I lived near Yangpu Park when I was a child. Every night, I would go to Yangpu Park for a walk, slide down my favorite elephant slide, go to the Wisteria Promenade to listen to aunts and uncles singing karaoke.

When walking by the lake, I would often find some vague words on the stones of the lakeside trail. As they are a bit hard to read standing, people didn’t notice  much, they stepped on them day after day.

But children are shorter. Since I was a child, I saw words read something like “…light…”. As I learned more and more words, I gradually recognized the words read “Eternal light shines on thee.” So one night, when my dad and I were walking by the lake, I asked him “what does  it mean “Eternal light shines on thee”?

A puzzled look gradually appeared on my dad’s face. He asked where I saw these words. I pointed to the stone on the ground and told him there. He leaned down to take a closer look, and suddenly a complex expression appeared. I sensed a shift in the atmosphere and started pestering him to tell me why.

So on that autumn night, I learned one thing: “Eternal light shines on thee” is a eulogy. The embankment of Yuhu Lake in Yangpu Park is made of tombstones.
(Not only that, I didn’t know English very well when I was a child, others in Yangpu Park probably didn’t know much either, because in addition to the Chinese tombstones, there were also foreigners, in addition to “Eternal light shines on thee”, there were big “RIP”s as well.)