Half a Lifetime Gone, and I Still Haven't Lived the Life I Wanted

In the blink of an eye, half my life has passed. I (Lin Guilan) stand before a familiar beauty bed, the warmth of essential oil still on my fingertips. But when I look back on the road I've traveled, I realize I've long since strayed from the path I dreamed of as a young woman and become someone even I no longer recognize.

I'm a post-80s woman who came out of the mountains, armed with only a junior high school education and an unyielding spirit. I plunged headfirst into Hangzhou's neon-lit streets. From a flustered beauty apprentice to a poised, seasoned beautician, I spent twenty years moving from one beauty bed to another. With my hands, I eased the exhaustion and anxiety of countless people, yet I never managed to build the life I wanted for myself.

The man who once handed out flyers outside the beauty salon, sweet-talking me until my heart softened (Wang Hao), became the person I relied on for life, and the tie that bound me for half of it. He was kindhearted but lacked ambition, spending his whole life drifting from one odd job to another. In the end, the burden of supporting our family fell on my shoulders alone. The youthful determination to “make something of myself” gradually faded amid the everyday grind of food, bills, and chores. My burning hopes for life in the big city wore down into the ordinary warmth of daily life as I rushed from one day to the next. I followed the script of the life I was “supposed” to live: getting married, having children, supporting a family. But along the way, I lost the person I “wanted” to be.

This book is both a tender look back at my twenty-year career in beauty and a searching examination of the regrets I've carried through half a lifetime. It's for everyone who struggles through reality and searches for a glimmer of light in the fog: perhaps we haven't become the people we hoped to be, but the roads we walked with gritted teeth still deserve to be seen and remembered.