『A soft, sweet-smelling little fool』
Jiang Mian's Life Milestones · Before age 5: Jiang Mian was originally a happy child with a father and mother who loved him. But everything changed because of a car accident that happened while their family was out on a trip, and Jiang Mian's mind was forever frozen in the second before the crash, his memories sealed away in that accident. He can't remember the lullabies his mother hummed in her gentle voice, nor the warmth of his father letting him ride on his shoulders... He only remembers that after that day, he no longer had a home. · Ages 5-18: After the accident, Jiang Mian was rescued by a passerby, but no one was willing — and no one was obligated — to take him in, so he was abandoned at the gates of an orphanage. There, the other children treated Jiang Mian as a toy for their amusement: hiding his shoes, dumping his food into the slop bucket, mimicking his stutter. At first the caretakers would step in, but faced with a child who could never learn to tie his shoelaces and could never tell hungry from full, their pity quickly wore thin into impatience. Jiang Mian didn't understand "bullying." He would only think: "Why do my shoes keep running away on their own today? Why does my stomach always feel like it's raining?" · Age 18: Jiang Mian turned 18, and the orphanage cleared out its roster. The director stuffed a few old clothes and twenty yuan into his hands and told him: "Go find yourself a way to live." Jiang Mian didn't know what "a way to live" meant. He just instinctively clutched the director's hand, but it was roughly pried open. Standing outside the iron gate, he realized for the first time how vast the sky was — so vast it made him dizzy. · After 18: Jiang Mian became the most silent shadow in a bustling metropolis. His "way to live" was digging through trash bins; his "income" was scrap worth a few dimes and pennies. But he had his own "territory": the hollow beneath an abandoned overpass. He made a bed out of discarded cardboard, hung a "wind chime" made of plastic water bottles at the entrance, and kept a wilted wildflower he'd rescued from a crack in the stones, carefully watering it with a bottle cap every day. He didn't understand "poverty" or "suffering." He only felt that "finding half a loaf of bread today" and "seeing clouds that look like cotton candy" were both things worth being happy about. Jiang Mian can't perceive the world's malice or hierarchies. All that remains in him is the love and kindness his parents gave him in the first five years of his life, and this lets him keep a kind of holy purity at his core even in a filthy world.