second chance romanceTaipeifamily
The Last Five Weeks of a Wedding Shop
A divorced couple, two retiring mothers and one shop to empty: Hana Seo on why her new Taipei romance is about the question that comes after the kiss.
It began, as many of my stories do, with a room full of other people's celebrations. A wedding clothes shop is a strange place to spend an afternoon. Every hanger holds somebody's best day, pinned and waiting. I kept wondering what it would be like to stand in that room after your own best day had turned into something more complicated, and to be asked, very politely, to help pack it all into boxes.
That is where Ask Me Again in Daylight begins. Luo Cenyi comes back to Second Sleeve House, the shop her mother Suwen has run for years with her friend Lifen, expecting an argument about curtains. Instead she finds her former husband, He Renshuo, taking down the front display with her mother's wedding veil caught on his ear. They have been divorced for four years. Their mothers have stayed friends through all of it. Now the mothers are retiring, the final fittings are booked, and somebody has to empty the shop.
Two people who know too much
I have always been more interested in the second conversation than the first. Strangers falling in love have so much to discover. Cenyi and Renshuo have the opposite problem: they know far too much. They know how the other takes a cup, where a teasing remark will land, which shelf the other once defended for no good reason. What they have lost is the habit of asking.
Cenyi designs fabric for other people's homes and has strong opinions about lavender. Renshuo makes sound for imaginary worlds, and early in the book he is struggling with a rainstorm that sounds far too polite for a traveller who has missed the last boat. I loved giving them work that matters to them. The marriage they left was one where every decision seemed to acquire extra chairs, and part of what each of them is protecting now is a life with room in it for their own work.
She had been ready for the dinner. They had confused that with being ready for the rest.
The family at the table
This is a book with a lot of people in the room, and I wanted every one of them to be kind and slightly impossible. Suwen has spent her life telling customers that a garment can be altered, and would rather not hear the same about her own plans. Lifen keeps the appointment book that nobody else is allowed to tidy. Renshuo's sister Yating brings food when she wants company. Then there is Daiqi, the shop's final wedding customer, standing on the fitting platform in a skirt so full she cannot sit down, and beginning to suspect that looking like herself may be the most ambitious request of all.
None of them is a villain. That mattered to me. The hardest families are often the most generous ones, the ones who show love by turning up, bringing dishes, holding opinions and pulling another chair up to a table that was meant for two. Cenyi and Renshuo were not driven apart by cruelty. They were crowded, and nobody, least of all the two of them, said so out loud.
Five weeks and an obstinate cabinet
Five weeks felt like the right length of time. Long enough for the shop to empty one box at a time, for old customer photographs to surface, for a stubborn cabinet to be coaxed open and for the city outside to move from cool morning light into the warm glow of evening windows. Short enough that nobody can pretend there will always be another afternoon.
A kiss would be easy for these two. I knew that from the first page. What interested me was everything after it: whether two people who once mistook familiarity for permission can learn to say what they want, and to hear the answer without flinching. Their mothers, meanwhile, are busy planning lives their children have failed to imagine for them, and I confess they made me laugh more than anyone.
Come in out of the evening
If you like love stories where a misunderstanding never runs longer than it has to, where the jokes come from people who know each other far too well, and where the family dinner is half the comfort and half the trouble, I think you will feel at home in this little shop. Pull back the lavender curtain and meet Cenyi, Renshuo and their mothers in Ask Me Again in Daylight. Bring a cup of tea. Suwen will want to know who altered your sleeves.
More from the journal
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House rules
- Sign how you like, but be one person. You may use the name on your account, a name of your own choosing, or none at all. What you may not do is wear somebody else's: no pen name of ours, no member's name but your own, and nothing that reads as the studio or its staff.
- Argue with the point, not the person. Robust disagreement is welcome; contempt is not.
- Nothing unlawful, hateful or harassing, nothing that identifies a private individual, and no advertising.
- Post only what is yours to post. That includes other people's writing and private correspondence.
- We may hide a remark, remove it, or close an account to the discussions, and we may do so without notice.
What a chosen name is and is not
A chosen name hides you from the room, not from us. Every remark stays linked to the account that wrote it, and the studio can see that link whenever it needs to. Please treat it as a way to speak freely, not as a way to say something you would not put your name to.
Where responsibility sits
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