Chapter 16: The scent of osmanthus
She still remembered what her mother had said on the expressway that day. "Look at the road ahead of us. This road is like the life you'll lead. You have to keep moving at over eighty kilometers an hour and never stop. If the scenery along the way, that momentary flutter of your heart, steals away your determination to press forward, if that sweet honey numbs your will to strive, then hidden behind that drop of honey can only be dry dust, mud that isn't bitter but is absolutely impossible to swallow."
"Believe me, exhaustion of body and mind is more frightening than simple pain. The former will make you feel that even death is a release, while the latter at least leaves you in awe of death."
At that moment, Tang Wu looked through the rearview mirror at the city beyond the silent hillside behind them, its scattered lights gradually disappearing. Beside the expressway built along the hills and farmland, rice blossoms bloomed brilliantly, but their vivid colors were invisible at night. All she could see was that swaying expanse.
There was a banquet in the city behind her, and Su Can, from whom she had just parted, was there. Yet at that moment, their paths seemed to have split into two different planes. The road stretching endlessly ahead left their lives equally uncertain, as though they had stepped into empty air.
Tang Wu wanted very much to say that, compared with the forbidding forest of steel and a glittering, multicolored life, she preferred breathing clean air among fields of bright yellow rapeseed flowers. At least beneath a clear sky, she could take a breath without restraint. But none of this could be said to her mother.
Because her mother was always full