He Xiaojun, a miner's son, and Huang Qiong, a normal school student, built a whole world belonging to each other in their letters.
He sent 317 letters, describing the future with crooked pen words; she read the letters under the streetlight of the provincial normal school, thinking that they would be able to stay together after three years.
However, the reality is like cold iron: her father is seriously ill, the family is in debt, the factory has laid off employees... And there is also the web spun by Ge Peng, the son of the Education Bureau, with his power - he threatens her parents' work and his family's future, pressing harder and harder.
This is not an elopement story.
This is a story about "having to".
Huang Qiong burned all the letters in front of his mother's bedside and put on an engagement ring; He Xiaojun sold blood to collect medical expenses and finally boarded the train going south.
They chose responsibility, abandoned love, and got married, had children, and grew old on their own life paths.
Many years later, we met by chance at the county market, and exchanged pleasantries at a distance of three meters, as calm as strangers.
Only in the middle of the night will they think of the summer when they were seventeen - the still-dry ink on the letter paper, the unfinished vows under the sycamore tree, and the "imaginary lover" who they imagined growing old with but never really had.
This is an emotional specimen of a generation:
In an era when letters were slow and there was only enough time to love one person in a lifetime, love often lost to reality, but those unfinished affections eventually ran through an ordinary life in another way.
Intent: The reconciliation of love and reality and the shaping of individual destiny by the times