[Hold Hands and Stay Forever] Fanfiction | Waltzing Leaves

Original novel: Hold Hands Forever by Hong Zao

The story picks up in America, a year and a half after the end of the original novel's school arc.

Their lives took a turn in a hospital room abroad. While in America, Jiang Yiyuan found Tao Qian and firmly took her hand. From that moment on, miracles kept happening, and the two of them ultimately shared a long and happy life.

Just as she had once hoped, Tao Qian really did live long enough to have grandchildren. On a sunny afternoon, she would hold them on her lap and tell them stories about her youth: the tale of a headstrong girl who stole an unparalleled treasure of a cabbage and had it blossom around her for the rest of her life.

Waltzing Leaves is a piano piece that appeared three times in the audiobook of Hold Hands Forever. I feel its melody captures the lives of Tao Qian and Jiang Yiyuan.

Life is like a leaf, twirling in a waltz as it falls toward home.

That is why I chose this title. The first scene that came to mind was an ordinary, peaceful, lovely afternoon in early spring. Tao Qian and Jiang Yiyuan sit on a park bench. Two leaves twirl down in a waltz above them, and Jiang Yiyuan proposes to Tao Qian.

(The commissioned cover depicts this very scene ^ ^)

In the winter of 2020, I first encountered my Neverland, a meeting that came four years late.

I have always kept returning to Hold Hands Forever. Hong Zao's writing and storytelling never fail to move me; in my eyes, they are an everlasting constellation.

Revisiting the story again and again is both looking back and exploring. The beautiful, heartbreaking ending once kept me tossing and turning night after night. After crying my eyes out, I picked up a pen and began writing fanfiction to make my own content.

In the original, they ultimately find their happy ending. Tao Qian does not die too young, lonely, carrying the regrets of her life, as she once feared she would. The waves of fate once knocked her down, and the starlight once dimmed in silence. The tiny maze of her heart once burned with torment, and she was once a lonely island. But eventually, time returned to her what life had taken away. From being trapped within herself in her youth to finding her way out of the maze of her heart, seeing the light within herself and the fulfillment of her life, this is her story: short, but complete. The reason I love Hold Hands Forever so much is the word "complete." The fulfillment of a life always brings me to tears.

In Jiang Yiyuan's heart, Tao Qian has always loved him with the same simplicity, candor, and passion. He will never know that her motives were once less than pure. To him, Tao Qian loved him from the age of nineteen until the end of her life. He occupied a third of her life, while Jiang Yiyuan loved Tao Qian dearly from the age of twenty until the end of his. Perhaps, like the ending of Titanic, when the elderly Jiang Yiyuan reaches the end of his life, he will see again, deep in the reaches of time, the woman he loved all his life. She will still be young and lovely, and he will have become young again, too. She will smile and reach out her hand to him. Hand in hand, they will walk together to the end of time, into eternity. (I wonder if the scene on the cover of the original print edition was meant to suggest something like this, haha.)

Still, selfishly, I hope they can have a long and happy life together, and that their promise to love one another for a lifetime will no longer be divided by the boundary between life and death. They can hold hands forever, and in the end walk together into the eternity of the universe. Sometimes I wonder whether some of the little details and hints Hong Zao left behind, such as the starry sky over Queenstown that Jiang Yiyuan mentioned beneath the stars on the night they parted, might be a thread leading to another journey through life. Perhaps if you grasp those threads, you can glimpse another possibility in a parallel world.

I also made an audiobook of this fanfiction on Ximalaya, narrated by the same two voice actors who read the original novel. Seven years later, it is another way of following and cherishing the story. The audiobook was how I first encountered this work. Though it was made quite a long time ago, the performances turned out surprisingly well. The human voice is such a lovely medium for stirring emotions. As I listened over and over, I became determined to write fanfiction. Yet even after finishing it, I remained emotionally caught up in the story. Perhaps it was because my first impression had taken hold, or perhaps because of a deeper longing. So I thought I would turn it into an audiobook, too, and ask the two voice actors who read the original to narrate it. Though many years have passed, it feels like a little thread connecting me to Hold Hands Forever. I so desperately want to get a little closer to Tao Tao, just a little closer.

Voices and music bring a story to life, as if carrying it forward in a deeper way. I think this is part of what an audiobook can mean. Words left unsaid and things left undone have finally found an echo after all these years. When I finished it all and listened to the story, I felt that Tao Qian and Jiang Yiyuan had truly embarked on another journey through life, and that I, too, had found fulfillment.

I wrote this during the summer vacation of 2021. It was first published on a fanfiction platform, then posted to Jinjiang. The writing in the first edition was very immature, and I rushed it (I wrote it in the last half of summer break and had to finish before school started). Later, I added quite a few extras and revised the main text here and there. (Of course, it still reads like a schoolchild wrote it. Only a few parts seem decent to me.) Unfortunately, even this little fanfic written just for my own enjoyment ended up copied and pasted onto plagiarism sites. (Maybe it was scooped up by a web crawler and reposted in bulk.) ...Um... what they copied was the very immature first edition... It's so embarrassing to have that old writing dug up... The current version on Jinjiang is the definitive one.

Theme: Life is like a leaf, twirling in a waltz as it falls toward home.