28-Year-old Su Wan is a "precision gear" in the advertising circle of first-tier cities - she compresses sleep for KPIs and measures everything with "effectiveness". Until a heavy rain after the celebration party, she hid in a second-hand grocery store called "Zhiwei Xiaozhu" in the old city.
The owner, Gu Zhixing, is wrapping tangerine peels in old newspapers. There are yellowed quotations by Chua Lam on the shelves, and the scent of osmanthus and oolong floats in the teacup. This man who was once a financial elite would travel three streets to pick out a bayberry and could tell the flowering time of each rose. He said: "Mr. Cai said, take your time, it will be faster."
One believes in "efficiency is truth" and the other practices "having fun is living". Su Wan initially laughed at his "impracticality", but when he broke into the shop again and again in the afternoon and was taught by him to squat and watch ants carrying debris, re-carving lard rice, and changing pots for roses on the window sill, she gradually felt her own heartbeat that had been numb for a long time - it turned out that she also loved painting, and "like" itself was meaningful enough.
When a promotion opportunity came bundled with a long-term business trip, and when the expectations of her family met with inner vacillation, Su Wan looked at the celadon vase on the window sill that she bought based on Cai Lam's story, and suddenly understood: "Having fun" is never about escaping, but about daring to stop for the current heartbeat.
And Gu Zhixing also saw in Su Wan's struggle that "transparency" does not mean lying flat, but with resilience, making life worth remembering.
From their first encounter with the confession in the fragrance of osmanthus on a rainy night, they pulled each other and healed each other in the smoke and smoke of the old neighborhood. In the end, I discovered that the best love is just for two people to work overtime together.
