Xingyu never expected that when he returned to the old alleys of Suzhou ten years later, the first person he would meet would be Cheng Yan.
My deskmate in my boyhood has now become a woodblock craftsman guarding a few old wooden blocks. His right eye is almost blind due to an old injury, but he is still using a boxing knife to repair a cracked piece of "A Piece of Harmony" bit by bit.
She came back for the "Intangible Cultural Heritage Digitization" project, bringing with her the most advanced high-definition reproduction technology. He is the last adherent of traditional hand-made rubbings and believes in "one New Year picture is one breath at a time".
Machine precision and manual blending, data algorithms and wood grain texture, efficiency first and slow work - they stand at opposite ends, but have to fight side by side.
Every step of the way the project progressed was a quarrel, and every quarrel opened an old wound. She thought he was a stubborn old antique, and he thought she was an impetuous businessman. Until late at night in the workshop, she saw him using his blurred eyes to identify the direction of wood grain against the light and shadow; until he saw that her computer contained every New Year painting design draft for the past ten years, with the word "Cheng Yan" written on the back of each one.
The old version is cracked, the ink is dizzy, the broken knife is connected, and the face is revealed secretly.
When numbers can be accurate to microns, and when machines can reproduce infinitely, are those imperfect, breathing, and aging traces still worth leaving behind?
They answered this question with a patch, a set of "Twenty-Four Solar Terms", and a kiss.
——It's not the reconciliation between tradition and contemporary times, it's the two people finally finding each other between the wood grain and light and shadow.
