Summer Knows Lan, Side by Side for the Rest of Our Lives
Lin Zhixia first met Lin Zhilan on a spring day when he was six. His stepfather, Lin Yanzhou, led a little boy in blue overalls through the door. The boy's soft little "Big Brother" became the bond that would tie them together for the rest of their lives. Their mother said, "Love isn't a cake. It's sunshine that falls on two people," and that sunshine warmed them from candied hawthorn skewers in kindergarten and error notebooks in elementary school all the way to a hospital bed in middle school.
In other people's eyes, he is a delicate, flirtatious beauty whose poor stomach requires his younger brother to make him warm porridge, and whose asthma attacks require his brother to hand him an inhaler. Yet he secretly hides his desire to have his brother all to himself in his sketches. His younger brother is a wolfish golden retriever: from a little tagalong who followed Big Brother around asking for candy, he grows into a Tsinghua top student who can shoulder any responsibility. To follow him to Paris and study alongside him, he memorizes French vocabulary late into the night and names his company "Lanxia," hiding both their names inside it.
From beneath the locust trees of Beijing to the banks of the Seine in Paris, from secretly depending on each other beneath their school uniforms to standing side by side in tailored suits: he starts a tech company and brings his brother's comics to the Xingman platform; he draws The Little Whale and the Tyrannosaurus, turning their story into a healing fairy tale in the eyes of readers. Warm porridge is always beside the stomach medicine, a light is always left on for him after late nights at work, and a figure holding sunflowers is always waiting below at his book signings.
This is a mutual journey from youthful infatuation to spending the rest of their lives together. He reels him in until his heart and eyes are filled with him; he stays by his side year after year, keeping him safe and secure. Their days intertwine sketches and code, and are filled with the gentle warmth of everyday life.
Theme: Through the intense dependence and deep possessiveness between two pseudo-brothers, this story explores love's many facets. It seeks to show that true love does not always look like warm sunshine. Sometimes it is accompanied by shadows of obsession and selfish possessiveness, but in the end, it leads us to face our truest desires and find our self-worth and a resonance between our souls in the bonds we share. This story aims to convey that love is mutual salvation: even knowing all of each other's imperfections and calculations, they still choose to embrace each other's broken souls, grow together, and ultimately become an indispensable light in each other's lives.
