Between Two Hills: The Grand Prize Winner of the Story Explosion of the Year

 
 
"My daughter, she wants to live a life opposite to mine."
"Mom continues her long-standing habits, dissatisfied with everything about me."
 
／From the moment life is conceived,
an eternal misunderstanding and bond grew between us.／
 
The mother travels alone to a foreign country to restart long-lost cohabitation with her pregnant daughter, who lives there. In the small apartment, the two constantly clash due to differences in language, culture, and values, and in the process of getting along, they mercilessly uncover each other's life wounds. The mother endured a lifetime of humiliation and heartbreak for her daughter; the daughter wants to escape her mother's love but must face childhood shadows and marital crisis...
 
The hidden, soft yet resilient parts of their hearts are dissected layer by layer, and in the confrontation of life, the two silently reconcile. This book skillfully switches between mother and daughter perspectives, describing the anxiety and low self-esteem in women's growth and the restrained yet intense emotions in family ties with cinematic detail.
 
They are separated by mountains between mother and daughter, mountains between eras, and mountains between cultures.
In the inevitable clashes, arguments, and complaints,
how long must mother and daughter walk to truly understand each other?
 
"Closely related people, yet sharing different memories in the same space. This estrangement, misunderstanding—what should be talked about remains unsaid, and what can be discussed are only trivial daily matters. They try to guess each other's true feelings with their own, clashing true feelings, even getting hurt... The distance between true feelings is sometimes far, sometimes near, but fortunately, true feelings do not change; true feelings are always true feelings, even if there is pain, it is still a beautiful thing in my heart.
──Author Li Ting
 
【Features of this book】
◆ Depicts the most intractable contradictions and pure love; they are sometimes daughters, sometimes mothers, and sometimes themselves.
◆ Starting from emotions everyone can personally relate to, it precisely captures the microcosm of modern East Asian families.
 
【Rave Reviews】
Li Hsin-Lun (Writer / Associate Professor, Department of Chinese Literature, National Central University)
Song Wen-Yu (Writer)
Chang Chia-Chen (Writer)
Mao Jian (Writer, Film Critic)
Zheng Zhi (Writer, Screenwriter)
──Heartfelt Recommendation
 
◆ Li Hsin-Lun (Writer / Associate Professor, Department of Chinese Literature, National Central University)──
This book voices the inner feelings of many contemporary women, with issues such as cultural differences, gender struggles, and generational gaps all brilliantly performed in this novel.
 
◆ Song Wen-Yu (Writer)──
How far is the distance between mountains? Mother and daughter are also like mountains—the ravines carved by love and hate were almost insurmountable. Until one day, you too finally become a mountain; it is in this process of becoming that proximity becomes possible.
Li Ting uses a dual narrative perspective of mother and daughter to depict the difficult situations of two generations of women under the oppression of marriage, childbirth, and nationality. She also shows us that what makes a mountain a mountain is never just the love and hate standing between two mountains, but the desire to move one step closer to each other, even when unable to move.
 
◆ Chang Chia-Chen (Writer)──
A daughter's inadvertent rudeness towards her mother is like what one might see accidentally walking into a stranger's living room. The mother-daughter problem is an open living room. You carefully block it with a bead curtain, but it doesn't hide anything. You fear others saying you don't understand history, don't understand perspective-taking, don't know how to love. You fear even more that on the day you do understand, you'll remember that you once thought "But I didn't want to" was a clever response. No one wants destiny, but destiny keeps coming. This is a book of answers about destiny.
 
◆ Mao Jian (Writer, Film Critic)──
This book cleverly uses dual viewpoints to write about the reproductive journeys and physical and mental transformations of two generations of mothers and daughters. The description from the daughter's perspective is particularly moving, featuring cultural negotiations from dawn to dusk, gender battles, and the ordinary life of hearing thunder in silence and then seeing the southern mountain.
 
◆ Zheng Zhi (Writer, Screenwriter)──
As a man, the mother-daughter relationship has always been a worldly emotion difficult for me to understand. However, this novel made me believe I understood it. Li Ting, with her calm narrative and clever arrangement, moved two mountains towards each other. A moving embrace does not necessarily require literally opening one's arms.