Light and Tang Blossoms from Shattered Glaze

Light from Shattered Glaze and Tang Blossoms

Beneath the crabapple trees at Jing City's No. 3 High School, the young master Pei Yu slips a shattered-glass brooch into Xu Zhaotang's workbook. “Just like you, it's pretty tough.” As the housekeeper's daughter, she's used to polishing the family's glassware in the morning light, but late at night she secretly repairs his shattered ancestral lamp. The fish glue binds together more than broken pieces. It also mends the vulnerability he hides beneath his brashness.

Their school uniforms hold a tenderness born of mismatched circumstances: she wears his old clothes, shortened to fit, with a tiny “Yu” embroidered on the cuff. He wears the bracelet of shattered glass beads she strung for him, each bead reflecting her profile as she worked. Crabapple blossoms made from orange-candy wrappers in class, and reflections of sugar sculptures at the alley's entrance, conceal confessions left unsaid.

One stormy night, he finds her piecing together the glass with a handkerchief wrapped around her hand, and suddenly understands his grandfather's words: “When shattered light comes together again, it burns even brighter.” In the kiln at the glass workshop, golden-red glaze meets sky-blue pigment, just like his passion and her resilience. Two “incomplete” souls piece together a spring more brilliant than the stars within each other's cracks.

This is a campus love song about breaking apart and becoming whole again. The folds of their school uniforms hide insecurity and pride, while the glimmer of shattered glass reflects a young man's true feelings. It turns out the most moving bond is being each other's “exception” and “light”.