At nineteen, Chen Mo met twenty-four-year-old Su Wan at Quiet Corner, a café steeped in the aroma of coffee.
She was like a breeze carrying an exquisite fragrance, drifting into his impoverished world and effortlessly rippling the spring waters of his admiration. He awkwardly offered her the sincere devotion of youth, believing he had grasped a ray of salvation. She took him to the clouds and showed him a splendor he had never imagined, yet also made him taste the bitterness of the dust all the more deeply.
When the novelty evaporated like perfume, and the more suitable “Platinum Age” arrived with effortless composure, the cheap scarf he had spent everything on buying had not even been given to her before it was crushed to dust beneath the cold gleam of diamonds.
“It’s all in the past,” she said lightly, as if brushing away a speck of dust.
In the final days of his senior year, he sat in the examination hall of fate. The blank spaces on his test paper were nothing compared to the emptiness gouged out of his heart. Some encounters, it turned out, had their endings written from the start. She had merely passed through his misery, while he had spent his entire youth looking up at fireworks destined to fall.
[A bittersweet age-gap romance that begins with admiration and ends in devastation. Watch a young man get driven into the cruel abyss of adulthood by class, age, and a fleeting infatuation.]
