One roast chicken, three children, and a thousand-year-old town beside a canal.
Shangguan Hui, a Gemini horoscope streamer from Guangzhou, is forty and still drifting like the wind. Obsessed with Wang Yangming's teachings and Su Shi's poetry, he has never been able to put down roots in the everyday world. That changes when he receives a "zodiac-special roast chicken" from Huaxian County, Henan. The sender is Shen Qingyu, a single mother and Aquarius culture-and-tourism streamer. With two daughters and a son, she sells intangible cultural heritage roast chicken through her livestream in Daokou Ancient Town, using zodiac algorithms to unpack the thousand-year-old canal culture.
From Guangzhou to Huaxian, from algorithms to aged broth, from "the unity of knowledge and action" to "refining oneself through practice," the two adults, their children, and a dog named Ahuang debate beneath the ginkgo trees at Ouyang Academy, count stars in the sunset by the Grand Canal, and cultivate themselves amid the bustle of an old roast chicken shop.
Like the aged broth used for Daokou roast chicken, this story simmers over a low flame, steeping thirty years of life's many flavors, until it finally answers the question:
"Does love, like the passing down of intangible cultural heritage, also need a little stubbornness, a little naivete, and countless everyday acts of perseverance?"
Wow, our Huaxian roast chicken has been written into a novel, my brother is so awesome. A good book worth recommending.