Tuberose: A Father's Silent Love

The Mid-Autumn Festival came early that year, but the season felt unchanged. There was no autumn chill, no breath of falling leaves—none of the stillness poets once likened to “cool water in autumn.” I often found myself slipping away to the northern edge of Yulin, searching for a signal in the wind that autumn had arrived.

Summer had burned out in a rush of routine days. It left behind no grand farewell—only the lingering fragrance of tuberose. Yes, I remember it well: tuberose after two in the morning—clean, fresh, and impossibly clear. The scent drifted through wooden fences, soaked in dew, carrying traces of damp soil and wild grass.

In the timeline of my life, tuberose is the scent of my father.

Even now, all these years later, those memories remain sharp. As if I could still reach out and touch them.

I remember the winding mountain path—miles long, the sole connection between our village and the county town. In those early hours, tuberose bloomed in full near our doorstep. Inside the house, under the dim, flickering light, my father sat at a worn wooden table, puffing on an old roll of tobacco. My mother moved around him quietly, stuffing food into two heavy baskets.

He wore a faded undershirt, bent low to test the weight of the load, making sure the rope held. The soft light cast their shadows across the wall—an image etched into the back of my mind, as real as anything I have known.

Back then, I didn’t ask many questions about my father. I didn’t feel I needed to. His presence was so constant it felt inevitable. But years later, I heard from a neighbor that whenever I left for school, my father would pretend to be indifferent—hurrying me along, telling me not to worry about home. Yet after I’d walked a short distance down the road, he would appear at the door and call after me, his voice carrying with it a thousand unspoken hopes. I never turned back—but I heard him. And something in me broke.

We lived in a time of scarcity, when even survival felt heavy. But I remember the faces. The gestures. The contrasts. And my father’s love—so silent, so persistent—it glowed like a coal kept alive through wind and rain.

His love never spoke loudly. Like the beauty of nature, vast and wordless; like the workings of the world, profound and quiet. He stood always at the edge of my life, waiting for me to grow strong enough to fly. Not with expectations—but with hope. With quiet faith.

He had planted tuberose by the door—not for himself, but for me. Just as he carried the weight of a life without choices, so I could someday walk further, see more. His own path was one of repetition and hardship. But he had dreams still—only now, they wore my name.

And so it was, every time the tuberose bloomed, I would remember: no matter where I was, no matter how far I had traveled, its scent would always lead me home.

I hear people complain about their fathers sometimes—their strictness, their pressure, their obsessions with grades and exams. I do not think less of such fathers. Perhaps they are clumsy in love, but isn’t that what love often is? Messy, unfinished, a projection of broken dreams. Maybe they’re just chasing the light they once lost.

My father, in the hunger of those early years, still believed in a better life. He planted hope in me. He watered it with silence.

And later—during the years I ran through schools and cities and deadlines—I rarely looked back. But I never forgot that old wooden doorway, and the figure who stood beside it. A man weathered by time, bent but unbroken, always calling after me.

And always, the scent of tuberose. That soft, unwavering presence.

Many years on, in strange cities and quieter nights, the tuberose still finds me. It arrives uninvited, cracking open memory like a seed. I am twelve again, walking a dirt path. My father is ahead of me, carrying my bags, pausing to tell me to watch my step. I am holding a single flower in my hand.

Was that really me?

A girl with a book bag. A blossom in her palm. A scent that would follow her for the rest of her life.