The Necessity of Old-School Dating

Take me out, ask me out the old-fashioned way, and after I reject you twice, I'll say yes the third time.
Don't MSN me, don't leave Facebook messages, and don't use What's App to ask me if I'm free later.
We're going for a walk, a long, long walk. Only when we're walking do we truly talk, old-fashioned talk.
Tonight, we're cunning because we're in love, old-fashioned.

Bitter hesitation, sweet regret. "I Am Xu Liangliang" is Li Wei-Jing's realistic love letter that once again pierces the microcosmic essence of a girl.

Like a witch's summoning or the intimate whispers of a storyteller in A Thousand and One Nights, it contains the pleasure of a novel's structure, the inherent meaning and lingering charm of poetry's "heartfelt expression," and the flavor of people's various predicaments in contemporary life, small dreamlike inversions, sorrows, joys, and vicissitudes.

A post-youth episodic drama about partial damage, temporary disability, selective defects, and random dream-induced amnesia... a female old soul's incurable pursuit of love and loss. Precisely because one pretends to be strong, one must be stronger; because one is adorably pampered, one must be more adorable; because one believes in beauty, one must be more beautiful.

Like records of foreseen harm (but in reality, aren't they truly harmless to humans and animals? I love myself so cautiously, thus self-controlled and restrained), tiny novels, tiny poems, tiny people, those stories far removed from true physical youth, where the ageless, undying heart of love and hate, though intermittent, fleeting, extinguishing and reviving, is always imminent: forming curves in the river of the heart, a shaded alley beside a rich and bright main street, and even more, a wondrous melody that breathes and fluctuates with every genuinely emotional moment—either light and free or lingering and entangled, either like a sacrificial movement or a casual tune, all gently whispered and sung for the heart of the reader in that moment alone, the nightingale belonging only to the king, once sung, it is forever lost, understood yet unwilling to understand, those boisterous yet silent ventriloquist messages, and the beautiful salvation that breaks hearts so easily.