Reborn in 1993: The Tailor Goes on a Rampage

The cross-breeze swept through the alley on a summer day in 1993, while an old ceiling fan creaked overhead.

Lu Yi had been reborn. Leaving behind the Forbes-listed prestige he had enjoyed in his previous life, he opened an unassuming tailor shop deep in a narrow lane.

Every woman who came in had a hardship she could hardly speak of.

The stunning factory girl, cursed as “a temptress” for her ample chest and slim waist, kept her head down every day;

the full-figured female office worker, whose clothes were always gaping at work, was too embarrassed to date at thirty;

the dance-hall headliner, whose stiff stage costumes had given her chronic back pain, could barely straighten up from the agony offstage.

Lu Yi used a tape measure to take the measure of their bodies, and needle and thread to mend their dignity.

No stuffing them into tight, padded bras, no stiff boning to squeeze them into shape. A few discreet S-shaped darts were all it took for them to see their most beautiful, dignified selves in the mirror.

With soybean-braised pig trotters simmering in the pot, he listened to his little sister smack her lips contentedly as she ate, and watched the tension leave his mother’s brow.

Lu Yi felt that this life, stitching a few seams each day to earn a little money and sipping strong tea, was far more grounded than any world of fame and fortune.

But when the stunning wealthy woman, living a lonely life far away in Hong Kong, gripped the pattern he had drawn with tear-filled eyes, Lu Yi realized he wasn’t just mending clothes. He was stitching together the broken dreams of countless women of that era.

And he himself had become the one person they could never bear to let go of in their dreams…