It has been quite a while since I received a letter from Sister Sunny; it’s hard not to feel concerned. It isn’t that I have any deep feelings for her, though I always unexpectedly think of her at unusual moments. I wonder, sometimes, if there isn’t something peculiar about this. Every time I think of it, I am again disturbed for several minutes.
   Sister Sunny’s family is related to ours on my mother’s side. It isn’t that close a blood kinship, but the heads of the two families went through great hardships together during the Sino- Japanese War and became really good friends. After the war they happened to work for the same organization, so they decided that they might as well live together. For almost three years, Sister Sunny and I lived under the same roof of a typical south China three-row building of the old days. Their family lived in the left chamber of the back row, and we lived in the right chamber of the same row. Altogether six families lived in the same house, but it was somewhat different from the helter-skelter compounds of the poor in the north. Although strapped for cash, each of the families managed to maintain a measure of respectability. During that turbulent time of price fluctuations and inflation, life was indeed tough for the salaried class. But back then the flames of civil war were still looming on the distant horizon, and hopes brought by the victory in the war were, though dimming, still flickering, so the days in this three-row traditional residence maintained, at least in my childhood memory, an atmosphere of joy and peacefulness.
   Every evening, Sister Sunny’s father, Uncle Yuan, would take out his huqin and flute from a cloth bag, and, in the courtyard between the second and third row, sit on a bamboo chair that had the color of a heavy smoker’s fingers, changing the bamboo membrane and adjusting the strings and cords. Sometimes he would play “Geese Alighting on the Sandbank,” and sometimes “Partridges Flying.” When he was in a good mood, he would get Sister Sunny to sing in front of everyone, either “The Convict Su San Being Delivered,” or “Farewell to My Concubine.” The neighbors who hadn’t gone to the movies or were not playing mahjong would all bring a chair or bench and sit around, drinking hot tea or nibbling nuts, and an extempore evening party would begin. Uncle Yuan was the band, and sister Sunny the star singer. In the surrounding shadows, the children were enjoying secret puppy love affairs and the adults celebrating the good times.
   In that alley of ours, there were at least a dozen of boys, from eight to eighteen, who all fell in love with Sister Sunny.
   Sister Sunny was a natural. When she sang the Peking opera, her clear and crisp yet slightly trembling falsetto treble, emanating from such a slim chest, was enough to make a man’s heart ache. But once she changed the pitch and sang Zhou Xuan and Bai Guang, suddenly it was as if the poor villages and rundown alleys several hundred miles away from Shanghai were filled with all the razzle and dazzle of the neon nights in the glamorous city’s foreign concessions.
   Sister Sunny’s skin was as white and tender as a baby’s, her two pigtails were silken and shiny, and her looks were a cross between Chen Juanjuan and Li Lihua. In the eyes of our gang who were secretly in love with her, sooner or later she was going to be recruited by the Star Motion Picture Company and would certainly become famous in the whole wide world.
   In 1948, my father found a job, and our family moved to Taiwan. Before we left, Father did a good thing.
   Uncle Yuan was the kind of person who didn’t work but lived off pawning his family’s antiques and paintings. When his daughter got older, it was quite natural that he began to think of lessening the family’s burden. So, with my father as a matchmaker, he married Sister Sunny to the son of a local aristocrat. The wedding was lively and full of pomp and fanfare. Except us silly boys whose infatuation was unrequited, everyone spoke glowingly of it. The daughter of a nouveau pauvre married into a wealthy country gentry’s family among whose ancestors were imperial officials. Needless to say, Uncle Yuan was extremely contented.
   It has been forty years since we parted, and for almost forty years there has hardly been a shadow of Sister Sunny in my heart.
   In 1987, three months before the marshal law in Taiwan was lifted, I went through a great deal of trouble to arrange for Father to visit his old hometown, see relatives and offer sacrifices to our ancestors, so that his biggest wish in life could be fulfilled.
   It was a typical sultry summer day of southern China, I remember, when we arrived at our old hometown. Father’s triumphant return created quite a stir in the village. As soon as he stepped out of the house, ....