"Xu Mingyuan's band-aid will never be able to fit the wound properly, just like Cheng Yanzhou's tea will never be brewed for the third time."
On a rainy night, seventeen-year-old Lin Zhaoran huddled in Xu Mingyuan's school uniform jacket. The boy used a rusty utility knife to carve out Orion on the attic wooden board. Every stroke of the blade brushed against the bruise on her wrist: "You see, the stars are connected in a line and become a tourniquet." In the cracked glass paperweight he gave her, there was frozen a jasmine that he snatched from his father's ashtray when he was fourteen years old - it was the last flower that her mother put behind her ear before she was alive.
When she fell in love with Yunnan tea master Cheng Yanzhou, those late nights spent counting the growth rings of ancient tea trees through the screen were always interrupted by Xu Mingze's basketball hitting the window. The purple pottery pot sent by Cheng Yanzhou was missing the spout, and Cangshan rosin was stuck to the cracks: "Only when the utensils are broken can you understand how to breathe." But he still refused to teach her how to dry the mildew spots that made her heart beat. Until she felt the concave and convex marks on the inner wall of the pottery pot - those were three hundred characters "Zhao", each covered with tea stains from different years.
At the age of 25, at the London Museum, restorer Lin Zhaoran held up a cracked tea cup. The glass fragments sent by Xu Mingyuan reflected his childhood compositions in the display cabinet, while Cheng Yanzhou's anti-malarial medicine bottle suddenly oozed the fragrance of Pu'er tea. When all the men tried to write notes for her with scars, she finally tore up those prescription notes in the name of love:
The domestic violence recordings hidden in Xu Mingyuan's tattoos, the can pull tabs cast by Cheng Yanzhou's silver ring, the family photos that her father smashed and glued together twelve times... These painful specimens were tempered into glass by her and grew violently under the dome of the exhibition hall——
It turns out that some love is destined to be incomplete, but deep in the cracks, weeds and roses will eventually share the same sunrise.
Purpose: Find strength in brokenness, achieve self-transcendence through dual efforts of science and emotion, and ultimately become an independent woman.