Hidden Fragrance

Hidden Fragrance is a full-length urban romance novel by Ji Mingxia, published by China Workers Publishing House in May 2014. The story begins in the summer of 1996 in a northern Chinese city: Li Xiaolu is the only daughter of the mayor, her mother died early, and her father is busy with official duties; Wan Shanying comes from a military cadre family with long ties to the Li family, and the two have grown up together; Zhang Youran is the son of the Li family's nanny, Wang Yaju, and his father is a sanitation worker, and he strives to make good through hard study. When Li Xiaolu's mother falls ill, Zhang Youran is sent to cook for Li Xiaolu, and the two unfamiliar young people begin with bickering and awkwardness and stumble along through school; Li Xiaolu simply transfers to the high school Zhang Youran attends, and there meets her childhood friend Wan Shanying again. Over the next fourteen years, three people of different backgrounds, temperaments, and circumstances become repeatedly entangled amid the sweetness of first love, the helplessness of marriage, the heavy pressure of family responsibility, and the dark side of human nature: Wan Shanying goes far away to a frontier outpost for his ideals, Li Xiaolu takes one wrong step in loneliness and loss, Zhang Youran drifts step by step under the drive of desire and inferiority, and Li Xiaolu's best friend Yang Anni tightens the tangled knot further. With the female protagonist's emotional journey as the main line, the novel unfolds a girl's decade and more from senior year of high school to workplace and marriage in a big city, writing both the recklessness and sincerity of adolescence and the cost of choices in adulthood, and finally leads the story from repeated difficulties to a sudden turn for the better. The book is about 290,000 characters long, with a plain and smooth pace, and belongs to fairly typical popular urban romance writing.