Yao Xiaoning is thirty-eight years old, has been editing books for fifteen years, has been in love many times, and has never stayed or looked back. Zhou Xu is twenty-seven years old. He has made intangible cultural heritage records and had his right leg and thigh amputated. He has considered "not needing anyone" as his homework for fifteen years. They met because of the production of a book and entered each other's lives in winter. She saw his broken leg hidden under his trousers, the scar like a crack on the spine of an old book, and his vulnerability that was never seen. He saw behind her "never staying", the fear that she didn't even realize, that she wouldn't want to leave again if she stopped.
They are together. But she said, "We are fine, let's break up." His left leg hurt for him. She deleted all his contact information, neatly, just like every time they broke up before. But later she discovered that she could no longer like other types. It's not that I can't let it go, it's that my bones have remembered it.
This is a story about discontinuity and continuity. Some people are not gone, but you can no longer reach them; some love is not for being together, but for you to become another version of a person, and then carry this version with you for the rest of your life. The right leg bears weight and the left leg rests for the rest of its life. Over the years, each of us cherishes it.
Concept: Incompleteness is not an obstacle to love, but an entrance to love.
This book is not about "how one person accepts another person's disability." That is too simple a narrative - the premise of acceptance is to regard the disability as something that needs to be overcome. This book is about: Incompleteness itself is a texture, a texture that can be loved, touched, and remembered. Just like the cracked spine of an old book, the rough edges of residual paper, the paper that has become soft after being turned over repeatedly - they are not "broken" substitutes, they have new and unique aesthetic value.
Yao Xiaoning is not "not afraid" of Zhou Xu's stump, she has the quality of "love". When her fingers covered it, what she felt was not a foreign object, but texture, temperature, pulse, and stories accumulated over fifteen years. This kind of love is not pity or tolerance, but a positive, aesthetic and erotic preference - just like she loves old books more than new ones, she loves bodies that are not the same, and loves those unique body textures that have been shaped by time, accidents, and some drastic turning points in life.