Thin Spring Shirt

In the seventeenth year of the Republic of China, there was a plum rain in the south of the Yangtze River. Twenty-two-year-old Shen Yunxiu is trapped in an old house that is declining. The unfinished wedding dress on the embroidery stand is the entire future that her mother has arranged for her - to marry the son of a salt merchant in the town in exchange for stability in the rest of her life. She thought that her whole life would be like this, like a mandarin duck on an embroidered bandage, entangled in gold threads and unable to fly. Until one rainy day, Lin Zhiwan, a female teacher from the provincial capital, knocked on the door of the Shen family ancestral hall. She wore a moon-white cheongsam and had short hair that reached her ears. She rented an unused wing to run a girls' night school, teaching female workers how to read, do accounting, and read poetry. She tells those girls who have never held a pen: Women can not marry, they can have choices, and they can live the way they want. Shen Yunxiu went to the class secretly and sat in the corner taking notes, like a person who stole fire. Lin Zhiwan taught her to write her name, and his fingertips brushed the back of her hand; on a rainy night, they held the same umbrella, shoulders touching shoulders; they looked at the moon in the patio and talked about Tagore and Peking in the distance. They fell in love under the kerosene lamp in the ancestral hall - restrained, gentle, blooming quietly like wild roses in a stoneware vase. But Shen Yunxiu's mother fell ill. The salt merchant's appointment letter has been sent out, and the red paper and gold letters are pressed on the table in the main room. On the day when the sedan chair passed by the ancestral hall, Shen Yunxiu saw Lin Zhiwan standing on the steps, wearing the same moon-white cheongsam when they first met. He watched her walk through the alley and step by step out of the small town as far as the eye could see. Later, she opened the book "New Life" left by Lin Zhiwan, and there was an extra line on the title page: "Before I was born to you, I was already old when you were born. The separation is not only years, but also the whole world." They are only one step away. Half a step in the night, half a step in the rain, that hour of waiting outside the back door, that square handkerchief that was rarely thrown in the window. Just half a step. But this half step separated them for a lifetime. Intention: Love is real, but life is also real. The tragedy of Shen Yunxiu and Lin Zhiwan does not lie in who does not love the other, but in the era, family, and identity they each carry, like two opposite tides, pushing them towards each other and pulling them apart. Lin Zhiwan taught Shen Yunxiu that "you can not marry", but he could not teach her that "you can leave your seriously ill mother behind." Shen Yunxiu understood the "freedom" written in Lin Zhiwan's book, but she could not understand what the person who was waiting outside the back door for an extra hour that night went through in her heart. The so-called "half step difference" means that within half a step is love, and half a step away is their respective destiny. They all tried to take that half step - Lin Zhiwan waited until the moon rose, and Shen Yunxiu dug her nails into her palms - but fate did not give them the chance to synchronize. What this story wants to say is: Some love does not lose to "not enough love", but to "too sober". I clearly know that my mother will die of illness after elopement, I clearly know that a female teacher with someone else's wife cannot survive in a troubled world, I clearly know that the wedding dress should be put on after the embroidery is finished, and the back door should not be opened after it is closed. They were not defeated by the world, but by their own consciences. The tears the reader sheds in the end are not for a love that has been torn apart, but for two people who clearly saw another way of living, but ended up living the way they least wanted to be - one sewed a strand of hair under a red candle, and the other wrote a line of poetry on the title page. All the courage was used in "farewell", but not in "running to". This is where it hurts the most.