I Love You, Do Whatever You Want

I Love You, Do As You Please is a beautifully nuanced story of young love and the passage of time. It begins beneath the ginkgo tree at Jiangcheng No. 1 High School, a witness to countless secrets. Its leaves sway gently, as if whispering of the hidden feelings between the young Cheng Wanyi and Lu Chenzhou. Beneath the line “You gave me a peach” embroidered from the Book of Songs on Cheng Wanyi’s ginkgo-leaf handkerchief lies another line, sealed away by time: “Not as repayment, but as a promise of love forever.” Like the feelings they never voiced, it waits for the right moment to bloom. Lu Chenzhou’s camera, and the seventeen rolls of film he ruined, captured the flutter of her eyelashes as she bowed her head over her books. To him, that was the view he would treasure forever.

From high school classrooms to a college darkroom, from a chance meeting in a cross-campus elective to the mingling of news and poetry in their working lives, they use a camera to capture the shadow of a butterfly on her lectern and a fountain pen to sketch the snowy light in his photographs. Their unspoken confessions hide on the backs of photographs in a tin box, in the veins of ginkgo leaves, and on the inside covers of their Book of Songs textbooks. The best kind of love is Lu Chenzhou’s shutter always following Cheng Wanyi’s light, while his heartbeat echoes forever in her poems.

When graduation-season rain washes over their youthful memories, and snow from the north drifts past the Snow Poetry Workshop, they will finally see the truth and tenderness in each other’s eyes, never to fade, in the developer of time. After all, the most moving thing is never a perfect photograph, but two hearts leaning on each other and lighting the way through the long river of time.