A Life of Simple Pleasures!

Tea master Shen Qinghuan opens a little shop without a sign at the end of an alley, using Pu'er tea of different vintages to mark the passing years. One of her regulars is a man who always seems to be injured. Only on a stormy night, when he shakes the blood from his coat, does she recognize him as the childhood friend who disappeared twenty years ago. Now, he is an underground antique restorer. He teaches her to read the marks of time in the crazing of porcelain, while she brews aged tea that has absorbed the past for him. When pursuers kick their way into the tea room, Shen Qinghuan lifts a floor tile, revealing a cellar full of bronze relics. “You restore artifacts. I’ll restore you.” On the most perilous night of all, the two of them wait by the kiln for the celadon glaze to emerge. With a magnifying glass, he shows her the rainbow hidden in the glaze, while she uses a tea stem as a brush to write on rice paper: “The finest things in life are no more than porridge simmering over a fire, and a kiss after surviving disaster.” In the morning light, their reflections in the tea show them both with white hair. It turns out the most precious relic is the time they’ve spent together amid the bustle of everyday life, its mottled beauty left “unrestored.”