1985, Qinghe County, Eastern Henan Plain.
Jiefang Road has only one main street, extending from the old bus station at the east end to the department store at the west end. You can ride a bicycle through the city in fifteen minutes. Bai Wen pushed her second-hand Forever bicycle to the kindergarten to register, while Jiang Fan was hanging a "Jiangjia Snacks" sign on the ladder. When she passed by, she asked him casually: "Did you add grass fruits to your soup?" His hand shook and he almost fell off the ladder.
——This is their first meeting. She thought it was an ordinary question, but he thought it was a thousand-year glance.
Bai Wen, as her name suggests, is fair, quiet, cute and taciturn. She has been a teacher all her life from kindergarten to elementary school to middle school and then to university. She is a piece of wood that needs "translation". Jiang Fan, as his name suggests, has a beautiful face and a narcissistic love for beauty. From a stall vendor to a restaurant owner, he has been wearing white shirts, looking in the mirror, and making breakfast for her all his life. He is a peacock who loves to "open his tail".
During the blind date, he was so nervous that he knocked over the tea cup; on the wedding night, he cooked her a bowl of egg noodles with too much salt. In the thirty-one years since then, he has never said "I love you", but he has spent his time in the kitchen at three in the morning, riding on the back of his bicycle in all weathers, cooking noodles for twenty miles a week during the separation, and boiling his hot love into ten thousand bowls of spicy soup.
From Deliang shirts to Santana, from enamel thermos buckets to twenty-three-page recipe love letters, from the deprivation of the 1980s to the excitement of the 1990s, to the prosperity and pain of the new century. She had read books all her life and published countless papers, and finally found that the most difficult knowledge to translate was the silent dialect of the cook next to her.
"He never said I love you, but he made me drink the hottest soup for thirty-one years."
Concept: This is a story about "the peacock desperately opening its tail and the wood slowly sprouting".
