In the night of Jan. 24th 2007, I was reposing on the bed with my eyes wide open to catch the transient sliding light patches on the walls and ceiling that were produced by the glaring headlights of the vehicles galloping on the road. I used to complain that the bed is so narrow that I would fall had I turned myself around, and my sleep was frequently molested by the roaring cars. That night, however, I started to try to appreciate everything I treated as interference in the past. Interestingly, attitude was colored by mood.

I would leave Hangzhou in four days.

With my eyes closed, I recollected the days that I was able to remember in Hangzhou. In fact I was not strong, not ambitious, not persevering - not at all. There were so many faculties and friends I met in Hangzhou who laid the stones to construct a smooth road that led me to the position I achieved now. Trust and friendship should be cultivated mutually, and thanksgiving should be performed everyday, so I informed my departure and expressed my sincere thank-you to those who once helped and cared me, apologized to those I had once hurt, and made sure that every task I involved had been fully accomplished or properly transferred to others. I cannot afford to attach any pity and sorrow to this beautiful and warm place.

I would leave beholden to nobody and nothing, and I had managed to do it, almost.

Then, what about that old man? He seemed to be as close as a classmate - at least a schoolmate - but meanwhile as far as an inaccessible star in the night sky. I felt uneasy by the mere thought that the inquiries about him had remained unsolved for six years or so.

What was hidden on the other side of than his fan?

This was the last thing I should reveal before my departure.

God, however, played tricks on me the next day: when I was anxious to look for him, no longer did he appear, although I was sure that he was in this campus, wearing the familiar clothes and assuming his unique posture.

“Yes,” said my roommates, when I asked them whether they had ever noticed the old man who constantly haunted our campus, carried a blue schoolbag on his shoulders, wore a pair of white sport shoes, and held a silk fan and a tote bag in his left and right hands, respectively. With such a terse description, it surprised me that my roommates identified him precisely and swiftly.

After exhausting the stories and comments about our hometowns, classmates - females especially - and the current events in our class or college, this was the very first time that the topic of that old man intruded into our casual evening chatting. And this intrusion spawned enormous “why” questions about him. 

- Why does he hide his face with that fan?

- Why does he never change his clothes, trousers, and the pair of shoes?

- Why does he never put his toe on the earth of the teaching district in our campus?

- Why does he linger in the campus everyday in spite of the weather?

...

These “why” questions in turn introduced enormous hypotheses about his life.

- He might be a creature from the outer space. He used to point his index finger upward toward the sky, acting like an antenna receiving the invisible signal from the planet he came from.

- He might be waiting for a beloved girl - God! who now must be at the age of my grandmother - to keep their promise of love. They fell in love here, but one day the girl disappeared without any reasons, but he believed that she would return to meet him and resume anything that had not ended, so he comes everyday to miss nothing.

- The teaching district was once a place where he had worked for years, and to which he had attached great personal affections. But later he was persecuted during the Cultural Evolution by this reason or that. He protested by keeping silence! Students graduate year after year, but the buildings stand still and the wound in his heart remains unhealed. Holding the fans over his face, he is only trying to keep away from all the sorrow of the past.

...

Hypotheses are still hypotheses because no one bothers to confirm them, although during the past four years everybody in our campus shared the great chance to come across him. He reflected so much uncertainty, but one certainty: he was indeed a legend.

I did not realize that four years elapsed with such swiftness until one day I found I was sitting in a new class among new faces: I was a graduate student now.

Missing all the separating intimate friends, missing the cozy dorm which I had nestled for four years, missing the happy time during the undergraduate years, I rode my bicycle toward the new dorm when I suddenly saw that odd old man, still hiding his face with the fan, sliding the familiar pair of white sport shoes on the ground.

“At least one person remains here”, I said to myself, threw a glance at him, and felt a little comfort.