Twenty-nine-year-old Cen Zhiwei is a calligraphy and painting restorer at Nanling Museum.
She is used to getting along with scraps of paper, old silk and fading years, and has always believed that the most important thing about restoration is never to make an old thing look like new again, but to respect everything it has experienced.
On the eve of the renovation of the old museum, a wooden cabinet that had been sealed for twenty years was accidentally opened, and a long landscape scroll of unknown origin and severe damage was revealed.
And on its old backing paper, Cen Zhiwei saw her mother's name.
Twenty years ago, a heavy rain caused water to enter the old library warehouse. Her mother, Cen Qinghe, left the cultural relic restoration industry because of this and never mentioned the incident. At the same time, Cheng Yuanshan, who was in charge of the renovation project, also shouldered the responsibility and left the cultural preservation industry.
Twenty years later, Cen Zhiwei met Cheng Yuanshan's son, Cheng Xuchuan, a historical building conservation engineer.
One restores cultural relics and the other restores buildings.
They went from being tit-for-tat when they first met to gradually understanding each other's persistence. In the incomplete files and silent old things, they re-approached that rainy night that their parents didn't want to mention.
Only later did they realize that some old things were not waiting to be restored to their original state.
So do some people.
All the cracks left by time do not have to be erased.
Someone is willing to accompany you to pick up the light lost in time, which is another kind of completeness.
