"Every crack is a trace of light passing through."
If there is a book, you can re-understand "incompleteness" and "completeness", "regret" and "perfection".
The story takes the imminent demolition of an old street as a starting point, revealing a past event of the family and country that has been buried for eighty years. Chen Mo, a modern cultural relic restorer, and Su Wan, a doctor of archeology, accidentally got involved in the magnificent history of the southward relocation of cultural relics from the Forbidden City in 1933 due to a "restoration" encounter. Through the unsent letter from grandfather Shen Qingyuan and the female painter Zhuang Ling of the Republic of China, a gold ornament with a honeysuckle pattern and an empty enamel powder box, a silent watch across the Taiwan Strait that lasted for half a century slowly unfolded.
The author takes the "gold repair" technique as his soul - not to cover up the imperfections as beauty, but to use gold thread to outline the scars, making the broken places shine with more brilliance than before. This is not only the craftsmanship of restoring artifacts, but also a metaphor for the attitude of the characters in the book about how to choose to live when they face the trauma of the times and emotional regrets.
The two lines of the novel run parallel, and the brushwork is as delicate as a gongbi painting. It not only shows the majesty and tragedy of cultural relics moving south during the war, but also the choices and growth of young people in contemporary cities between career and emotion. The time and space of the two sides of the Taiwan Strait are intertwined, and personal destiny is closely intertwined with the feelings of family and country, which reflects the gentleness and tenacity of the Chinese people's "respect for things and cherish feelings".
This is not only a story about waiting and reunion, but also a hymn to all ordinary people who still choose to "repair" their lives and protect civilization in a broken era.
Read "The Traces of Gold Repair" and learn to draw the first stroke of gold on your own cracks.
