Last night while driving my son home from school, I lost control and snapped at him for disrespecting his mother. He was complaining about her looking older, the wrinkles around her eyes and her habit of nagging him about things, like putting on more clothes or drinking more water at school to ward off colds.

"Your mother is, and always will be, the most beautiful woman in the world," I said to him and he blushed. He knows I seldom lose temper.

Driving through the windy spring of Beijing, seeing my child sit there speechless, I felt tears spring to my eyes.

For me, and millions of my countrymen, spring is time for remembrance.

In the spring of last year, I said goodbye to my mother, and gently kissed her face for the last time. She has been lying on a mountain slope in my hometown in Anhui Province, southern China, for a year now, with my father, who died in 2001, beside her.

Even though my parents are always in my thoughts, my job has kept me from visiting them. I haven't sent my mother flowers, even though red, yellow and blue blossoms are now everywhere, in the gardens, on the mountains and in the fields.

During the Chinese Spring Festival, I requested my younger sister and elder brother to kowtow to Mom and Dad, sending them goodies and lots of paper money, on my behalf. My sister used to cry out on the phone line. She said Mom loved me the most.

My mother gave me a second life. When I fell ill to hepatitis B, a de facto death sentence in the countryside in 1979, Mom sold all our chickens and eggs to pay the hospital bills. When that wasn't enough, she was on her knees asking to borrow 50 yuan from a better-off family in the village to make the payments.

After I recovered and came home from the hospital in Anqing City, I asked where they had gotten the money for the bills. Dad told me everything and his voice was coarse. My mom just smiled.

It was the most beautiful smile I had ever seen in my life, I told my son.