Melbourne Lavender

Sixty-year-old Wu Lei stood backstage at a top fashion show in Melbourne with a dried sprig of lavender pinned to his chest. Sitting under the stage were the royal family, celebrities and women who could influence the world's trends, but there was an empty seat in the first row - it was not a legend reserved for love, but dedicated to a person who could not wait for the curtain call. Thirty-four years ago, he was just a poor young man who came to Australia from Xi'an. The first English word he learned on the assembly line of Bell Creek was "Reject" - defective product. In the mixed smell of cartons, glue, disinfectant and lavender, he picked out unqualified goods for the factory, and was judged as unqualified by life again and again. From being eliminated by the factory to making a living in the humblest corner of Melbourne; from not being able to understand a complete sentence of English to breaking into the coldest center of the clothing industry; poverty, desire, love and betrayal, the support of friends and the death of partners, the silent and cramped foreigner was polished inch by inch into a person who can influence the world's aesthetics. He spent half his life proving that a person's value is never determined by the label initially attached to him, but he also paid a longer price than success. Many years later, when the purple-gray dress passed over the catwalk like twilight and the countdown sounded again backstage, the light gray envelope placed on the empty chair still reminded him: the so-called legend is just a person who was thrown into the "defective box" and refused to be what others judged him to be throughout his life; and the real fragrance of lavender often only slowly emerges from the depths of memory after the flowers wither.