This is a story about time, memory and redemption.
Lin Niantang is a lonely girl who can "see" the emotional imprints left on objects. Her world is noisy and crowded - every old object tells the story of the past, and every street echoes the joys and sorrows of strangers. Her only sense of security came from the yellowed photo tucked in her notebook: a young man standing under a sycamore tree, the sun shining all over the ground. He turned back and smiled, with the summer of 1999 behind him.
This photo does not belong to her. It was a relic entrusted to me by my neighbor's grandmother before she died. The boy in the photo was my grandmother's first love that had been lost for forty years.
Destiny took a sudden turn at the age of twenty-four. Lin Niantang found that when she touched the old photos, she felt not only emotional fragments on her fingertips - but also cracks in time. She can "fall into" the day in the photo, and as a bystander, see all the details of that summer. What's even more amazing is that in the world of 1999, she met her young grandmother and the boy named Shen Du.
And Shen Du could actually see her.
"Who are you?" He asked.
"Someone who shouldn't be here," she answered.
Traveling through time is not allowed, and changing the past is even more taboo. But Lin Niantang gradually discovered that there was some kind of gravitational attraction between her and Shen Du that transcended time and space - they met repeatedly in different eras, and every time, he recognized her.
Until she found out the truth: Shen Du's life was a carefully planned disappearance. And the look in Grandma's eyes before she died hides a secret deeper than love.
This is a story that spans forty years and three generations.
