At the welcome reception, everyone else talked about offers from top-tier law firms. When Lin Qingxiang named hers, all she got in response was an "Oh."
She was a law graduate from a county town. The year she graduated, she gave up on graduate school and chose the fastest way to make money. She thought she'd found a ray of light: Liang, the lawyer who mentored her, was the very person she'd seen onstage during her third year of college.
Later, she learned what the first year of pursuing an ideal really looked like:
Scrambling for a case-filing number at midnight and coming up empty. Spending three nights writing a draft, only to see someone else's name on it when it was submitted to a forum. Going from three client calls a week to one every two weeks, and eventually none at all. Turning her water glass upside down on her desk, then turning it right side up again, because it wasn't time to pack up yet.
Then, one Friday at four in the afternoon, her mentor closed the door and said three words: "I'm quitting."
She needed her supervising lawyer's signature for her internship assessment. That day, she stood for a long time at the subway entrance. No signature meant no salary, and it felt as if she'd wasted the whole year.
She didn't back out. She knocked, spoke up, and asked for help, filling all ten case slots one by one. She completed her training, went to interviews, got her license, and took on her first client: a retired teacher who had taught math for thirty-nine years. His retirement savings of several million had gone up in smoke. Sitting across from her, he said:
"It's not all about the money. I just want justice."
She will meet people who appreciate her, and there will be subtle currents stirring beneath the surface, but in the end, she translates all of it into the same thing: do the job well.
After seeing reality for what it is, she still chooses to put on that robe.
Theme: Set in the legal profession, this novel follows a young lawyer as she grows through the grind of real life. She is exploited, abandoned by colleagues, and looked down on. Again and again, she adjusts her rose-tinted view of the profession, yet she never lets go of her professional standards and ethics: she gets the documents in order, organizes the evidence, and treats her clients' problems as matters that deserve to be taken seriously. The story aims to convey a grounded, positive outlook: even after recognizing that the profession is far from perfect, she still chooses to believe, and puts that belief into each concrete, awkward, earnest effort. She grows from an underestimated intern into someone who can shelter others from the rain, not through talent but through a resilience that refuses to break.
