Tu Yao 涂遥

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  • The Anonymous Call

    Over the past year or two, I’ve received at least one anonymous call almost every other day. At first, I would answer, thinking it might be something work-related or maybe someone who had forgotten to save their number. But after countless moments of irritation—hanging up on obvious scams or robotic voices—I gradually stopped picking up altogether.

    Online, there are plenty of funny videos of people pranking scammers, or even turning the tables on them. It’s amusing, yet I can’t help but feel a little helpless. What a world, full of deception and lies. And then I remember one anonymous call I made long ago, completely different from the flood of scammers that now fill me with fatigue and frustration. That call remains, to this day, a memory that feels tender and strangely charming.

    It must have been around my second year of junior high, thirteen or fourteen. Boarding school life was often boring, and in our free moments, my friend Na and I would wander the campus together, chatting about everything and nothing, pondering the little mysteries of adolescence, and, like all girls our age, imagining the life we might have in the future. Sometimes we would indulge in what we thought were bold mischiefs—like sneaking into the gym, spraying the floor with a fire extinguisher, and running away laughing. There weren’t cameras everywhere yet, and at night, the playground was full of couples meeting in secret. If we went for a night run, we’d often spot familiar faces, then return to the dorm to gossip.

    One evening, after dinner, we wandered to a public phone booth in front of the teaching building while waiting for class to start. Mobile phones were already common, but as boarding students, we still carried a prepaid card for calling out if necessary.

    “Why don’t we just dial a random number and see what happens?” I suggested.

    “What if someone picks up? What do we say?” Na asked.

    “We’ll just improvise,” I said, grinning.

    So we dialed at random. After two or three rings, someone actually answered. We exchanged a wide-eyed glance, trying to act calm.

    “Hello?”

    “Hello? Who’s this?”

    On the other end was a young man, his voice carrying a slight county accent.

    “Who is this?”

    “Hey, it’s you who called me.”

    We didn’t want to reveal our identities, so we exchanged another glance.

    “What are you doing?”

    “Me? I’m about to go to work.”

    Surprisingly, he didn’t seem suspicious. Instead, he chatted patiently.

    “Going to work at this hour?”

    “Yes, I’m a chef. Evening shift today.”

    “A chef, huh? Then we’ll call you Chef Brother.”

    “Hahaha, alright.”

    He probably realised we were some young naive girls. Looking back, I like to think he found it amusing, maybe even a little delightful. Perhaps his life was also dull—kitchen, home, repeat—and maybe he secretly welcomed these tiny, unexpected moments, like a call from two mischievous middle school girls.

    We wrote down his number. When the bell rang, we had to hang up, promising we’d call again, though he couldn’t reach us first.

    A week later, we remembered “Chef Brother” and called him again. I don’t recall the exact conversations, but over time, we slowly learned about each other’s lives. We shared school routines and little funny happenings; he shared life as a chef. We never crossed boundaries, never hinted at anything romantic, and never considered meeting in person. Yet every time he picked up, there was a quiet, unmistakable joy in his voice. Listening to a stranger, living in the same city but seeming from another world, recount the simple rhythms of his everyday life was quietly thrilling.

    These occasional calls continued for nearly a year, until summer approached, when we learned we’d be moving to another campus for our third year. Perhaps that campus had phone booths too, but something about the change of place made the calls feel different. One day, we told him this might be our last call. Third-year studies would be demanding, and we might not have time to chat anymore. I remember a trace of disappointment in his voice, quickly softened into understanding and encouragement.

    “It’s okay. Study hard and get into your dream school!”

    “And you, keep cooking well and enjoy your work!”

    We laughed over the phone. I thought perhaps we could still call sometimes. But somehow, we never did.

    That year, I didn’t study diligently. I spent my days lost in novels and films, dreaming of becoming a film director. Physics, chemistry, and math—the very subjects that are crucial for getting into a prominent high school—felt useless to me.

    Now, years later, I haven’t become a film director either. I explore life’s possibilities while accepting the serendipity and changes that come my way, and try to live in the moment. Just like Chef Brother, who once happened upon an anonymous prank call, yet responded kindly, took things as it comes, and continued to converse with sincerity.

  • Her Brightest Summer

    Not long ago, I went back to my grandmother’s house to celebrate her 87th birthday. After lunch, my mother and I set off toward the old home where she had grown up. A thin winter rain was falling, Chongqing rain, slow and endless, soaking into the skin. The cold there is not sharp but seeping, damp and marrow-deep. Stepping into the old house felt like slipping into an ice cave. Even outside, the air was bitter, heavy, with no wind, yet colder than stillness should allow.

    I walked close behind my mother. The house was a courtyard dwelling built on a slope, the yard tilted downward, once used for drying grain. As a child, I often played in its abandoned spaces, climbing trees, scrambling onto rooftops, roasting sweet potatoes in a small fire, building tents out of rags and sticks where my friends and I would play at lives far beyond our own.

    My mother looked around the ruins and sighed.

    “As a child, this courtyard felt enormous, and the rooms unending. Now it just looks so worn.”

    She told me how, as the youngest child, she had lived in a little room in the northwest corner. Carefree. Each dawn she would run along the country paths to the main road, past the grain depot, and back again. Running carried her forward: into the school volleyball team, into competitions, and eventually all the way to Beijing for university. She remembered the banquet tables her family set here to celebrate—dozens of them crowding the courtyard and spilling into the rooms. “I don’t know how we fit them all,” she said.

    I tried to picture her at eighteen, nineteen, in 1989—a year that feels, in retrospect, like a hinge in history.

    As a child, I would pore over her university photographs. What struck me most was her smile—bright, carefree, unguarded. She still had a round face then, broad shoulders, permed curls, sometimes hidden by oversized sunglasses. At twenty she favoured slouchy sweaters, striped T-shirts, polka-dot skirts, pale jeans, padded jackets (the uniform of her time), which somehow feels timeless. In photo after photo she is drinking beer with classmates, traveling to nearby hills and lakes, or performing gymnastics at the opening of the 1990 Asian Games in Beijing.

    I didn’t see Beijing until I was eleven, but long before then my mother had already taught me the city through those pictures:

    “This is me rowing in Shichahai. Here we are at Fragrant Hills. This is the Temple of Heaven. That’s the Great Wall. Those are the broken columns at Yuanmingyuan.”

    So when I finally arrived, I felt a strange déjà vu, as though I had lived there once before.

    Perhaps what I loved most in those photographs was that my mother looked so happy, so different from the mother I knew. For much of my childhood I believed she did not love me, perhaps even disliked me. She reserved her warmth for her students. For me there were only criticisms, strict instructions, a tone that always seemed impatient. She rarely smiled at me. And so, the girl in those photographs: youthful, blooming, alive, felt like someone I longed for, someone I almost wished had been my mother instead. Along with Beijing itself, she seemed radiant, full of promise, familiar yet unreachable.

    I imagine the Beijing of the late 1980s, though I never lived there, must have been the best Beijing since the founding of the republic: skies of clear blue, sunlight through the shadows of hutong trees, ancient gates, wide boulevards, seas of bicycles, young men and women in sunglasses and jeans. All of it captured in the photographs I grew up with.

    When I was six, my father taught me to swim by tossing me straight into the water. Soon enough, I managed. Ever since, I teased my mother for being afraid to swim. “You’re a PE teacher! How can you not even get in the water?” I’d gloat, diving under to show off. She would reply seriously, “I was supposed to take swimming in college, but half a year of student movements ruined everything.”

    “What movements?” I asked. She would never answer.

    Years later, in a high-school history book, I saw a brief, passing mention. And then I understood. At that age, the less I could find in writing, the more curious I became. I asked her again. She avoided me. I told her what I’d learned, how many had died. “That never happened,” she said sharply. “Don’t believe what people say. It was just foolish students, being manipulated.”

    Later, when I studied in the UK, I encountered so much more, films, interviews, memoirs, novels. Everything I read contradicted her words. Should I believe the one who had lived it? Or the weight of evidence that said otherwise?

    Eventually, I asked again, carefully. And at last she spoke. What she told me confirmed what I already felt: that the 1980s were, perhaps, the last truly open and promising decade in China’s recent history.

    I imagine her at twenty, standing shoulder to shoulder with other young people, full of restlessness and conviction, raising their voices for themselves, for their country, for everyone. Whether incited or self-driven, it didn’t matter, they believed they had power. They believed change was possible.

    And what of us, in our twenties? We escape, we retreat, we compromise. We live “Buddha-like,” or obsessed with wellness. Our eyes shrink to the size of a well’s mouth. Those who truly care, who dare to see beyond the horizon, are sanded down again and again until their edges disappear. Perhaps this erosion is exactly what is intended.

    I sometimes joke that I wish I could trade places with my mother, just once. To be twenty in the late eighties. To wear oversized sweaters, to climb the Great Wall and shout, “I love this world!” To hear a Beijing rock concert, to sit through a marathon of strange cult films, to watch an experimental play. I know history cannot be rewritten. But if I had lived that summer, I would have taken countless photographs, written endless diary entries, recorded every cry, every song, every restless heartbeat of that milestone season.

    Yes, it is an idealist’s nostalgia—longing for a time that was never mine, a time I never lived. Perhaps it was cruel, ugly, dark, poor, sad. And yet I cannot help but yearn for it. Even my parents sometimes say, “Back then we didn’t feel much. But now, looking back, the environment really was better.”

    I know I can’t spend my life complaining about my own era, or romanticising another. To others I might seem nothing more than a champagne socialist. And yet, I wonder, when our generation reaches middle age, what will we have to show? It seems all the opportunities, all the turning points, belonged to theirs. Can we do better? I’m not sure.

    For much of my childhood, I believed my mother didn’t love me. She didn’t cook for me, didn’t clean my room, didn’t give me pocket money. She barely came to school events, not even parent-teacher meetings. What she did give me was strict discipline, constant criticism, endless tasks.

    And yet, she always supported my choices. She encouraged me to write, to watch films, even to idolise celebrities. She never told me what to become. She only wanted me to live freely, to live happily, to follow what I loved, just as she did. Ideally, not to chain myself to an office desk.

    Looking back, I realise this was enough. I loved the independence she gave me, her refusal to let motherhood consume her: I love my child, but she is not my whole life—this was her silent creed. Now that she is older, she has grown a little softer, more talkative, even dependent on my advice. And I, through this slow transformation, have grown into someone with my own will, my own centre. This is exactly what I wanted.

    Now I understand that was its own kind of love. She showed me how to carry myself with a stubborn brightness, even in the shadows. And though I once swore I would never be like her, the truth is I want to inherit the best of her: her courage, her refusal to bend, her way of standing firmly in the world.

    So let our parents rock, because once, in their twenties, they already did. And if I think of my mother standing on the Great Wall in the summer of 1988, smiling with all the light of youth, I know I will always remember it as my mother’s brightest summer.

  • Love Education（相爱相亲）— Sylvia Chang’s Testament to Women’s Inner Lives

    Today I watched Love Education (2017), Sylvia Chang’s deeply felt work of conscience. I remember first seeing her posts about the film on Weibo years ago — updates from the set in Henan, photos of the crew popping champagne at wrap. Even then, what struck me was not hype but sincerity: a sense of people working with quiet dedication. By now, Chang has reached the stage of her career where she no longer needs to chase attention; she films what she truly wants to film.

    The film is memorable not only for its topical elements — relocating ancestral graves, the Kafkaesque bureaucracy of paperwork, the absurdities of television crews — but for how carefully it resists cheap sentiment. Chang is too astute to fall into the familiar traps of Chinese melodrama: the grandmother’s unwavering fidelity to a vanished husband, or Huiying’s rigid insistence on filial duty, could so easily have been played for saccharine tears. Instead, the film’s emotional charge lies in its restraint, in the way it renders women’s thoughts and contradictions with a tenderness that feels both raw and true.

    Chang is not the kind of director who observes at arm’s length, nor one of the coolly detached chroniclers of reality so fashionable in contemporary Chinese cinema. She brings warmth, humor, and a generous empathy, yet her sentiment is never contrived. The intimacy she creates is so unforced that it disarms the viewer, making one feel less like a spectator and more like a confidant.

    My own acquaintance with Chang as an actress goes back to Ang Lee’s Eat Drink Man Woman, where she played the eccentric woman who eventually marries the patriarch. Later I saw her in Stanley Kwan’s Full Moon in New York, as a rebellious daughter of a Kuomintang general chasing her stage dreams. More recently, she appeared in Jia Zhangke’s Mountains May Depart, as a Chinese teacher in Australia caught in a bizarre May–December romance — perhaps the film’s weakest link. That role seemed almost a provocation, as though Chang were deliberately seeking out unusual challenges, unwilling to be confined to conventional middle-aged female parts.

    But as a director, Chang has always been most compelling when she turns her gaze toward women. Love Education is no exception: its three female protagonists — grandmother, mother, and daughter — embody not only generational differences but also three facets of womanhood, refracted through time. The grandmother represents tradition and obstinacy; Weiwei, the granddaughter, youthful candor and impulsive love; Huiying, the mother (played by Chang herself), a portrait of middle-aged contradictions — anxious, irritable, yet deeply vulnerable. Each is bound by her own inner obsession, her own “little thought,” as the Chinese phrase goes.

    It is through their attitudes to love that these women come most vividly alive. For the grandmother, love is waiting — decades of fidelity to a man who abandoned her within a year of marriage, leaving only remittances and letters. For Huiying, love emerges in quarrels, sarcasm, the endless friction of daily life with a husband she nonetheless cannot do without — expressed movingly in a car scene where all her barbs dissolve into a simple dream confession. For Weiwei, love is immediate, impulsive, embodied in her pursuit of a band singer: she sneaks into bars to hear him sing, brandishes her household registration booklet to marry him on a whim, and stubbornly declares she will wait for him even as he departs to chase uncertain dreams in Beijing.

    What Chang captures so deftly is the complexity of these hearts: their stubbornness, their tenderness, their contradictions. We sympathize with the grandmother’s lifelong devotion even as we are unsettled by its futility; we admire Huiying’s competence while bristling at her volatility; we delight in Weiwei’s boldness while cringing at her immaturity. Yet it is precisely this insistence — this refusal to let go of what matters most in their hearts — that gives them resilience. Chang suggests that it is women’s tenacity, their capacity to cling to love in its many guises, that sustains them through life’s harshest passages.

    Unlike the overt polemics of feminist cinema, Love Education grounds itself in the quotidian. It does not sermonise. Instead, it makes visible the kind of women we recognise around us — even, perhaps, within ourselves. In this lies its quiet radicalism. Western films like Nymphomaniac may seek to shock by grafting masculine behaviours onto female bodies, but Chang locates power elsewhere: in patience, in tenderness, in the stubborn dignity of women who endure.

    What moved me most was how unabashedly she reveals women’s inner landscapes. The grandmother clings to a marriage that barely existed, turning memory into a fortress; Huiying hides her devotion behind quarrels, yet dreams of her husband’s young face with the innocence of a girl; Weiwei brandishes her love with reckless pride, telling her grandmother, “This is my boyfriend — handsome, isn’t he? Even my mom hasn’t seen him yet.” These gestures, tender and foolish and brave, cut across generations.

    Perhaps that is Chang’s achievement: to show us that in the end, women are bound not by ideology but by their capacity to love and to wait, to err and to endure. Love Education is a rare film that makes you leave the cinema not heavy-hearted but warmed — a reminder that within each of us lies that unyielding thread of devotion, and in dreams, we still glimpse the beloved at their most radiant.