Lin Nian is a person who is good at repair.
She has repaired broken porcelain from the Song Dynasty, broken wood from the Ming Dynasty, and residual paint from the Qing Dynasty. She used to use tweezers to pick up the smallest fragment and slowly put it back together under the desk lamp - when the cracks were aligned, the thing came back.
But she hasn't cultivated herself. A fire when she was six killed her parents and the skin on her left leg. She was raised by her uncle's family and learned not to talk, not to cause trouble, and not to take up space. She shrank herself into a small quiet piece and put it in the corner, thinking that it would not break again.
Shen Mo was the one who was repaired.
When he was six years old, he was bought from an orphanage by a puppet maker and kept in the basement for twenty-three years. Qi Xiuyuan taught him how to make and manipulate puppets, but not how to speak - "Puppets are the perfect expressers."
Qi Xiuyuan died when he was eighteen years old. He was rescued, but could no longer speak.
All the puppets he made later had a sad face.
When they met, Lin Nian was repairing a batch of Republic of China puppets—eighteen of them, with a number and name engraved on the back of each one. Those were eighteen children who had been "collected" by Qi Xiuyuan, one of whom was himself.
She fixed broken arms, broken legs, crooked necks. He watched her repair, from communicating with pen and paper to speaking the first word, from standing at the door to sitting next to her.
In winter they clear snow together. In the spring, he made a puppet named "Wang", with his eyes closed and smiling, waiting for someone who could see it.
Later, the first complete sentence he said was: "Then I will sweep the snow for you."
This is a story about restoration - restoring wood
