四月的风，吹来了他们走来的方向

It was late April. The wind still carried a trace of chill, yet the air had begun to thicken with the hush of summer heat. On that slightly uneasy day, I was introduced to him by a relative from China—a boy, 180 centimeters tall, with an unassuming face and a family that ran a mid-sized supermarket back home. He wasn’t striking, but something about him stayed with me the moment I saw him.

That morning, urged by my mother to dress neatly, I met him briefly at Vancouver Airport before his flight to Quebec. Just ten minutes—yet it felt like two migratory birds crossing paths mid-flight, each searching for a safe branch in a foreign sky.

He was studying at the University of Toronto. Like me, he had immigrated as a teenager. He had landed in a town with hardly any Chinese presence—life, language, and culture were all unfamiliar and heavy. He was like a mirror of my fate: plucked from the familiar, thrown into a world of new rules and unknown words, forced to grow up before he had the chance to just be young.

While studying, he took care of his younger brother and managed adult responsibilities—visas, paperwork, banks, doctor visits. He studied hard, was constantly pulled down by circumstances, and rarely spoke. But his silence carried the weight of someone holding a household together.

That moment nearly brought me to tears.

He wasn’t my savior.
But he was the first boy in my six years in Vancouver who made me feel seen. Truly seen.

He might not have known the urban anxieties of China’s first-tier cities, but he surely understood what it meant to watch your family’s worth shrink under a foreign exchange rate. He knew the quiet panic of falling from middle-class comfort to the working-class grind. He knew what it meant to shoulder the hope—and debt—of an entire family while still figuring out who you were.

That same year, I met her—
A girl from Fuzhou, whose parents ran a mid-sized supermarket in China. She was ten centimeters shorter than me, soft-spoken, her voice carrying the gentle rhythms of Fujian. Unlike the people I met in Vancouver, she didn’t try to "blend in." She didn’t rush to perfect her English or curate a polished image.

She was like a reflection of my soul.

With her, I didn’t need to explain why I was in college instead of university, where I worked, or what my GPA was. I never feared she'd measure my worth against someone else’s life script. She talked about Fuzhou’s alleyways, street food, Lunar New Year feasts—the comforting noise of home. For a moment, I was a child again—before shame, before silence, before I was split in two.

With her, I finally felt this:
To exist was enough.
To be me—was enough.

Even if I wasn’t prestigious,
Even if my path was still winding—
I wasn’t failing.

She reminded me I was not broken.

That year, he was the one who made me want to become better.
She was the one who reminded me I already was.

They didn’t stay forever.
But in the year I was closest to breaking,
they arrived—like wind,
like light.

Two kinds of tenderness.
One was a vision of the future.
The other, the feeling of home.

And me?
I will always remember.