In the twilight of Huang Xuhua's hometown,

the sea swept over the Rongjiang River in Jieyang. I stood at the entrance of an alley paved with bluestone slabs, watching the three gilded characters of "Academician Lane" shimmer in the twilight. The boat-shaped street lamps along the street lit up one after another, as if it were the same gentle dusk thirty years ago when Huang returned to his hometown for the last time. The boy who once walked barefoot on the pebbles of the riverbank left here with only a blue cloth-wrapped textbook. He went so far, so far that even his mother's silver hair became a reflection in his memory. For thirty years, he remained anonymous, turning the cooking smoke of his hometown into the waves of Bohai Bay, and the fishing songs of his childhood into the sound pattern of nuclear submarines. At this moment, on the river, fishing boats returning to port are raising cooking smoke. The deep-blue tracks that Huang drew on the blueprints all those years ago are ultimately no match for a wanderer's attachment to his hometown. The grandmother at the entrance of the alley said that she saw a white-haired old man lingering here for a long time last autumn, stroking the moss marks on the blue brick wall as if stroking the pressure hull of a submarine. When the evening tide flooded the riverbank, a long whistle of a steamboat came from afar. I suddenly understood that some people spend their whole lives measuring the depth of the sea, but they forever moor their deepest thoughts in the harbor from which they set sail. The boat-shaped street lamps in the twilight swayed gently, as if a submersible was sleeping peacefully in the arms of its home port.