Before my bed, the moonlight pools like frost upon the floor. I lift my head and gaze at the mountains of the moon; I lower my head and think of home.

This twenty-character poem by Li Bai is China's most beloved verse. Every child memorizes it. Every traveler, far from home, has whispered it to themselves in a foreign land.

Li Bai wrote it during a lonely night in a Yangzhou inn, homesick for his native Sichuan. The moonlight, cold and distant, became the bridge between where he was and where he wanted to be.

A thousand three hundred years later, the poem remains untranslatable in its perfection. The Chinese diaspora carries it in their bones — four lines, twenty characters, an entire universe of longing.