[Small town youth + two-way redemption + group portrait + silent secret love + native family]
Kirishima is a small southern town shrouded in sea fog all year round.
Xu Xiaoxiao has lived here for eighteen years. She draws the same arrow on the scratch paper every day - heading north. There is snow in the north, there are universities in the north, and there is another life in the north where you don't have to be stuffed into a fishing shop and marry someone you can't even name.
She thought her senior year of high school would be like all the previous years, hot, humid, and endless.
Then Shen Yi moved next door. A transfer student from the provincial capital, a film camera and an English novel. He handed her the camera and taught her how to press the shutter button.
Xia Zhi wants to sing. Her dad smashed her guitar. She packed the parts into cookie boxes and opened a bar on the dockside.
Lu Ye is the son of a breakfast shop owner. He gets up at four o'clock every day to light the stove, and practices the pleats of his buns from thirteen to eighteen. He cut out ten coasters and put them under the legs of Xia Zhi's wobbly table.
Four people, one Kirishima and one senior in high school.
When the typhoon came, they huddled in the tin house, with the buzzing iron above their heads and the gray-white wharf outside the door.
The fog will eventually clear. But some people won't leave.
