Zhao Luoqing is a carpenter who has been repairing old-fashioned pine cabinet door hinges for ten years. He is used to traveling around and never stays in one place for more than three months. Until he walked into the old wood repair workshop "Suiyu Tang" in Linxi Town, Jiangnan, and reunited with Gu Yanzhi, whom he had met for three days in Dali six years ago.
Gu Yanzhi is the owner of Sui Yu Tang and a painter who switched his career from the Academy of Fine Arts to wood restoration. She has an almost paranoid aesthetic obsession with old wood and advocates "repairing it to look as old as before". Every scratch is regarded as a stroke of time. She left him to repair a pair of Republic of China pinewood wardrobes. He squatted down to grind the leaves and adjust the door seams, his hands as steady as circling a piece of jade.
From the hinge axis being rusty and requiring a new one, to the moisture-absorbing pine cabinet doors getting stuck during the rainy season, requiring a scraper to remove the gaps; from layer after layer of patchwork wood chips embedded in the seams, to the repeated misalignment of gaps caused by dry and wet deformation in the four seasons - Zhao Luoqing's hands can fix the problems with every cabinet door, but he can't fix his own heart that has been wandering for fifteen years.
Gu Yanzhi asked him to stay, but he said he couldn't sit still. When he returned from a long journey, she waited for him after he was trapped in a landslide for eight days, for half a month when he took care of his mother in Sichuan, and for two months when he finished repairing more than a hundred hinges in Jiangxi. While she was waiting for him, she learned how to repair cabinet doors, change hinges, and insert wood pieces, and she supported Sui Yutang by herself.
But she was going to the provincial capital to paint after all. Zhao Luoqing squatted on the threshold of Suiyu Hall and said, "You go, I'm here."
Old things can be repaired every year, hinges can be replaced, door gaps can be filled, and wood chips can be inserted. But no matter how smooth the gaps between people are, they will still feel damp and painful on rainy days.
