“Pinky promise, hook and loop, a hundred years, no take-backs!”
Eight-year-old Lin Xiaonuo met Zhou Yang, his leg in a cast, at a children’s hospital. In the smell of disinfectant, two lonely souls made the first promise of their lives. Congenital heart disease had confined Xiaonuo’s world to the pallid walls of a hospital room, but Zhou Yang burst into her closed-off life with dinosaur badges and stories about Tyrannosaurus rex.
From elementary school, when Zhou Yang fought older students to protect her, to high school, when he presented his champion’s bouquet to her in the stands; from the first time she heard his heart race out of control in a downpour when they were eighteen, to university, when he used a stethoscope outside the operating room to let their two hearts “talk”, for fifteen years, Zhou Yang remained the most unwavering constant in Lin Xiaonuo’s life.
Just as their childhood affection finally began to blossom, the hurricane of reality blew them apart across oceans. He left behind a diary filled with ten years of secret love, while she held on to a dinosaur badge whose colors had long since faded. Over the next three years, she turned her longing into children’s stories, while he studied treatments for pediatric heart disease in a lab abroad.
Then, at a book signing, they met again as adults. Zhou Yang took out the dinosaur badge he had carried with him for fifteen years, and Xiaonuo opened the last page of the yellowed diary. It turned out they had never forgotten that childish promise.
This is a story about protecting each other and growing up. When ancient medical texts meet a dinosaur badge, and a stethoscope records their heartbeats, they spend fifteen years proving that some promises never change, not even after a hundred years.
