Yesteryear’s Wish by Zixiao Yu

A years-long tale of connection, loss, and the emotional minefields of youth, Yesteryear’s Wish by Zixiao Yu is a striking portrait of unfulfilled love and the uncertainties of life.

When the narrator’s stable home is disrupted by the arrival of his cousin, Yunyun, their childish clashes soon shift to an inseparable bond, but age and distance quickly pull them apart. New chapters of life bring new responsibilities, pressures, and infatuations, but the lingering past is rarely far from their minds.

Broken into three sections of connection, displacement, and reflection, this is a story of young hope written with the wisdom of age – a beloved childhood bond ripped away, an adolescent love lost, and a long-sought reunion denied. The narrator’s anguish over Yunyun’s disappearance from his life is mirrored in his ill-fated obsession with Shasha, then ultimately driven home by the timeless pain of missed opportunity and regret.

Delicately laced with immersive detail and touching scenes of memory, longing, and loss, the intimacy of the storytelling makes it easy to forget that this is indeed a work of fiction. The intricate expressions of suppressed desire and the emotional depth of even the most banal daily activities paint a lively and realistically flawed picture of these characters, where each word and gesture feels packed with significance. Reinforced by the novel’s cyclical themes of grief and the perennial search for happiness, this is an evocative, moving, and closely relatable work of contemporary fiction.