Two boys abandoned by the world find in each other a reason to keep living.
Core Premise
Shen Yan is seventeen, a high school senior repeating his final year. His father hauls bricks at construction sites, and his mother has spent her youth on an assembly line at a factory in the south. He lives alone in a ten-square-meter rental room in an urban village, quiet and solitary, like a shadow in the city that no one notices. He thinks this is all life has to offer: get through the college entrance exams, get into university, leave this dreary northern city, and put everything behind him.
Lu Yan is eighteen, a down-and-out boy who bounced from place to place before ending up in this city after being expelled from school. His father drinks heavily, and his mother remarried. Carrying two woven-plastic bags and an orange cat he found, he moves into the vacant room next door to Shen Yan's, which has been empty for half a year. He loves to laugh and talk, acting as if nothing matters to him, until late at night, when muffled coughing comes from next door.
They should have been two parallel lines that would never cross.
But that winter, the sight of Lu Yan crouching by the wall to feed a cat reminds Shen Yan of the orange cat he lost. And the bag of shiitake and greens buns left outside Shen Yan's door, never offered face-to-face, makes Lu Yan feel for the first time that perhaps this city isn't so cold after all.
One is a top student who has never been properly loved. The other is a playboy who hides his scars behind a smile. They meet in the worst of times, in a run-down urban village, in a classroom for early-morning study at five, and amid the howling wind on the rooftop. Little by little, they pull each other out of the abyss.
Through the mist, toward the light.
Theme: Love between two men
