When Moon was nineteen years old, she went to Mianfang in the old city with a girl from her village to learn skills, and met Zhou Chen.
He is the only son of a cotton mill owner. He has twelve cocoons on his hands and is very steady when holding yarn. On the first day, Yue Yue pulled the yarn and broke three threads. Instead of preaching, he just handed over his gauze board: "Touch, you have to remember the path the yarn needs to go." Yue Yue touched the warm sweat stains in the grooves of the gauze board, and her heartbeat was so fast that she felt like she was about to break her ribs.
Moon has known what it means to be "unworthy" since she was a child. The canvas shoes she wore were mended over and over again, and the ancestral hall of Zhou Chen's family had a gilded plaque. She was drying cotton in the courtyard of Mianfang, and his mother sent someone to bring a bowl from the official kiln to contain the wine. She held her own bowl with the gap and the soup spilled all over her lapel. It was raining that day, and when she ran out of the alley, she heard footsteps behind her, but she didn't look back - she was afraid that what she would see when she turned around was charity.
On the last night of her studies, Yue Yue stuffed a note in the middle of a double-sided quilt: "The tight side is for the world, the loose side is for yourself." Later, when Zhou Chen went to the provincial capital, she stayed in the old city, and the two never met again.
Six years later, Yue Yue became an independent quilt maker. When she was repairing old quilts in Hangzhou, she found a letter from her grandmother hidden in the interlayer of a wedding quilt: "I am too timid and dare to hide my love in the deepest part of the cotton." At that moment, Yue Yue suddenly understood that cowardice is hereditary, but craftsmanship can cure it.
She returned to the old city to open a studio called Miangui, and the first big order she received came from Zhou Chen.
