Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south

“Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south” is a verse from the Song of Solomon that the narrator identifies as the closest surviving clue to Rong Jinzhen’s expression of love for Di Li. Written in Rong Jinzhen’s notebook, it gives an intimate, literary form to feelings that the book presents as real but only partly recoverable.

Source and wording

The narrator learns the verse’s identity by repeatedly asking Di Li what words in Rong Jinzhen’s notebook might have carried a declaration of love. She hesitates before explaining that they were not his own words, but a quotation from the Song of Solomon: song number four, the final verse. The narrator subsequently looks it up and identifies it as: “Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south; blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out. Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat his pleasant fruits.”

The quoted verse is the fullest wording the narrator can reconstruct, not an unambiguous statement of Rong Jinzhen’s intent. Di Li had said that he had not expressed his love straightforwardly, while allowing that some of his words might have meant just that. The biblical language therefore stands as a possible declaration, one whose significance is felt more clearly than it can be proved.

The notebook as a private message

The verse belongs to a notebook the narrator describes as jumbled and sometimes obscure. Its later sections make Rong Jinzhen’s growing love for Di Li more apparent, but Di Li removed passages that the narrator suspects contained intimate emotional details. Their absence leaves the relationship harder to understand and keeps parts of it inaccessible to outsiders. The narrator consequently compares the notebook to a cipher: it offers evidence of intimacy while also enclosing that intimacy in secrecy.

That concealment is sharpened by the notebook’s stated purpose. On the third day after leaving the hospital, Rong Jinzhen brought it to Di Li’s office, where her security duties required her to inspect notebooks being submitted. He told her it contained no work-related secrets, only personal ones, and said he hoped she would read it and reply. The distinction turns the notebook into a deliberately personal communication within an institutional setting: he offers access to his inner life, but through pages whose obscurity and omissions prevent complete disclosure.

Meaning and limits

Di Li finished reading after sunset and walked back to her dormitory in the dark. She lived in building thirty-eight, while Rong Jinzhen lived in the separate specialists’ building. When she arrived, he was waiting there. She told him she had finished the notebook; he asked her to speak and said he would listen. She asked him to let her be his wife, and he answered yes. They married three days later.

That sequence gives the verse a consequential place in their courtship without resolving exactly what Rong Jinzhen meant when he wrote it. The notebook precedes Di Li’s request and his assent, and the verse is among the words she remembered as possibly carrying the meaning he had not stated plainly. Yet the narrator acknowledges that removed passages and incomplete information leave the emotional history only partly visible. The quotation thus works both as a trace of affection and as a marker of what remains unreadable: a literary invitation whose private meaning the surviving account cannot fully disclose.