Introduction to Years of Gentle Rain
She is Yuwei, a girl who came from a mountain hollow.
At seventeen, a green-skinned train carried her youthful uncertainty and left her amid the fragrant dumplings of Longcheng. Her flour-dusted fingertips first grasped a way to make a living, then held on to security. She married the son of a coal miner, and their days, wrapped in the scents of coal dust and home cooking, settled into a warm, gentle rhythm amid the little tasks of sorting vegetables, rolling dough, and knitting sweaters.
Her hands were the needles of everyday life. As she knitted a scarf for her son, she hid a little dinosaur in its diamond pattern. When she mended her husband's work clothes, she embroidered a crooked little flower on the patch. Even the cup cozies she made were decorated with curling vines, cream paired with pale blue, like the days she saw before her: simple, yet lovely to look at.
Some said her life was too ordinary: she had never seen the neon lights of a big city or held a respectable job, and spent her whole life going between the stove and her skeins of yarn. But she managed to simmer sweetness out of life's daily necessities. It was the warm water her husband handed her when he came home from the mine, the red checkmarks in her son's homework book, and the ginkgo leaf from her hometown on the balcony, touched by moonlight. It had dried up, but still carried the scent of morning mist from the mountain path.
From morning dew in the mountain hollow to gentle rain in Longcheng, from youthful courage to the security of middle age, she never became a legend. Instead, she knitted the most fitting answer out of an ordinary life: the best life is not about rushing off to faraway places, but about turning the days right before you into a sweater that fits, dumplings served warm, and light in the eyes of the people beside you. These are Yuwei's years, one after another, and the soft, tangible happiness that every ordinary person can find.
