At thirty, divorced Su He had nothing to her name except a three-year-old son and bone-deep exhaustion. After losing her job, she stopped by the roadside to help a stranger with a high fever: Shen Du, a twenty-four-year-old parcel sorter. She had no idea that this simple act of kindness would change both their lives forever.
Shen Du had grown up being beaten by his father. He dropped out of school at fourteen and struggled to survive at the very bottom of society, never knowing what it felt like to have someone care about him. The cup of hot water Su He gave him and her question, “Have you eaten?” were the first warmth he had received in his twenty-four years. He fell in love with her, with an almost obsessive, all-or-nothing intensity.
But real life is no fairy tale.
Office gossip, the sudden return of her ex-husband, society’s prejudices against relationships between older women and younger men and against single mothers, and the wound deep inside Su He that had never healed all tested their relationship. She always cut off her own feelings before anyone could abandon her. As Shen Du’s past gradually came to light, they were forced to face the same question:
Were they each other’s salvation, or each other’s abyss?
Rooted in the realities of life, this is a story about the hardships of surviving at the bottom of society, the trauma of one’s family of origin, and how two people battered and bruised by life find the courage to believe in love once more.
