From Tianying to Neon

The story begins in the 1980s. There are no lucky breaks from a golden finger, no thrilling comeback after being pushed to the brink. This is simply the life story of an ordinary person. From a village girl rolling up her trouser legs in the fields to the proprietress of a Sichuan restaurant, she spends twenty years bringing pots of steaming, spicy, savory comfort food to the table and carving out a world of her own in Sichuan cuisine. The old stove at the end of the lane saw her fumbling through the rush at four in the morning, and witnessed her transformation from kitchen helper to Sichuan restaurant owner. Time passed with every turn of the wok: dirt roads became shopping streets, bicycles gave way to cars, and a few more zeroes appeared in the bankbook. But when life finally moved beyond getting by and into comfort, the hands that had once kept each other warm on cold nights quietly slipped apart, now that warmth was no longer scarce. As we rush toward a “better life,” do we lose sight of life itself? Twenty years weathering life’s storms together could not withstand the silence that followed once the waters calmed. The two people who once held each other as they slept beneath a leaking roof now each keep to their own empty half of the bed in a two-hundred-square-meter house. When mortgage and car payments replace sweet nothings, when business dinners and overtime steal time from breakfast, when the cost of the children’s tutoring becomes a bigger concern than anniversaries, have the sincere feelings that once shone so brightly in poverty been tarnished without our noticing? The times push us to run forward, but has anyone told us how to hold hands and run together?