The Suspended Thing

by Simon Wu

Wu, Simon. “The Suspended Thing.” Global Vision Research, 2026.

Zhan stood on the sports field, holding his diploma in both hands and smiling into the camera. Around him, his classmates were smiling into the lenses in front of them too. But how many of them were smiling from the heart? he wondered.

Nine months earlier, he had smiled on this same field. It was the day in early September when the list of capstone supervisors was released, and it was the happiest he had felt in months. Yet his happiness was not simple, nor was it as easy and bright as that of the other students assigned to Professor Lin. Lin was one of the most sought-after professors in the school, and Zhan was the only undergraduate she had taken on that year who had never once managed to get into one of her classes.

It was not that he feared she would treat him differently. What unsettled him was the question of why she had chosen him at all.

Was his story idea really that strong?

For the first time in a long while, Zhan had room in his mind to ask such questions. All summer he had shut himself inside the Lhasa City Library, preparing for the graduate entrance exams. The days had been consumed by review sheets and past papers, his thoughts narrowed to formulas and outlines. There had been no spare space for anything else. At that moment, however, he had to turn back to his graduation script. If he did not, he would have nothing to say when he met with Lin.

The outline he had submitted told the story of a female teacher facing a professional crisis after a student in her class took her own life. He had not written the premise out of genuine interest. He had chosen it because it seemed to align most closely with Lin’s research, hoping it would increase his chances of being assigned to her.

Now that his wish had come true, he realized he had not yet figured out who his main character truly was. The teacher remained a shape without weight.

He set aside his exam preparation for the time being and stayed with the story instead, as one might sit quietly with someone does not yet understand, waiting for them to speak.

Writing a story seemed to have the power to draw a person into another world. When he surfaced again, time had slipped past without his knowing. All summer, Zhan had counted his days carefully, as if each one were marked and measured. Lately, though, he had not even finished counting the days he had spent working on the script before the morning of his meeting with Lin arrived.

He reached her office earlier than they had agreed. It was a single office; from the width of the door alone he could tell the room inside must be spacious. As he lifted his hand to knock, he heard Lin speaking with someone. He lowered his hand and waited instead.

Leaning closer to the door, he realized she was speaking Tibetan.

The only Tibetan word Zhan knew was his mother’s name. He could not make out a single sentence from the conversation inside. But wasn’t Lin from Beijing? How could she be speaking Tibetan?

He was still puzzling over this when the door swung open. He startled.

A classmate of his stepped out, Tashi, who was Tibetan. Zhan raised his hand in a quick farewell to him and then walked into the office. Only when he lifted his hand again, this time to greet Lin, did he realize that what he had just witnessed must also have been a thesis meeting.

“Good afternoon, Professor Lin. My name is Zhan,” he said, standing across from her desk, his voice a shade too tight.

“Just call me Lin,” she said, smiling. “Sit.” She gestured to the chair beside her.

“Are you from Beijing too? There’s something familiar in your accent,” she added, her smile widening.

“Oh, my father’s from Beijing,” Zhan said. “He came here when he was young, part of the aid program. After that he stayed on, working for the local government.”

He felt the warmth in Lin’s tone, and his own voice loosened. He had meant to say more, to mention his mother, but Lin did not follow the thread of family. Instead, she turned to his script.

For a brief second he felt the small drop of disappointment. Then he was caught by the clarity of her questions.

When Lin spoke about the work, something in her manner changed. It was as if an invisible screen had fallen around them, sealing them off from the corridor, from the rest of the building, from whatever moved beyond the window. The focus between them was almost tangible. Zhan felt stirred by it. Outside of reading or watching films, he rarely experienced this kind of shared concentration, this sense that two minds were leaning toward the same fragile thing.

After the meeting, his ideas about the script felt sharper. The story would center on how a young female teacher navigates the aftermath of a student’s suicide: false rumors spreading among students, parents questioning her competence, the quiet humiliation of being dismissed, and the uncertain search for another school willing to take her in.

He planned to keep working on the teacher’s character once he reached the library, but when he sat down and opened his laptop, his thoughts did not return to the teacher. They lingered on Lin instead.

He looked up at the opposite wall, at a motivational slogan printed in both Tibetan and Chinese, and let his eyes rest there without reading. A sudden chime pulled him back to the screen.

An email. Lin had forwarded the department’s message about the formatting requirements for the graduation project proposal.

He scrolled down quickly.

The header,“From, Sent, To, Subject”,was not in English or Chinese. It was in Tibetan.

Only then did he realize that even Lin’s computer system was set to Tibetan.

What would it be like, he wondered for the first time, if he knew this language too?

Zhan’s mother, Sonam, was Tibetan by birth. After she met his father, Tong, her curiosity about Beijing had grown into something close to longing. In those years before smartphones made every place feel near, she had been captivated by Tong’s stories, about forced demolitions that tore down entire neighborhoods, about the stubbornness of old residents, about the speed with which new glass towers rose where low brick houses once stood.

On a brief trip to Beijing together, Sonam fell in love with what Tong described as its rough, relentless rebuilding, the old pushed aside, the modern rising in its place.

After that trip, they had meant to part ways. Their feelings about Beijing stood on opposite shores. But when Sonam found a job in the city and Tong returned to Tibet alone, she discovered she was pregnant.

At the time, one of the few things Beijing and Tibet shared was a low tolerance for unmarried pregnancy. So Zhan became the reason they married. Sonam gave up the job and went back to Tibet to carry him to term.

She gave him only a Chinese name. She spoke to him only in Mandarin. She sent him to a Chinese-language kindergarten. Zhan never knew whether she had already decided that he would one day live in Beijing, just as she had decided, when he was in his second year of kindergarten, to leave Tibet and return there herself.

Perhaps Lin’s child spoke only Tibetan and not Chinese?

The thought surfaced suddenly, and Zhan found himself smiling, though the smile held a trace of bitterness. It was the first time he realized that his sense of being unusual had arisen from imagining the unusualness of someone else.

He did not have to wait long to learn that his guess was wrong. In a later meeting, Lin mentioned that her husband and son were both in Beijing. She had come to Tibet to teach while her son was in kindergarten.

As she spoke, she turned a string of Tibetan Buddhist prayer beads slowly through her fingers.

“My mother left when I was in kindergarten too,” Zhan said. The words slipped out before he could weigh them. He immediately felt the bluntness of what he had said. “I mean,” he corrected himself, “We rarely saw each other after that.”

“I haven’t seen my son for a long time either,” Lin said, and patted Zhan lightly on the shoulder.

He heard the concern in her voice, and at the same time felt a flicker of confusion. Why did people find comfort in the suffering of others?

He did not ask about her son. He did not return to Sonam. Instead, he turned the conversation back to the script. After all, a fictional story, however cruel, could not wound in the way life did.

As winter drew nearer, Zhan and Lin met more often. He had not expected the script to move forward so smoothly. A week before he began his final round of preparation for the graduate exams, he had already completed the treatment and the scene outline. What remained, the detailed scene writing, could wait until the next semester.

“You’re the fastest student I’ve supervised this year,” Lin said.

“Thank you,” Zhan replied. He wondered whether fast was truly a compliment.

“Did you manage to get tickets for The Glass Menagerie directed by Ivo van Hove?” Lin asked.

“No, it was almost impossible,” Zhan said. Ever since it was announced that Isabelle Huppert would bring her version of the play to Beijing, the production had become a quiet obsession among the faculty and students in their department.

Zhan knew he would not have flown to Beijing just to see the play, not with the exams approaching. He had not even tried to buy a ticket. Still, he was unsure why Lin was asking. Perhaps she was thinking of going. Perhaps she was not. He did not want her to know that he had never planned to see it. Yet he also did not know what he would say if she did suggest they go together.

When Lin actually took out two tickets, Zhan felt his heartbeat surge. A thousand possible replies rushed through his mind. He opened his mouth and found he could not speak.

“You and Tashi were the only two who didn’t get tickets,” Lin said, placing them in his hands.

“Then do you still have one?” Zhan asked. He had not even realized he had accepted them. Once he did, he hurried to return the tickets.

“I’m not going,” Lin said. “It works out perfectly for you two. I was invited to give a lecture at another university in Tibet that day.” She paused, then added, “And don’t transfer me the money. It’s my treat. Think of it as extra material for your script.”

For a brief second, Lin seemed to blur with the young female teacher in his script, the one who treated her male student with such care that they might almost be mistaken for mother and son. A thought flickered through him, quick and frightening. Would he, like that boy in his story, end up choosing death?

Since he had begun meeting Lin, such thoughts had surfaced without warning. They unsettled him. They brought back a memory of Sonam visiting him in Tibet four years earlier.

“You’re the only person in this world who ever made me change,” Sonam had said over dinner, when they were alone.

“A few years later you found yourself again,” Zhan had replied.

“Did Tong teach you to say that?” Sonam asked, a trace of irritation in her voice.

“No. I’m going to apply to film school in Beijing. Don’t worry,” Zhan said.

He had not wanted to argue during the rare time he had with her after his parents’ divorce. Yet he disliked the faint pressure he sensed beneath her words, as though he owed her something for the choices she had made. Zhan seldom judged Tong so harshly. He could not tell whether Tong had once suppressed a sharper part of his nature, or whether Sonam had awakened the half of him that came from her, or whether it was both at once.

After he failed to get into Beijing’s film schools four years ago, he did not see Sonam again. He did not know whether she had stopped believing in him. When he told her this time that he planned to apply to graduate programs in Beijing, she made no mention of visiting Tibet for the Lunar New Year.

This time, it was the theater ticket Lin had given him that became the reason for his meeting with Sonam. But in doing so, they also took away Lin’s chance to see her own son. Throughout the train ride to Beijing, Zhan kept wondering: could it be that, like Sonam, Lin did not feel much longing for her son either?

Zhan arrived in Beijing ahead of his classmates to see Sonam. Before each meeting with her, he felt a nervousness he could not shake. It reminded him of the feeling he had before meeting Lin. Yet once the meetings began, the difference was clear. With Lin, the tension dissolved into focus. With Sonam, something awkward lingered in the air.

When he showered, Sonam would gather the underwear and socks he had taken off and wash them by hand. The sight filled him with shame, and he could sense a faint embarrassment in her as well. Zhan could only ease the awkwardness by talking more. Sometimes trivial conversation had a numbing kind of magic: when he and Sonam spoke about the people and events in their separate lives, lives the other knew nothing about, they both seemed to relax.

Of course, the play was part of their conversation as well. But the production itself was not as unparalleled as he had imagined. Even so, Huppert’s lightness and command of the stage still captivated him.

That night, he and several classmates kept talking about Huppert’s performance all the way back to the hotel where they were staying. Seeing that it was already past eleven, Zhan decided not to return to Sonam’s apartment. He sat at the desk in their hotel room, trying to review his exam materials, yet Huppert’s body kept resurfacing in his mind, the way she moved across the stage, the French flowing through the air, not a word of it intelligible to him. He had hardly looked at the Chinese subtitles on either side of the stage. Though he understood no French, his eyes had remained fixed on her throughout.

He was still replaying the images when Tashi clapped him on the back, startling him.

“Isn’t this Lin’s handwriting? She’s been helping you prepare for the exams?” Tashi asked.

The other two classmates came over at the sound of his voice and recognized the handwriting as well. Zhan quickly gathered the papers.

“Yes. Since I finished my capstone’s work early this semester, she’s been helping me review,” he said.

“We’re applying to graduate school too,” Tashi said. “How come she didn’t help us? Maybe she has a thing for you.”

“Don’t talk nonsense,” Zhan said, his voice suddenly firm.

“Alright, alright. Can’t even make a joke anymore,” Tashi replied with a grin.

But where did a joke end and the truth begin? Once Tashi’s remark reached other ears, it turned into an amusing story. As the story traveled, more people began to take it seriously. The only small comfort was that the rumor spread during winter break, after Zhan had already completed his graduate entrance exams. Still, he had no way of knowing whether it was Tashi, or one of the other two, or all three of them who had passed it along.

When the new semester began, Zhan contacted Lin as required to schedule a supervision meeting. He walked into her office with a tension far heavier than before. Lin, however, greeted him as if nothing had happened. She motioned for him to sit and handed him a liquid hourglass.

“This is for you, a New Year’s gift,” she said. “Did you rest well over the break? Did the exam go well?”

“Yes,” Zhan answered. He tried to steady his hands as he took the hourglass. He nodded, without clarifying which question he meant to answer.

“Your outline is very strong. Just keep working. I believe you can win the Best Screenplay Award,” Lin continued.

“I’m so sorry, Lin. I wasn’t careful. Someone saw my review notes,” Zhan said. He stood up and bowed.

“It’s not your fault. You don’t need to apologize.” Lin reached out and guided him back upright. “As long as we know we’ve done nothing wrong, that’s enough. There’s no need to worry about what other people say. Events are forgotten. What stays with us are the feelings they leave behind. So don’t spend too much of your heart on something like this.”

Events are forgotten. What stays with us are the feelings. Was that really true?

Zhan still remembered the bowl of tsampa noodles Sonam had cooked for him the night before she left, when he was five. He remembered Tong staying up late every evening with the lights on, preparing documents to fight for custody. Yet he could no longer recall what he had felt at the time. The feelings had dissolved. What remained were the scenes themselves, stored away intact, carried quietly with him into the present.

He did not argue with Lin. He simply continued discussing his writing plan for the semester.

As the meeting drew to a close, Lin told him they would need to cancel next week’s appointment. Zhan was surprised. It was hard to imagine someone like Lin, who had stayed in Tibet over the Lunar New Year to finish work instead of returning to Beijing, taking leave.

“I promised the two students doing their short film thesis that I’d go on location to guide them,” Lin explained. “They’re shooting in Shigatse. I’ll leave with them after my class on Monday.”

Zhan said nothing. He nodded. While she spoke, he placed the liquid hourglass she had given him on the desk.

It was delicate, almost architectural. Inside, four folded steps descended from top to bottom. Orange liquid gathered in the upper chamber, then slipped through a narrow opening, drop by drop, landing on the highest step before cascading down the tiers in small, measured falls.

Zhan watched the droplets descend, one after another.

“Calming, isn’t it? The orange liquid takes three minutes to fall completely to the bottom,” Lin said, following his gaze to the hourglass.

Three minutes, one drop after another.

Zhan could count them. In three minutes, the liquid separated into two hundred and thirty seven droplets. If he turned the hourglass over, the liquid would still flow from one end to the other in three minutes. But since the opening cut each drop into slightly different sizes, would it still be two hundred and thirty seven?

Whenever he thought too intensely, heat rose to his head and face. It was happening now. His cheeks and ears burned. He lifted his head and drew in a deep breath. Only then did he truly see the room around him.

There were Tibetan objects everywhere. On the windowsill opposite him stood a small incense burner. On the white wall to the left, several framed certificates hung, and between them a thangka of a great Buddha. On the bookshelf to the right lay several strings of prayer beads. A thick Tibetan carpet covered part of the floor.

For some reason, Zhan found himself thinking of the classroom in The Piano Teacher, where Huppert plays the teacher, though there was nothing particularly similar in the way the two spaces were arranged. Was it simply the resemblance between Lin and Huppert? Zhan wondered. A faint dizziness came over him. His face flushed even deeper. Before he could stop himself, his hand moved toward Lin’s waist and rested there, lightly.

Lin caught his hand at once and moved it away.

“These are all things I bought in my first few years here,” she said, pointing to the decorations he had just been studying. She then stood, opened a cabinet, and took out a long woven cotton scarf. “This was given to me by a Tibetan girl the year I arrived. I didn’t know then how sharp the temperature difference was between day and night. I was walking home one evening, coughing from the cold wind. She took off her scarf and gave it to me. I was deeply touched. I’ve kept it ever since. That kind of thing would never happen in Beijing.”

Zhan was grateful that Lin did not dwell on what had just happened, that she chose instead to ease the air with a story. He listened with unusual care.

In the past, he might have forgotten the tension and embarrassment of that afternoon. He would have remembered only the gift, and the moment she moved his hand away. But as he stood to leave and picked up the hourglass, he noticed the instant when the liquid suspended.

Some droplets had merged into larger ones. Others had been divided by the steps into finer beads. None of them flowed anymore toward either end.

Did time suspend in that instant?

Events unfold in time, and end in time. Yet there are moments suspended in between, like the liquid held briefly within the folds of the hourglass. Time continues to move. The event may not be over. What remains are the aftershocks of feeling, traveling quietly alongside time itself.

While Lin was away from campus, Zhan revised the female teacher in his script without telling her. He borrowed from both himself and Lin, sensing that the character had lacked depth. But the changes rippled outward, altering the chain of actions that followed.

For three weeks, he did not schedule a meeting with her. When he finally returned with a new outline, news arrived almost at the same time that he had passed the first round of the graduate entrance exams.

Lin praised him for both. She also said she would accompany him to Beijing for the second round of interviews.

Zhan had not expected Lin to praise his script so highly. Nor had he expected her to offer to introduce him to her doctoral supervisor, one of the professors in the master’s program he was applying to.

When he told Sonam, she seemed even more surprised than he was. Still, she spent those exam days in Beijing with him in an ease that felt new. During that brief stay, Zhan sensed that something between them had softened. She asked about Lin, listened carefully, and spoke with a gentleness he did not remember from before. He suspected she was trying to judge whether Lin might truly help him in the second round. Even so, he told her almost everything.

On the second day after he returned to Tibet, he received the offer from the Film School. He ran to Lin’s office with the news, only to find it empty.

He called her immediately.

“I’m leaving Tibet,” Lin said.

“Why? Where are you going?” Zhan asked.

“Back to Beijing.”

“But I thought you liked it here,” he said.

“There are some matters at home. The school will assign another professor to supervise your thesis,” Lin replied. Then she ended the call, quickly, as if there were nothing more to explain.

Zhan froze where he stood. All at once, he remembered the flash of jealousy that had crossed Sonam’s face when he told her how well Lin had treated him. The thought startled him. Had Sonam been inspired by his script? Had she asked so carefully about every detail of how he and Lin got along in order to gather information to report her?

He had no time to think further. He ran back to the dormitory and asked Tashi to contact his uncle, a senior administrator in the university’s personnel office. Only then did he learn that Lin had been reported, and that she had chosen to resign.

But had the accusation been substantiated? Had the school disciplined her? What exactly had she been accused of? Who had filed the complaint?

Questions crowded his mind. He wanted to ask Tashi’s uncle directly, yet he knew he would not receive an answer. There were rules about privacy. And he could not dismiss the thought that Tashi himself might not be entirely innocent.

Yet, when the rumors about him and Lin had spread before, Lin had not grown distant toward him, Zhan thought. Only if it was Sonam who had done this could Lin’s reaction make sense.

Zhan had indeed had dinner in Beijing with a professor from the Beijing Film Academy, and had shown him his script. That professor happened to be serving on the admissions committee that year. Only Sonam knew about this. But if she had used it to report Lin, then Zhan’s own future would have been ruined as well.

Are you afraid that I might be sexually harassed by a teacher, or are you afraid of losing your own place? Besides, that dinner was only about the script. Lin wanted to help me secure funding so I could make it. If you really used that to report her, then it was nothing but slander. This was what Zhan said to Sonam in his mind. But even nine months later, on this very day, he still had not dared to make the call. He was afraid that, just as he had lost Lin, he might lose Sonam too.

He had imagined many possible futures for Lin. Perhaps she would take up a position at another university in Tibet in the following academic year. Or perhaps she would return to Beijing and live there with her husband and son. He hoped it was the latter. In his script, he had given the female teacher that very ending.

But in real life, Zhan would never know anything about Lin again. She had become like the liquid in a horizontally placed hourglass, suspended there, no longer flowing toward either end. Time, however, would continue. And the aftershocks of feeling would continue with it.