In the bustling Lujiazui, Shanghai, 23-year-old architectural designer Shen Yanci always dreams of a bluestone alley soaked in water vapor late at night. The old locust trees at the entrance of the alley, the carved windows facing the river, and the soft words of Wu Nong while her grandma was swinging her cattail leaf fan were the soft background hidden under his suits and leather shoes.
It wasn't until a phone call from his grandmother at her old house in Suzhou that he had to suspend his pursuit of KPIs and return to the Jiangnan town he had "escaped" for ten years. The walls of the old house are mottled, and the moss in the patio has spread over the stone steps. The neighbor grandma who the grandmother said "helps look after the house" is actually Grandma Li who always gave him sweets back then. But now, her grandson Chen Nian'an has become an "old stubborn" who guards the lantern shop handed down from his ancestors and refuses to demolish it.
One is a "new urbanite" who is accustomed to using CAD drawings to measure the world, and the other is an "old time guardian" who is obsessed with preserving tradition with bamboo strips and red paper. The collision when they first met was like raindrops hitting the bluestone, each with its own sound. Shen Yanci wanted to finish the trivial matters in the old house and return to Shanghai as soon as possible, but during the days when he helped Grandma Li repair the window lattice and accompanied Chen Nian'an to put up lanterns, he reconnected with the warmth in his memory: the mist on the river in the morning, the sound of flower sellers on the bridge in the evening, a bowl of hot soup handed over by neighbors, and the gentle arc drawn by the bamboo strips on Chen Nian'an's fingertips under the light.
He gradually discovered that what he wanted to escape was not the small town, but the rush and loneliness he had to face when he grew up; and what Chen Nian'an insisted on was not a shop, but a generation's obsession with "home" and "roots". When the roar of the demolition team's machines got closer and closer, and when the work in Shanghai urged him to return, Shen Yanci stood on the bluestone road connecting the old house and the lantern shop, and finally understood: the so-called return journey is never a geographical coordinate, but the light in the heart that is always on and belongs to the old year.
This is a story about hometown and distance, tradition and modernity. There is no fierce conflict, but there is tenderness soaked in the smoke of fireworks - just like the rain in the south of the Yangtze River, fine and silent, but can quietly wet the softest places in the heart.
Intention: Have you met the right person?