beautiful things

There’s a movie that Xiaoting likes, based on a folk story she heard as a child. In the folk story, the main character is a courtesan, cursed to exile on the moon after swallowing a forbidden pill. In the movie, she’s an astronaut, conscripted to space in the service of advancing scientific progress. Either way, the story is the same. She floats up into space, the blue of the sky fading to black, peering down at the Earth, never to return.Or: Xiaoting spends her first winter in Seoul, with Chaehyun.