Cook Life Slowly, Cook You Carefully

28-Year-old Lin Wei was used to filling her stomach with takeaways until her grandmother passed away. She dug out the yellowed thread-bound cookbook at the bottom of the camphor wood box. The words "Home-cooked food for Guodong" were blurred on the cover. On the inside page, grandma wrote in pencil, "In the winter of 1968, Guodong came back from the snow and drank three bowls of radish and pork ribs soup." There was a tenderness she had never known between the lines.​ Her mother always said that her grandmother was "trapped on the stove her whole life", but when Lin Wei was clumsily reproducing the lotus seed glutinous rice porridge, her neighbor Grandpa Zhou's words, "It's like living in life, it has to be simmered slowly to get the sweetness." She suddenly wanted to know: the grandmother who used sweet potatoes to make exquisite pastries in the era of scarcity, and the grandfather who broke his leg buying pickled vegetables, what was their love like?​ As the dishes are brought to the table one after another, the past memories of grandma and grandpa and the secrets of mother's failed marriage gradually emerge. Lin Wei learned to pick dewy vegetables in the morning light of the old market, and understood the "mutual tolerance is the only way to be delicious" in Grandpa Zhou's pickled fresh vegetables. Finally, he quit his job at an Internet company and opened a small restaurant called "Slow Cooking Time".​ When she found on the last page of the recipe that her grandfather had written "I was trapped by your tenderness", she finally understood: what her grandmother cooked was not porridge, but the days; what her mother complained about was not the kitchen, but the heart that no one cherished; and the "slowness" she pursued was never a retro ritual, but the courage to cook a good meal seriously for the one you love.​ The food will get cold, but the care hidden in the steam and the temperature left on the edge of the porcelain bowl will be like well-boiled old soup, always warm in time.​