In 2024, Shen Zhichao, a brand trader who was forced into a corner by insurgency, landed in Jakarta dragging two suitcases. In the mezzanine of the suitcase was a tin biscuit box that her grandmother had given her: eleven yellowed letters of overseas Chinese approval, and a reply letter that had been sealed for a hundred years.
She wants to open a shop from scratch and take root in this hot and humid tropical land. The old arcade in Surabaya she chose was the former site of the business store where my great-uncle worked when he went to Nanyang a hundred years ago. On a rainy day, she hid under the eaves of an arcade and met a young man who spoke ancient Chaozhou dialect - a hundred years ago, her ancestors fell under this eaves and were taken in by his great-grandfather.
The Shen family keeps the letters that were sent, and the Lin family keeps the last one that was not sent. The two families each held half of the story and waited a hundred years before they were put back together again.
In 1926, the 19-year-old Shen Huanchao boarded a ship from Zhanglin Port and sailed to Southeast Asia. The sentence he wanted to say at the end of each overseas Chinese letter was never sent until his death. In 1932, his fiancée sold her dowry and crossed the sea alone to find her, but by then she was gone.
A hundred years later, the slow-moving Shen Zhichao finally understood: some words, it took a hundred years for him to realize that he could not wait.
Reading Tips: Dual timelines, the modern overseas entrepreneurship and the 1920s voyage to Nanyang are intertwined; career and relationship are both equally important, and the emotional line is perfect; the female protagonist is slow and decisive in confessing her love, and the male protagonist is gentle and dedicated in the 1920s, and the action man has been secretly in love for two years.
Mission: Use sincerity and courage to take root and grow in a foreign country