulled the curtains open a crack, and looked at the unusually quiet street outside.

The black FBI sedan across the street hasn't appeared for three days in a row.

He withdrew his gaze, walked back to his desk, sat down, opened a drawer, and took out the manuscripts he had written over the years.

It was a thick stack of papers, each page filled with densely packed formulas and annotations.

In fact, he had wanted to go back for a long time, but the US authorities obstructed him, leaving him helpless, in pain, and even contemplating suicide...

Now.........

He turned to the last page, picked up a pen, and wrote a dozen or so words in the blank space.

"I want to go back! I have to go back!!!"

Even if I die and my soul perishes, I will have no regrets!