In your thirties, you’re stuck in the middle. Not poor enough to be unable to survive, not rich enough to stop having to live. You go to work, come home, eat, and sleep, day after day, year after year. The people around you are much the same, heads down, walking fast, never looking at one another.
What about the person you were at twenty? The one whose eyes still shone? The one who said, “One day, I’m going to…”? Where did he go?
You don’t know.
You only know that one day, all of a sudden, you want to go find him.
A Shandong man in his thirties steps out of Jinan Station. He doesn’t know where to go, but he has to keep moving. Because another version of himself lives in his mind: a little younger, a little more innocent, with a light in his eyes. Wherever he goes, he feels that person has been there before. He chases him all the way, for three thousand kilometers, through the gray ruins of factories, through deserted villages, and into crowds of people walking fast with their heads down. He wants to remember where he lost the person whose eyes still shone.
A story about someone who got lost, setting out to find the self he lost along the way.
