She is a brush, painting the misty rain of Jiangnan; he is a mountain, silent but shielding her from every storm.
The Li family home in Suzhou is a scholarly household. When Li Lingyi was twenty-two, a marriage contract sent her to the Shen family in the capital.
One blind date was all it took to settle their lives together. On their wedding night, they slept on opposite sides of the bed, an arm's length between them. He said, “If you ever need anything, just tell me.” She replied, “All right.” They were as polite as strangers.
Li Lingyi thought this was nothing more than a respectable alliance, and that all she had to do was fulfill her duties as Mrs. Shen.
Then Shen Junxiu prepared a south-facing studio for her, complete with an inkstone and handmade rice paper, all exactly what she was used to. Then she found an old photograph of herself at ten hidden in his study, and he said, “I was at that art exhibition, too.” Then, beside a branch of red plum blossoms she'd painted, he quietly wrote back, “They haven't fallen yet. I'll wait for you to see them.”
It turned out that some people had been waiting for each other for many years, deep in the passage of time.
He never said he loved her, but he carried her back to their room when she got drunk, remembered her casual remark that “it hardly ever snows in Suzhou,” and stood quietly in a corner of her art exhibition until the very end.
From polite distance to unspoken understanding, from a marriage contract to love hidden in paintings. This is the slowest of confessions, and the longest love letter of all.
“I've seen Miss Li's paintings.”
“When was that?”
“When you were ten. What about you?”
“Me? A little later. But that's all right. I can wait.”
This is an extremely slow story. It's so slow that the male and female protagonists sleep on one side of each other on their wedding night, with an arm's length between them; it's so slow that they use a painting or a poem to convey their feelings - "The winter plum blossoms have not yet bloomed" and "They haven't fallen yet, waiting for you to see"; it's so slow that the male protagonist has been waiting for the heroine for seventeen years, starting from when he pressed the shutter at an art exhibition when he was ten years old, but never said it out loud. But it is this "slowness" that makes every heartbeat extra precious. When Shen Junxiu prepared the studio, inkstones, and handmade rice paper for Li Lingyi, when she discovered that there were old photos of her when she was ten years old hidden in his study, and when he said "Then don't leave" when she was drunk - these moments were not industrial saccharine, but the sweetness after years of accumulation. The greatest charm of this book lies in the "hiding" of the two protagonists. Shen Junxiu hid her secret love for seventeen years, her painting skills for eight years, and countless words of "I love you" in "I can see it every year in the future". Li Lingyi hid her vulnerability, insecurity, and inferiority complex for fear of not being worthy of him. Both of them are approaching each other cautiously, conveying their feelings through paintings, and using actions instead of words. This kind of implicit, oriental love, rendered layer by layer like a gongbi painting, is too rare in today's fast-paced online articles. If you like the long flow of water in "Know or Not", the dual-power setting in "A Little Smile Is Charming", and the narrative style of "not talking about love but loving everywhere" - you will not be able to put it down this book.