Ink, Paper, and Passing Years: A World of Tumultuous Romance

In the summer of 2006, Wen Jingran, a young man from Guangdong, boards a northbound train alone with his bags and arrives on the campus of Northern University. His Mandarin, tinged with a Cantonese accent, makes him the butt of jokes and ridicule from the moment he joins the student community. He eagerly joins the literature club, only to face exclusion and suppression, with nowhere to channel his love of writing. Unwilling to sink into despair, he starts a club from scratch and raises the funds to publish a campus newspaper, carving out a place of his own with ink and words.

In those green and carefree years, he quietly harbors a cautious crush on his classmate Lu Qinghe. His feelings flow through his writing, but he never finds the courage to confess them. Academic setbacks follow one after another. He nearly loses the chance to graduate after failing his make-up exams, and his bid for graduate school ends in failure. Time and again, the boy's youthful ambition is battered by reality.

Over five years, he grows from a naive young man from the south into a determined youth, weathered by life but still true to his ideals. Along the way, several romances intertwine, and every joy, sorrow, love, and resentment becomes part of growing up. His ideals repeatedly clash with reality, eventually settling into a coming-of-age epic and a life's answer sheet unique to those born in the 1980s.