Winter, 2018, Taipei.
Lin Jiaming has just successfully proposed to his girlfriend, Wu Xinyi. He is a second-generation Taiwanese businessman from Beijing, while she is a second-generation mainland spouse, born and raised in Taipei. They decide to hold their engagement banquet in Beijing and invite relatives and friends from both sides of the Strait to witness the occasion. But the happy news is like a stone dropped into a calm lake, sending ripples across three decades.
The news first stirs up trouble in the Wu family in Taipei. Wu Xinyi's mother, Wang Xuemei, was a mainland bride who married into Taiwan in the early 1990s. Hearing that her daughter is going to "marry back," memories she had buried come flooding back. When she first married, her accent and different habits made her feel like an outsider. She remembers the loneliness and the bitter taste of secretly nursing her homesickness through countless late nights. Almost instinctively, she votes against the marriage.
Meanwhile, the Lin family in Beijing is far from harmonious. Lin Jiaming's father, Lin Hao, was among the early Taiwanese businesspeople to move west. He built his business from nothing and knows how hard the journey can be. He admires Xinyi's intelligence, but worries that his son's future family will struggle to survive amid cross-strait differences and misunderstandings, just as he once did.
This novel and its characters are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to actual people or events is purely coincidental. Do not imitate.
