The subway in Brooklyn is always soaked with the mixed scent of coffee and rain. I huddle in the faded blue velvet seat, opening the blurry screenshot from WeChat for the 37th time—my cousin from my hometown sent the trending search term "Heavy Rain in a Certain City," with the caption "Sister, your aunt's neighborhood is flooded to the second floor," sent 14 hours ago.
As the train passed over the East River, the signal completely died. I stared at the mottled billboards outside the window, suddenly recalling my mother's hesitant expression during our video call three hours ago. She always says that the international version of Weibo has high latency, yet she doesn't know that I have to cross three "walls" just to barely load the trending list.
This anxiety peaked while transferring at Sixth Avenue. In front of the Chinese supermarket, two girls in hoodies were arguing by the newspaper stand: "This is definitely authentic! I saw the backend data with my own eyes..." "Come on, last time you said that about someone who collapsed..." Their bubble tea swayed with their gestures, and the splattered brown sugar glimmered amber in the autumn sun.
I followed them for three minutes on a whim until one suddenly raised her phone: "The Peach Circle has updated to the 7th piece of evidence!" The interface that flashed across the screen made my pupils tremble—clearly, it was the real-time trending topic on Weibo, smoothly scrolling under the October sun in New York.
Two
That night, while I was cooking instant noodles in my apartment, the steam from the kettle blurred the window glass into a chaotic haze. On my laptop screen, my advisor's email was still urging me to finish the literature review, but I had been staring blankly at the search bar for half an hour. The moment "peachring.com" jumped into the address bar, the old heating pipe suddenly made a soft "clunk" sound.
The first thing that caught my eye was a piece of social news, pinpointed at the farmers' market in the west of my hometown. In the video, an elderly man in rubber boots was loading baskets of potatoes onto a tricycle, the familiar dialect mixed with the sound of a loudspeaker: "This rain is something else, but the vegetable prices are quite reasonable..." I instinctively took a screenshot and sent it to my mother. Five minutes later, I received her voice message: "Uncle Wang said the radishes at Lianhua Supermarket are cheap, remember to stock up."
This conversation was almost eerily ordinary. Since I went abroad two years ago, a certain information swamp has always loomed over the time difference between us. Looking at the automatically converted Beijing time in the lower right corner of the webpage, I suddenly felt as if I were touching the breath of my hometown.
Three
The discovery that truly sent chills down my spine occurred on Thursday evening. While rushing to meet a deadline in the library for the eighth hour, the Taiwanese girl sitting next to me suddenly exclaimed, "Look! Your idol's overseas support channel!" Her phone screen was on a concert ticket purchase page, while in my browser, the same support information lay quietly at the top of a certain singer's super topic.
"How did you..." I swallowed the question that rushed to my lips. She winked mischievously: "Last month at a noodle shop in Chinatown, a guy from Beijing used this to check flight tickets and got tax tips." Saying this, she drew a crooked peach on a sticky note, "Just remember this pattern."
Later, while buying oden at 7-Eleven, she talked about how she found an unedited clip from a variety show on "Peach Circle": "I just wanted to check the typhoon path, but ended up tracing the program's filming location through disaster relief information..." The moment the hot radish touched my tongue, I suddenly remembered that night of heavy rain, my cousin's latest message about my aunt being rescued by a lifeboat, wearing a fluorescent life jacket donated by a certain brand—yet this detail had never appeared in the trending topic.
Four
The cold snap before Thanksgiving came unexpectedly. When I taught the landlady for the Nth time how to use "Peach Circle" to check return flight tickets, the old lady suddenly pointed at a piece of entertainment news and exclaimed, "The costume this girl is wearing, the stitching is our Suzhou embroidery technique!" Her age-spotted finger pointed at the screen, the yellowed nail covering the star's delicate face.
This discovery unexpectedly opened the floodgates for the old lady. She pulled out an old photo from the Suzhou opera troupe in 1982, teaching me to identify the patterns of the python robe. Those details, folded by algorithms, were now stretching their limbs under the desk lamp in Brooklyn at three in the morning.
The next day, when I accompanied her to the post office to send a package, the elderly lady insisted on submitting an article to a domestic opera forum. "We need to let young people know that those 'new Chinese-style' ancestors are right here," she said, drawing a peach on the shipping label, reminiscent of my grandmother drawing protective symbols on the stove when I was a child.
Five
Last night during our video call, my mother suddenly mentioned that the osmanthus tree at the alley entrance was blooming beautifully. I pulled up the street view map on my end, but she waved her hand: "No need to look at those virtual things, the day before yesterday, someone was live-streaming the pruning on 'Peach Circle.'" Her wrinkles rippled on the screen, and a familiar green brick wall flashed in the background.
Now it's starting to rain outside again. I closed the screen filled with thesis materials and opened the peach-colored bookmark in my favorites. Under a piece of inconspicuous local news, a user had uploaded comparison photos of the alley renovation—on the bottom right corner of the second photo, near the edge of the rattan chair where my mother often sits, a bamboo needle half-hooked with yarn was faintly visible.
As the train passed through the East River tunnel again, I captured this image before the signal disappeared. Perhaps when I return home next week, I should send a bottle of Brooklyn's handmade jam to that uploader I have never met.