Zhou Xiwu has learned a quirk since he was a child - he stops everything when he counts seventeen. Thirty years ago, my father fell and died, and my mother disappeared. All that was left to her was a wooden comb with broken teeth and the words "Mom went to find a color for you." Trapped in debt and betrayal, she survives every day by counting onions, pieces, and her own heartbeat.
In the deep alley in the south of the city, there is a noodle shop with only one lamp. The owner, Xu Nanlai, a retired scout with a disabled right hand, saw that her left foot was three millimeters heavier than her right foot when they first met, and she put seventeen slices of green onion in the bowl. He said: Your father's partner at the time watched you for seventeen minutes while you were picking up pieces.
A bowl of noodles and seventeen slices of green onion connect an old case from thirty years ago, a color card numbered "Seventeen Shades of Grey", and a sealed basement. Zhou Xiwu found a note left by his mother underground: "There are seventeen squares on the color wheel, and you are the seventeenth square." But the seventeenth square is always empty.
While running a noodle shop and a design studio, she was getting closer to the truth while peeling back layers of deception. When the seventeen color cards are put together completely, the warm white of the space finally appears - it is not a color, but the temperature left behind after the light has traveled its journey. Seventeen shades of gray is the warmth of someone's palm waiting for you to catch it at the finish line
