First Love

Wen Jing and Du Xiaofeng fell in love in their second year of high school, but seven years of romance ended abruptly with his one sentence, "Wife, I'm sorry"—he had fallen for someone else. After the breakup Wen Jing buries herself in daily busyness, trying to compress that first love into a small stone and toss it behind time. At a high school reunion she unexpectedly learns that Du Xiaofeng's first love was not her, and hears another piece of news: Meng Fan, the quiet, introverted classmate of those years, has died in a car accident. To recover for her friend Susu the pieces Meng Fan published in the magazine Summer Journey before his death, Wen Jing begins searching out those long-scattered old issues. Between yellowing magazines and callow writings, the campus life of the late 1990s is sifted back bit by bit: the lilacs at the school gate, the pencil case on the desk, who was listening to whose songs, who walked past the track holding a basketball. She also gradually discovers that the encounters she once thought accidental may not have been accidental at all. With the appearance of the last magazine, the secret Meng Fan left in his writing, and at the end of his life, is finally revealed. Through another's unspoken love Wen Jing re-examines her own seven years, and comes at last to understand what the words "first love" truly point to: they belong not only to those who are in love, but also to times quietly remembered in places no one knows.