Amid the crack of firecrackers, another year passed; the spring breeze brought warmth to the festive wine.
The rising sun shone on countless homes, where new peachwood charms always replaced the old.
It was Lunar New Year's Eve.
Chu Ge rode the Electric Scooter, with Qiu Wuji holding a laptop on the back seat. The young couple zipped all the way to the old town to spend New Year with his parents.
She was carrying the laptop for Chu Ge. The tragedy of being a writing grunt was that he had to write even over New Year.
His time in the book had mainly gone toward the screenplay, and he had barely stockpiled any chapters for the novel, so he still had to write. In any case, once they arrived, Qiu Qiu would help his parents with things, and he could just hide away inside and write.
Come to think of it, Chu Ge's childhood New Years really had been spent "amid the crack of firecrackers." Never mind New Year's Eve; the firecrackers would start going off days earlier, from Little New Year onward, making such a racket that he couldn't have written a word.
But in recent years, firecrackers had become rare. What he had once found annoying had instead become something he felt a little nostalgic for.
Along the way, there were no children scavenging firecrackers, no grubby little monkeys setting off explosions in the streets... In the past, he might have wanted to grab them and give them a beating. Now there was no one to grab even if he wanted to.
The city was becoming ever more civilized, but unfortunately, those old memories were nowhere to be found. Every gain came with a loss, perhaps. As a writing grunt, he did prefer a little more quiet.