This is a story of misunderstanding and belated understanding.
City girl Lin Xiu married rural young man Wang Tieniu because of her deafness. Her life in the 1980s was full of collisions - Wang Tieniu, with a violent temper shadowed by the Cultural Revolution, turned the frustrations of life into violence against his wife; Lin Xiu built a line of defense in silence with scavenging, organized the rags into neat "treasures", and quietly supported the family with the money from selling scraps.
The son grew up in disgust and fear, disgusted with his mother's "dirtyness" and despised his father's cowardice. However, after his mother passed away unexpectedly due to a dispute over a piece of waste, he woke up in an empty home: what he regarded as rubbish was his mother's clumsy love; those silences he despised concealed unspeakable tenderness.
When he finally understood the tenacity under his mother's patched clothes and the deep affection in the scrap pile, he was left with endless regret. The last lesson that life taught him was: some love always reveals its original appearance in memories after it is lost.
This novel and its characters are purely fictitious. Any similarity is purely coincidental and should not be imitated.
