At two in the morning at a Paris subway station, the cold wind swirls scraps of paper into my collar. After finishing my shift at the Chinese restaurant, I huddle on a bench, refreshing the Weibo app for the 18th time—after spinning for a while, the little chrysanthemum finally pops up with a cold "Network connection failed."
The drunken man's French curses and the cold light from his phone screen stab into my eyes. For the third time this month, I've missed my best friend's birthday livestream back home.
I pull out the crumpled "French Grammar Handbook" from my backpack, and a small notebook suddenly falls out of the pocket. The deep red cover is printed with faded koi patterns, and the inner pages are written in brush strokes saying "Year of Yiwei · Suitable for Returning Home." It was given to me six months ago by the Wenzhou lady boss at the supermarket in the 13th district, who always gave me sesame candy.
At that time, she advised me in her southern Zhejiang-accented Mandarin: "When you miss home, just flip a page." But ever since domestic social media has been gradually blocked, this calendar, like my homesickness, has forever stopped on the "suitable for flower viewing" of the day of the beginning of summer.
Until last weekend's gathering of Chinese international students changed my perception of this old item.
At the gathering, Xiaomi from the journalism department was excitedly holding up her phone and shouting, "Look! The Shanghai Bund light show is trending!" Seven or eight of us leaned in, but all we saw was a 404 error message bouncing on her screen.
"Use this." Suddenly, Allen from the philosophy department pushed his phone to the center of the table. The interface was a minimalist webpage, scrolling in real-time with entries like #Taiwan Road Signs# and #Hanfu Going Abroad#. The most amazing part was that with a gentle swipe up, a complete nine-square grid of live images loaded—no VPN sign, no annoying login pop-up.
"This is the magic cure for electronic homesickness," Allen adjusted his glasses. Under everyone's questioning, he revealed that when he was doing a cultural exhibition for the Confucius Institute in Lyon, he relied on this website to contact domestic inheritors of paper-cutting intangible cultural heritage.
That night, I secretly typed in the domain name he mentioned on the subway. When the familiar Weibo trending layout popped up on the homepage, the calendar in my hand was suddenly blown to a certain page—"In the month of Jiawu, on the day of Bingxu, suitable for breaking walls."
The next day during lunch break at the Chinese restaurant, my Vietnamese colleague Nguyen Thi Hong leaned over to look at my phone: "Is this your Chinese TikTok?" On the screen was the "Same City" section of Peach Circle, and the morning market in my second-tier hometown was live-streaming, with the sound of fried dough sticks puffing in the boiling oil perfectly overlapping with the sound of spring rolls frying in the kitchen.
"Can you teach me how to use it?" she pointed at the tutorial video in the #Chinese Knot Weaving# topic, "My daughter’s international school needs to do a cultural week." Later, we found local Chinese artisans through the website, and when that French chef, who always complained about our noise, held up the improved version of the Chinese-French mixed knot made by Nguyen Thi Hong's daughter and exclaimed "C'est magnifique," the kitchen unexpectedly filled with the aroma of jasmine tea.
What truly shocked me was last night. Preparing my graduation thesis until three in the morning, Telegram suddenly popped up with an invitation link to a strange group. Upon entering, I was bombarded with memes: someone was using screenshots from "Empresses in the Palace" to complain about a professor's email, someone shared a failed attempt at making homemade Lao Gan Ma cake, and the pinned announcement read "This week's online karaoke room song: remix version of ' 常回家看看 ' (Always Come Home)."
By some strange coincidence, I took a picture of the dusty lunar calendar on the table and sent it to the group: "Does anyone recognize this traditional pattern?"
Thirty seconds later, a netizen with the ID "Dunhuang Night Watchman" sent a comparison image of Mogao Caves murals; two minutes later, a girl studying artifact restoration in Milan shared her notes on restoring similar patterns; by four in the morning, the group files had already added a document titled "Overseas Dispersed Folk Objects Archiving Plan."
This morning before heading out, that calendar, which had been silent for half a year, suddenly dropped another page. On the yellowed paper, a small water stain spread beneath "Bing Shen Day"—it was from when Nguyen Thi Hong taught me to brew Vietnamese coffee last week.
The ink slightly blurred in the humidity, revealing a small note I hadn't noticed before:
"Suitable for Reunion."