This is a candid portrait of everyday life, written for ordinary people everywhere. Following the paths of the heroine, Wang Shanshan, and the hero, Liu Haitao, it weaves together countless real, tangible fates and romances amid the bustle of daily life.
Here are deep affections and regrets from different eras; innocent, passionate entanglements; strong, single women wrestling clear-eyed with careers and love; and people afraid of marriage, torn between fearing and longing for intimacy. There are ordinary people steadfastly sharing life’s daily necessities, middle-aged men and women working day and night and gritting their teeth to press on, and those in middle age confronting marital troubles and crushing career pressures, struggling to endure. There is the silence and heartache of sexless marriages, the love of the elderly who have weathered half a lifetime of storms and now face illness, aging, and death together, and the twists and turns of those still searching for a place to belong after the devastation of divorce.
There are no perfect characters and no over-the-top wish-fulfillment drama, only the bare realities of life and the love, hatred, and tangled feelings hidden in the everyday. Vignettes from ordinary people’s lives take turns unfolding, full of life’s warmth and hardship, human struggles, and even a touch of uncanny fate and destined encounters spanning past and present lives.
It turns out that every meeting and parting, every act of devotion and betrayal, every moment of holding on and letting go in this world happens for a reason. We stumble through the world, learn through love, and search for our own answers and peace of mind amid the mess of everyday life.
A chronicle of love amid life’s bustle, and of the joys and sorrows of the ordinary world.
This isn’t someone else’s story. It’s yours and mine, the love and lives of ordinary people everywhere.
