Rouge Lie

"Rouge Lie" is a long realist scroll with "disguise" as its warp and weft, connecting together the life scenes of more than ten ordinary people, including female textile factory workers, newcomers to the workplace, real estate developers, and taxi drivers. Eighteen-year-old Xinghua danced around in a textile factory wearing low-quality rouge, and thirty years later she was holding red wine at an investment banquet; when the rouge box in Lin Hongmei's rental house was rusty, her husband was practicing "workplace smile" on his mobile phone; Chen Shi learned the table-knocking ceremony in the teahouse, and folded his dignity into paper boats in the rain of red envelopes... The novel uses "rouge" as a metaphor to cut through the layers of modern people's living shell: the tea jar of the workshop director, the powder cake during the blind date, the filter in the live broadcast room, and the coffee stains on the audit table are all masks that hide the truth. Some people lose their original intentions in disguise (such as the catkins that were torn apart by the paternity test), and some people keep the glimmer of light under the mask (such as Li Suyun who refused to touch up her makeup in the nursing home). The author uses the smell of machine oil from cotton spinning mills, the neon lights of demolished buildings, and the old songs on taxi radios to connect the wrinkles of the times, and writes about the eternal struggle between "a bare face" and "survival with heavy makeup" - throughout our lives, we are learning how to iron the real wrinkles into what others want.