On the day Lin Shen turned forty, his wife, Fang Xiaohe, handed him divorce papers.
“You haven’t really looked at me or Niannian in a long time,” she said. “You’re at home, but you’re not really here.”
Fourteen words delivered the verdict on a marriage. There were no arguments, no betrayal, only ten years of disappointment accumulating in an ordinary woman’s heart.
Lin Shen moved into a rental in an old residential complex. Next door lived an old man who grew flowers and kept cats. On his balcony stood a nearly dead orchid. Lin Shen thought he had hit rock bottom, but he had no idea the real abyss lay ahead. His daughter’s words, “You promised you’d take me to the aquarium,” cut into him like a blunt knife, day after day. The words in his father’s diary before he died, “I’m sorry, son,” made Lin Shen cry for the first time for the man who had beaten him his entire life. And the homeless man in the nursing home, clutching a broken guitar and suffering from mental illness, turned out to be the older boy next door who had taught him to play.
He thought he was rebuilding his life, only to realize he didn’t even know how to love someone normally.
This is a novel about “rebuilding after being broken.” There is no comeback, no wish-fulfillment. There is only an ordinary man who, at forty, breaks his first half of life apart, then picks up the pieces one by one to make a self that is not quite whole, but at least real.
The story features a little boy hiding in a cupboard, a stray cat with a lame leg, a copy of The Little Prince with “May you never be tamed” written on its title page, old friends reunited twenty years later, Cheng Yuan, who will never get better but has learned not to be afraid, Old Zhou, who entrusts him with his cat and orchid, and a woman who goes from hatred to forgiveness
