Red and Green

As a girl of ten, Yan Se lost her mother—who died by suicide after jumping from a building due to depression. From then on, she became a withdrawn girl with red-green color blindness, unable to tell red from green at traffic lights, wearing only black clothes, trusting no one, and afraid of being hurt again. She shut herself inside a quiet and monotonous world until she met the "bad" girl Zhuang Xixi. Zhuang Xixi drinks, smokes, fights, steals—she has done almost every bad thing except murder and arson. Yet behind these outrageous behaviors hides a painful past that few know about. The meeting of the two girls cracks open a gap in each other's closed-off lives. Around them are also the genius boy Ji Mo, nicknamed "Black Rose"; Xia Han, a bad boy from a technical school; and the pretty girl Sang Lan, who opposes them at every turn. Several storylines intertwine and advance as the teenagers, each carrying the wounds of family and growing up, slowly draw closer through misunderstanding, collision, and reconciliation. The novel uses the two colors of red and green as a metaphor: the world in Yan Se's eyes is blurred, and the youth she experiences is equally difficult to simply judge in terms of right and wrong, light and dark. Through meticulous psychological description, the work presents a group of teenagers struggling and seeking redemption amid pain, and captures the coming-of-age flavor that "it turns out everyone's youth hurts so much."