The Five Brothers' Dream

And so Ma Yide went to the Yellow Mountain.
At first, he had no particular destination. He bought tickets as far as they would take him and followed the railway from one stretch to the next. When he reached Anhui and heard that the sea of clouds over the Yellow Mountain was especially beautiful, he changed his route on a whim. After exhausting travel by carriage and train, by the time he arrived at Tangkou at the mountain’s foot, evening had fallen. After rain, the mountain air was clear and cold. Beneath the inn eaves hung a row of red lanterns, their light trembling faintly across the blue-stone road.
The next morning, he climbed the mountain with other travelers.
The beauty of the Yellow Mountain was utterly unlike that of the ancient Western Regions he had seen. The ancient Western Regions opened and closed on a grand scale: high sky, broad earth, snow mountains and grasslands unfurled like a long scroll. the Yellow Mountain, however, was layer upon layer, strange peaks rising like blades, clouds breathing in and out—like a landscape painting splashed in ink by Heaven and Earth’s own hand. The stone steps were damp, pine roots twisted across them, and the sound of springs came nearer and farther among cracks in the rocks. The mountain wind carried pine resin, rain, dew, and the coolness of stone, gradually dispersing the heat and anxiety in his chest.
He climbed all the way to Shixin Peak.
The pines on the peak were the strangest of all. Black Tiger Pine crouched like a fierce beast; Joined-Root Pine stood like lovers shoulder to shoulder; Sea-Gazing Pine slanted out from a sheer cliff, its branches strong and weathered, like an old man reaching out to test the depth of the clouds. In the distance, peaks appeared and vanished in the morning mist, like countless immortals in white robes standing at the edge of Heaven. Clouds rose from the valley—first one thread, then one sheet, and finally, like a tide, spread over the mountains, leaving only a few pointed summits exposed, floating like islands.
Ma Yide stood by the railing, silent for a long time.
He thought of the railcar of rotten melons at Canton North Station, of himself standing in the freight yard reeking of decay, his heart filled only with the word failure. But now, the sea of clouds surged beneath his feet, and the morning sun slowly rose from the east. Ten thousand golden rays pierced the clouds and lit the peaks until they shone. Suddenly, he felt that human gain and loss, placed amid mountains and rivers such as these, was so small as to be almost pitiful.
Just then, someone behind him called softly:
“Ma Yide?”
He turned.
Between morning light and cloud mist stood a young woman.
She wore a light gray trench coat, a reporter’s bag over one shoulder. The mountain wind had slightly loosened her hair. In her hand she held a black interview notebook. Her features were delicate, her eyes bright. She carried a little fatigue from travel, yet compared with university days, she now had a calmer maturity.
Ma Yide stared for a moment before he recognized her.
“Lee Hong?”
The woman smiled. In that smile were surprise and also a trace of sorrow not easily detected.
“It really is you. I thought I had mistaken someone else.”
Ma Yide could hardly believe it. “Why are you in the Yellow Mountain?”
Lee Hong lifted the interview notebook in her hand. “An assignment. The People’s Daily Earth supplement. We have a topic called ‘Fifty Glorious Years of the Republic,’ tied to the National Day tribute, and we began visiting local areas five years in advance. Xinhua also has a team doing ‘Twenty Years of Reform and Opening.’ Both teams have come to the Yellow Mountain these days to cover tourism development, the local economy, and cultural resources.”
She spoke concisely, yet could not hide the brightness in her brows and eyes.
Ma Yide was even more surprised. “Did you not study foreign trade? How did you become a reporter?”
Lee Hong smiled. “Did you think everyone was like you, graduating only to think about making money?”
The sentence was light, yet like a small stone falling into old time.
Ma Yide felt somewhat embarrassed and rubbed his nose. “I failed to make a fortune. Instead, I first lost a whole railcar of Hami melons.”
Lee Hong froze slightly, then put away her joking tone. “Really?”
Ma Yide looked toward the sea of clouds and smiled bitterly. “Really. From the ancient Western Regions to Canton: floods, high heat, rotten melons, local thugs—everything one should and should not see, I saw. Now I am waiting to start work and repay debt.”
Lee Hong did not immediately comfort him.
She merely stood shoulder to shoulder with him by the railing, watching clouds rise from the valley and turn gold-white beneath the sunlight. After a long while, she said softly, “You were like this in university too. While others were still calculating job assignments after graduation, you were already drawing commercial routes on paper. At the time, I thought you were too impatient, yet I also felt that you had a force in you that others did not.”
Ma Yide turned to look at her.
In university, Lee Hong had been one of the quietest women in the class. She sat by the classroom window, her notes written with great neatness. She did not speak much, yet in discussions she often touched the heart of the matter with one sentence. Ma Yide had been busy and fiery then, occupied with student union work, internships, market surveys, and lectures of all kinds. He had never truly stopped to look at her closely. Only occasionally, when he turned back, he would find her gaze resting on him, gentle, then quickly moving away.
He had not been entirely unaware.
Only, young men often think those quiet affections can be set aside for the time being, as though all missed chances can still be repaired later.
“Lee Hong,” he said in a low voice, “at that time, you…”
Lee Hong did not let him continue. She only smiled and interrupted him. “At that time, we were all young.”
The sentence was very light, yet like a section of cliff revealed through cloud and mist, with deep meaning hidden below.
The two of them walked slowly along the mountain road toward Bright Summit.
Along the way, they met the Xinhua interview team. Several reporters were carrying cameras and filming the mountain porters. The porters bore heavy loads on their shoulders, step by step ascending the steep stone stairs. Sweat soaked their undershirts, and their bamboo carrying poles bent slightly under the weight. Lee Hong stopped and carefully wrote down their names, ages, hometowns, how many trips they made in a day, and how much they earned.
Ma Yide stood to the side and watched her interview.
She did not ask questions hurriedly, nor did she put on a reporter’s airs. At first the porter was restrained, so she smiled and said, “Please speak slowly. I am not in a hurry. This mountain is so high that I grow tired even walking empty-handed. You carry a load up here—that is true skill.” After only a few sentences, the other person gradually relaxed and began speaking of the mountain paths, his family, his children’s schooling, the growing number of tourists at the Yellow Mountain, and how porters now had more work.
After the interview, Ma Yide smiled. “You truly seem like a reporter now.”
Lee Hong capped her pen. “What else would I seem like?”
“Like…” He thought for a moment. “Like someone who can hold other people’s lives in her hands.”
Lee Hong lowered her head slightly, her cheeks reddened a little by the mountain wind. “You speak more pleasantly now than you did in university.”
“In university I only knew how to speak of profit, exchange rates, and tariffs.”
“And now?”
Ma Yide sighed. “Now I know one more word: risk.”
Lee Hong could not help laughing.
When they reached Bright Summit, the clouds opened for an instant, and all the peaks revealed themselves. Tiandu Peak rose steep as a sword; Lotus Peak towered into the clouds. In the distance, the peaks of the West Sea stretched layer upon layer, like waves solidified into stone. Far below, villages were faintly visible, fields like fine patterns, and Jiangnan’s misty waters faded into a blue-gray distance. Tourists exclaimed in wonder, and the clicking of camera shutters rose one after another.
Standing in the wind, Lee Hong suddenly said, “During this assignment, I sometimes feel that grand narratives are very hard to write. Whether it is twenty years of reform and opening or fifty glorious years, the subjects are enormous. But when they truly fall onto paper, they are still a porter’s shoulder pole, a small innkeeper’s account book, and a new schoolbag for a child in a village primary school. The changes of a country are ultimately hidden in these small places.”
Ma Yide listened with deep attention.
If these words had come from Guo Jiawen, perhaps they would have carried a trace of television news style. But from Lee Hong’s mouth, they were much softer. She was not standing before a camera searching for images; she seemed rather to be crouching down and picking small lights out of the soil.
“You have changed,” Ma Yide said.
Lee Hong looked toward the distant peaks. “People must change. Have you not changed too?”
“I have become a mess.”
“No.” Lee Hong gently shook her head. “You have become real.”
This sentence shook Ma Yide’s heart.
They stayed on the mountain for one night.
At night, the wind on the Yellow Mountain was very cool. The interview teams stayed in a guesthouse on the summit. In the corridor, tripods, film bags, and interviewing equipment were piled about. The Xinhua reporters were hearty and forthright; the People’s Daily group was more literary. When the two teams gathered for dinner, they spoke of topics, local reporting, and National Day tribute pieces. When conversation grew lively, some slapped the table and recited poetry; others spoke of the hardships of grassroots reporting.
Ma Yide sat to the side, as though he had wandered into another kind of jianghu.
This jianghu did not speak of commodity prices, resale deals, or tenfold profits. It spoke of the times, of language, and of how a country was written upon newspaper pages. Lee Hong introduced him to the others: “My university classmate. Foreign trade major. A top student.”
Someone laughed and asked, “Also a reporter?”
Lee Hong glanced at him and answered for him. “No. He is someone who went to the ancient Western Regions and shipped a railcar of Hami melons.”
Everyone first froze, then burst into laughter and insisted on hearing the story.
So Ma Yide told the story of that defeat. He had thought it would embarrass him. Unexpectedly, when he spoke of the flood washing out the railway, the carriage turning into a steamer, and the rotten melon stench rushing out when the door opened at Canton North Station, several reporters listened with fascination. An older Xinhua reporter slapped the table and said, “This is the real story of the early reform era! Courage, risk, the marketplace, jianghu, and the tuition paid by young people.”
Lee Hong lowered her head and smiled, but she did not laugh at him.
That night, after dinner, everyone dispersed. Ma Yide and Lee Hong walked outside the guesthouse. The moonlight on the mountaintop was cold and clear. Clouds flowed beneath their feet, and distant peak shadows were like dreams. They stood side by side, neither rushing to speak.
After a long while, Lee Hong said softly, “Yide, when we were in university, I liked you very much.”
Ma Yide’s heart tightened.
The sentence was spoken too calmly, and because of that, it left him more helpless than tears would have.
Lee Hong continued, “At that time, you always walked so quickly, as though a mountain of gold were waiting ahead of you. I wanted to call you back, but felt I could not. Later, after graduation, when we each went our separate ways, I actually felt relieved.”
“Why?”
“Because liking someone who is always rushing forward is very tiring.” She smiled, but there was a trace of moisture in her eyes. “You could not see the people beside you.”
Ma Yide lowered his head. After a long while, he said, “I am sorry.”
Lee Hong shook her head. “There is no need. At that time, you were not wrong, and neither was I. Youth is simply like that. Some people look at mountains, some hurry along the road, and some stand by the roadside watching those who hurry.”
The mountain wind passed, and the pines sounded low.
Lee Hong’s original name was Li Huahong. Her hometown was Anji in Huzhou, Zhejiang.
Anji has many mountains, much bamboo, and much clear water. It is not as prosperous and brilliant as Suzhou or Hangzhou, but it has a quiet beauty hidden among mountain mist. In spring, bamboo shoots break through the soil, rising several inches after one night of rain. In summer, the bamboo sea rolls green, and when the wind passes through ten thousand stalks, the whole mountain is filled with soft rustling. In autumn, the streams are clear and bright, and white tea gives a faint fragrance. In winter, thin snow rests upon the bamboo; the green branches do not break, but instead seem even colder and purer. The local people live by the mountains: bamboo shoots, bamboo wares, bamboo mats, bamboo weaving, white tea, and mountain goods are all ordinary livelihoods, and they also nourish in the people a temperament both gentle and resilient.
When Li Huahong was little, she often followed her mother into the bamboo groves to dig shoots. In the morning, before the mist had dispersed, she carried a little bamboo basket, her shoes damp with dew, and walked among the bamboo shadows. At that time, people in the village all praised her for her fair skin and clear eyes, saying that Anji’s mountains and waters nourished people, and also nourished beauties. Yet she liked her own name least of all. She felt that the two characters “Huahong,” flower-red, were too bright, too vulgar, like wedding candy wrapped in red paper at the marketplace. In university, she quietly changed her name to Lee Hong. With one “flower” removed, the name became more crisp, and more like herself—not willing merely to be a flower admired by others, but wishing instead to be a bamboo leaf in the mountain wind, with sound and bone.
At this moment, Ma Yide suddenly felt that the Yellow Mountain’s clouds were not merely beautiful. They were like life. They came filling the valleys and left without trace; when they covered the peaks, one thought Heaven and Earth were in chaos; when they parted for an instant, one understood that the mountains had been there all along.
The next morning, they went together to see the sunrise.
Before dawn, the viewing platform was already filled with people. In the east there was first a line of pale white, then a faint red, as though fire were slowly burning beneath the sea of clouds. Suddenly, a red sun leapt from behind the cloud layers, and golden light poured over the peaks. Pines, strange rocks, and human brows and eyes were all illuminated.
Lee Hong lifted her camera and captured that moment.
Standing beside her, Ma Yide suddenly said, “Lee Hong, I used to think life had to be seized by force. Seize opportunity, seize time, seize profit. Now I feel that some things cannot be seized. One can only wait for the clouds to open.”
Lee Hong lowered the camera and looked at him with a smile. “That sentence sounds much better than those wealth-making speeches you gave in university.”
“Then do you want to write it into your report?”
“No,” she said. “That sentence is for you to keep.”
When they parted at the foot of the mountain, the two interview teams still had to continue to other places in Anhui, while Ma Yide was preparing to return to Canton. At the mountain foot, tourists moved like woven threads. Vendors along the street shouted their wares: Huizhou ink, Maofeng tea, walking sticks, raincoats. Lee Hong took a small interview notebook from her bag, tore out a page, and wrote down her address in Beijing.
“If you come to Beijing in the future, find me.”
Ma Yide accepted the paper and suddenly did not know what to say.
Lee Hong looked at him, gentle and open. “Yide, work well, repay your debt well, and live well too. Do not let one railcar of rotten melons define your whole life.”
Ma Yide’s throat felt faintly bitter. “You too. Do not write yourself too tired.”
Lee Hong smiled. “Reporters are tired by writing.”
She turned and walked toward the interview vehicle. The hem of her trench coat was lightly lifted by the mountain wind. Ma Yide stood where he was, watching her figure gradually disappear among the crowd. In his heart there was a sorrow difficult to describe. It was not fierce love, nor the pain of regretful weeping. It was like the moist mountain air left behind after the sea of clouds at the Yellow Mountain had dispersed—faint, cool, and lingering for a long time.
On the train back to Canton, he opened the paper Lee Hong had given him.
Besides the address, there was a small line of writing:
The mountains are high and the clouds are vast; may your heart be wide.
Ma Yide looked at it for a long time. At last, he folded it carefully and placed it inside his economics book.
Outside the window, the mountains and waters of Jiangnan retreated all along the way. He knew that this journey to the Yellow Mountain had solved none of his practical problems. The debt remained; the job had not yet begun; life was still difficult. And yet his heart seemed finally to have walked out of that rotten railcar at Canton North Station.
the Yellow Mountain had taught him to look at clouds. Lee Hong had taught him to see the youth he had once lived through.
And some meetings, though they appear accidental, are in truth like sunrise in the mountains: after a long night, they have already been waiting there quietly.