A vibrant dockyard scene with mist and industrial elements, featuring Deku from My Hero Academia in avant-garde streetwear: a two-tone cropped bomber jacket, asymmetric sleeves, and mismatched boots. Light plays off his outfit, which blends textures of fabric and denim. Surrounding him, shards of porcelain and repair tools create an atmosphere of artistic chaos, while sunlight filters through, casting intricate shadows on the weathered workbench. The air is thick with the scent of resin and river, enhancing the fusion of anime character and realistic environment

The dockyard is a throat that never quite clears. Every morning it coughs up river mist and diesel breath, and my studio—wedged between the slipway rails and a stack of salt-bitten timbers—inhales it like habit. I work with what the Yangtze gives back: porcelain hauled from a wrecked belly of wood, bowls that once traveled as confidently as rumors, shards that now arrive wrapped in wet silt, smelling faintly of iron and algae and old tea.

“Why don’t you hide the seams?”

Once, a girl visiting stood at the doorway and asked me. Her voice was soft, as if afraid of breaking something.
I didn’t answer right away—not out of profundity, but because I suddenly felt ashamed: all these years, making a living, writing, telling stories by “making cracks visible,” is it really just another, more respectable pose? To be honest, writing this now, I hesitate. As I type these words on a brand-new MacBook, smelling the mingled scents of glue, lacquer, camphor, and river water, do I even have the right to talk about “honesty”? Maybe this is just a more refined, self-soothing compromise?

My hands have learned to listen with their fingertips. Cracks have their own grammar. Glaze, when you wet it, speaks in a different timbre; you can tell whether this bowl has been lifted by greasy fingers a thousand times, or has been stored away quietly in straw with hardly a trace of human touch. Restoration isn’t just mending. It’s more like an interrogation—using water, light, and patience.

Some afternoons, when the sound of the river slapping against the pilings grows rhythmic, I let my mind wander to another “hero”: Izuku Midoriya—Deku—suddenly appearing between my drying racks and clamps, absurd and gentle. Not in neat school uniform, nor in that green suit which looks designed by someone who still believes in “symmetry.” The look in his eyes as he steps in is serious, as if beaten but refusing to retreat, yet his clothes look like a casual collage: a random fusion of avant-garde streetwear, like fragments from different eras finally willing to acknowledge each other.

He appears as if he too was salvaged—dragged up from the riverbed of “how things should be.”

His jacket hangs off one shoulder, an intentional “mistake”: a short flight jacket pieced from two kinds of black, one matte like charcoal powder, the other shiny like the river at night swallowing a lantern. The zipper is a few millimeters off-center, a small violence that tenses the whole garment. The left sleeve is too long, swallowing his hand; the right sleeve is short enough to reveal his bandaged wrist. The shirt underneath seems to remember it was once a flag—raw-edged hem, exposed stitching, the fabric stiff like remnants of starch. One pant leg is wide, the other narrow, as if he grew lopsided overnight. A length of chain at his waist knocks against the doorframe, a crisp metallic sound, like a chisel tapping lightly on porcelain.

He stands in the air of my studio—half river, half adhesive, half the sweet-sour of lacquer—his outfit like two hulls colliding head-on: the hero training ground forcefully stuffed into a shipping channel.

I want to tell him: being bold isn’t always being loud. Sometimes, being bold is deciding to show your scar. Sometimes, it’s letting a seam remain visible, admitting you’ve been altered—let’s stop here for now, no rush to explain.

On the workbench sits a bowl I’m restoring, pieced together from seventeen fragments. The rim is lobed, the glaze a pale celadon, seemingly calm at first glance, but if you tilt it you see the hidden crackle—fine as a dried-up riverbed. Each piece I align with a dab of resin, press, breathe. Deku watches, as he watches everything: as if by paying close enough attention, he can become worthy of this world.

“Why don’t you hide the seams?” he asks, his voice light, but with a familiar hunger—the same desire he carries in battle, to deconstruct strength into mechanism.

I don’t answer immediately. I rinse a fragment; water beads on the glaze like sweat. “Because the path matters,” I finally say. “Where something broke, how it traveled after. A ship isn’t just its destination.”

He looks down at his own clothes, as if suddenly realizing they too are a map. Those asymmetries that could be mistaken for “trend” become evidence of movement, surviving accidents.

Outside, a barge drags by, heavy and low, its ropes groaning long and deep. The window frame shudders. Deku’s mismatched boots—one with a thick sole and exaggerated tread, the other narrow and sleek—shift softly on the concrete floor. Dust rises, smelling of lime and kiln ash.

I show him a shard painted with a koi, the brushstrokes swift as if still alive. “This piece,” I say, “was made to be held, not just seen.” The back is worn smooth, from fingers hooking there repeatedly. “A rice bowl from a boat. Salted fish, scallions, rice. You can tell: the path of wear, the glaze thinning at the rim—chopstick scrapes, day after day.”

He leans in close, his breath fogging the fragment for a second. He smells of rain on synthetic fabric, like a new jacket getting its first soaking in an old city. A lot of avant-garde streetwear pretends to belong to future blocks, but his seems more like carrying the past as you walk.

I have my own secrets on this bench too—the kind you don’t tell visitors, because they haven’t yet learned how to hold things steady.

In the drawer beneath the clamps is a small tool I almost never let go of: a miniature bamboo-handled scraper, its tip ground sharp as a fishbone. It belonged to an early salvage diver—back when shipwrecks were still only whispered about, and official procedures always lagged behind greed. The bamboo handle is dark from the repeated pressure of his thumb. I found it in a crate of mud-caked fragments, wedged between broken dishes like a forgotten rib. Some nights I polish it with camellia oil, the scent green and slightly bitter, and I swear no matter how I wash it, a trace of river mud still hides in its fibers. I don’t use it because it’s “sacred.” I use it because it makes my hands dare not lie: the blade is exacting, forbidding me to pretend a seam cleaner than it is.

Against the back wall is a wooden crate, covered with a tarp that always seems to sweat. I never open it in front of others. Inside are my failed restorations—vessels that seemed whole under the light but months later sighed with a hairline crack. Some I rushed; some I chose the wrong solvent; some simply refused “unity.” I keep them not to punish myself, but to remember the weather: the river teaches you, what’s salvaged isn’t always saved. The crate smells of old glue and the sourness of regret, sticking in the nasal passages.

And then there’s that recording.

On a shelf, between paint jars and cotton swabs, sits a battered tape recorder missing one rubber foot. I found it inside a sealed waterproof bag from a wreck, the manifest marked “Nil.” The tape is short—less than three minutes—and I’ve only listened to it late at night, when the wharf quiets enough to hear your own joints creak. A man’s voice, hoarse, urgent, counting cargo in a dialect not found in textbooks. Then a pause. Then a laugh, cut off mid-way, as if suddenly realizing there’s no shore to swim to. A bend in the river is named twice, a bend that later vanished after a flood changed the course; if you know that bend, you can string together routes the official records don’t acknowledge. I’ve never told anyone, because once you speak a hidden route aloud, people start calculating profit, and the river gets turned into a spreadsheet—the thought stings even as I write it, but it’s true… at least it’s true for me.

Someone like Deku, I think, would listen to that tape but wouldn’t ask for a copy. He’d treat it as a relic, not gossip. He’d understand some knowledge is traded for with time, not stolen with curiosity.

He moves between the drying racks, his jacket brushing against the net bags holding fragments, making a fine friction sound—like sandpaper grazing bone. The “asymmetry” of his clothes begins to echo the “asymmetry” of these fragments: a cup’s handle grafted onto another’s body, a lid not quite matching but finding a way to sit. If avant-garde styling isn’t performance, then its essence is turning restoration inside out: visible seams become the focus, collisions become identity.

I suddenly remember a completely unrelated scene: someone once picked up a bizarre, destined-to-fail lemon squeezer and said, “Look how beautiful it is, like an insect from another world.” The memory tightens my throat. I remember, years ago in my ancestral home in the countryside, on a rainy afternoon, I found a dead beetle in a damp corner, its wings gleaming with a metallic sheen. I thought it was breathtakingly beautiful then, too, and full of sorrow. Perhaps our fascination with “failure” is, at its core, a preemptive mourning for all things destined to pass.
And restoration, sometimes, is just making that mourning a little neater—a little more presentable—a little less shameful.

In my mind, I place him on that ship’s deck, though he doesn’t belong there—green hair hidden under a patched hood, eyes scanning the horizon. Rough-handed sailors, their skin cracked and swollen, pass steaming bowls of rice. The deck is slick, river mist like salt. Smells of tar, fish, wet rope. A wooden crate rocks with the ship’s sway, the porcelain inside clinking like chattering teeth.

He’d notice how the bowls are held, how the plates are stacked, how someone wraps cloth around a chip to keep from cutting their lips. He’d archive these details like he does an enemy’s moves—not for show, but to survive.

Back in the studio, the outfit is no longer just style; it’s become a hypothesis: one sleeve long, one short, like a crewman’s tear hastily dealt with, the snagging side cut away, the other side left for now. The chain at the waist isn’t decoration; it’s a tether, to keep you from slipping overboard. The thick-soled boot for wet decks, the narrow boot for sprinting across beams. Random fusion, yes—but the river is random too, and it still makes channels.

When I finally finish restoring that celadon bowl, I don’t seek “invisibility.” I align the fragments so the seams form a shallow spiral, like the eddy behind a piling. In sunlight, the resin glints for a moment, a soft admission. I place the bowl on the table, tap it with a fingernail. The sound isn’t pure, but it’s alive—lower, warmer, like someone speaking after being soaked in water.

Deku reaches out, as if afraid it might bite. His fingers hover, then gently touch the rim. The glaze is cool. His thumb traces along a seam without flinching.

“I think,” he almost whispers, “I’d wear something like this on purpose.”

The wharf wind finds its way through the window crack, carrying the river’s chill across the workbench. It lifts a corner of his asymmetric jacket, rattles the chain, and sets the hanging fragments gently chiming against each other, ding-ding-dang-dang, like distant utensils on a ship’s galley shelf.

I look at him and see not a “look,” but an understanding: every mended thing is a biography. That bold outfit—mismatched fabrics, exposed stitching, stubborn imbalance—is like a restoration artifact that refuses to lie. It’s wearable wreckage, a mobile salvage operation, a walking history.

The river still carries things outside: new containers, old silt, secrets rearranged by the current. The studio holds the smell of curing resin, damp earth, and the stubborn bitterness of camellia oil lingering on the bamboo handle. I place the bowl beside the fragments, because I keep the fragments too. The whole scene has a strange peace: hero and porcelain, streetwear and shipping lane, all stitched together by the same principle.

No journey stays clean.
No break is necessarily meaningless.

But if you want me to be more honest—I’m not sure I’m “resisting” either. Maybe I’ve just learned to choose a posture, among imperfections, that’s more visible. Maybe that’s enough, maybe it’s not…

Late at night, the wharf seems to finally swallow its last breath. The river outside the window is black without end. Sometimes I wonder: those fragments that were never salvaged, are they too continuing “whole” somewhere? A wholeness we’ll never see.
And tomorrow morning, the fog and the smell of diesel will return. I’ll turn on the light as usual, run my fingers over the cracks as usual—like confirming a path still exists.