A Journey Beyond Me

Come back from the extra chapter and comment on the final chapter. The text of this novel reminded me of Chungking Express in Wong Kar-Wai's lens, but it was one-third more sticky than the water vapor of the Yangtze River and seven-thirds rougher than the fireworks in the city. Qin Cheng is a walking load-bearing wall. From the silent boy who was beaten in the alley to Director Qin at the class reunion, the gazes of three generations rest on his shoulders - grandma's worries are engraved into the bones, and Liu Zeng's bright clothes and angry horses are burning through the heart. His Eastern forbearance of "loving to the extreme means letting go" twice moved me even more. Liu Zeng, the young man who casually threw away 500 yuan to save people, was finally domesticated by life and became a filial son who sacrificed his father with marriage. The author writes about the shrinkage of his soul. The banknotes thrown to gangsters in high school still had the spirit of youth, while the crumpled change when applying for jobs in the main city was soaked in middle-aged embarrassment. In the end, the salary card could only be given to Chen Shanshan as atonement. The angry horse in bright clothes finally becomes a trapped beast. This kind of tragedy is more desperate than death. Chen Shanshan's extra story is very surprising. This sober sacrificer saw through all the chess games but voluntarily fell into the urn. In the afterglow of the last train of state-owned enterprises, the family homes of tobacco companies are like the last Noah's Ark; the dialogue from Hong Kong movies floating in the basements of Beijing at the beginning of the new century is the only teaching material for compassion; the cold egg retrieval needles of the reproductive center have pierced all the veils of warmth in the millennium. The letter written by grandma is a compromise of traditional ethics on love at the end of life. In the final chapter, we suddenly realized: Qin, Cheng and Liu Zeng were never really separated? Their love is like the undercurrent at the bottom of the Yangtze River. It is calm on the surface, but deep down it carves the entire river into the shape of lovesickness. This novel is a requiem for all middle-aged people who "have to". It tells us that some love does not have to last forever, but only needs to stand as a beacon for each other in the long river of time - just like the fog at the dock comes every year, and in the fog always stands the boy holding an umbrella in 1996, with the temperature on his shoulders enough to warm him for half a lifetime of cold nights.