In 1998, Tongcheng, a small industrial town in the south, was wrapped in rust and fireworks. During the roaring years of the steel mill, fifteen-year-old Lu Cheng lived a silent and solitary life. His mother died young and his father was insensitive and taciturn. For him, there was always a thin barrier between the noisy world. The old city of Tiexi, full of abandoned railway tracks, is his unique secret realm, housing his unknown worries and loneliness.
In the middle of summer, he picked up a rusty old harmonica from a crack in the railroad tracks. With no one to teach and no music to rely on, the young man played the melody based on his instinct, hiding all the sorrow, loneliness and expectations that had nowhere to go in his youth into the sound of the piano at dusk. The melodious and lonely sound of the harmonica floated between the old signal station and the railway tracks, quietly alarming the equally lonely girl Su Zhen in the dark.
Su Zhen, whose parents are separated, and Lu Cheng, who is withdrawn and taciturn, are two isolated islands that echo each other. In the industrial afterglow of the small town in the 1990s, witnessed by the evening breeze and the railway tracks, a silent encounter happened quietly. The thoughts of two lonely teenagers and a long and gentle harmonica melody slowly weave the delicate tenderness and fateful bonds in the barren years into their own story of the old time.
Concept: The work takes the decline of the industrial town in the 1990s as the background of the era, focusing on the unspoken youthful loneliness and self-salvation of young people. Using the rusty harmonica and abandoned railway tracks as spiritual carriers, the book writes about the sensitivity, confusion and melancholy of incomplete growth: the vacancy in the original family, the silent settling of the tide of the times, and the nowhere-to-be-placed emotions in adolescence, making two lonely teenagers become each other's glimmer of light. The story does not deliberately create a dramatic plot, but uses the gentle images of the night breeze, railway tracks, and the sound of the piano to explain that loneliness is not a desperate situation, and that encounter is the core of healing. In the gap of the times when the old times are fading and the fireworks of the steel factory are gradually extinguishing, the pure and pure fateful bond of ordinary teenagers is described, proving that in the barren years, silent companionship and understanding are enough to heal all the desolation and scars of youth.