Summer at Fengli Middle School was stifling and endless. Yang Xiaodong, a ninth-grader, felt that life was like a rusty faucet, until he met Tang Yu at the intersection by the school gate, the hardware store owner's daughter.
She had come from Zhengzhou to this small southern town with her mother, who had remarried, carrying with her the dust and silence of the Central Plains. Every day, Yang Xiaodong went to the store to buy screws he had no use for, just to hear her softly quote the price in Mandarin with a Henan accent.
But the first person to openly declare his affection for Tang Yu was Zhang Zhenhai, the rich young master of the town. He could casually buy the most expensive tools in her store, or park his family's car outside the school gates to waylay her. Zhang Zhenhai cornered Yang Xiaodong in the restroom and asked, "With nothing but your family's three-wheeled scrap-collection cart, what do you have to compete with me?"
A brawl on a rainy day left wounds in all three of their youth. When Yang Xiaodong finally worked up the courage to confess, all he saw was the hardware store's roller shutter pulled closed, with a "Business for Transfer" sign on the door.
Some farewells come before there's even time to say goodbye. Some affections can only become a scar from adolescence.
Theme: The turmoil of young love
