Hide and Seek

Leaving the university laboratory late at night with her boyfriend, Weiyuan remembers the wool scarf her mother had just knitted and left behind, so she turns back to fetch it—and thereby discovers and saves a young man, Xu Jingshen, who has turned on the gas in a suicide attempt. From then on the two care for each other, yet neither knows that the other is the person destined for them. Over the years that follow, Weiyuan graduates, works, loves, marries, suffers a miscarriage, divorces, and is promoted; people come and go around her, and those she meets by chance are all vaguely connected to Xu Jingshen. Meanwhile Xu Jingshen, drifting from place to place, searches again and again for the woman who once saved him, always half a beat behind. It is like a long, stubborn game of hide-and-seek: the seeker hides in the open, the sought hides in the dark, with years of fate's repeated meddling between them. Yi Shu writes of the caution, pragmatism, and forbearance of urban men and women in intimate relationships, and of a longing that refuses to be extinguished. The Chinese title adds the character mi (lost, bewildered) to "hide-and-seek," precisely the gloom and loss she speaks of—some things, perhaps, can never be found in a lifetime.