San Yan

“Three Words”

Subtitle

One lie saves one person, one careless word destroys a whole group, and one rumor buries an entire city.

Wedge

The clock in the old street has been ticking for seventy-two years.

Copper rust covered the clock face. The hands were worn thin from use. The time it indicated was always half a beat slow, just like all the words that everyone on this street kept hidden in their throats, refusing to speak them out loud.

At sixty-seven, the clock repairer Shen Mo kept this shop that was less than ten square meters in size. The wooden door of the shop was covered with intricate carvings of varying depths. Each carving was a mark left by a clock that had stopped working. When people spoke to him, he would reply only half of the time. Year after year, he spent his days cleaning the gears, as if all the noise in the world couldn’t compare to the delicate ticking of the clock mechanisms.

Everyone says that silence was what Shen Mo lacked most in his life. Yet, what ultimately destroyed him was just one simple phrase.

Language is the lightest thing in the world. It can spread throughout entire streets and alleys with the wind, and traverse entire cities along network cables. Yet language is also the heaviest shackle. Every word is nailed to a person, leaving no room for argument or escape.

Everyone despises lies and condemns those who tell them. But only when all the events are laid bare and the past is exposed to the light of day, do people realize with horror that it isn’t lies that hurt people, but rather people’s willingness to blindly follow rumors and refuse to listen to the truth. This is what leads to all those irreparable tragedies.

The entire story is divided into three parts: “Lies,” “Misstatements,” and “Gossip.” Three timelines intertwine: the old street, now facing demolition and condemned by everyone online; a tender promise from twenty years ago; and a mysterious case from thirty-five years ago, surrounded by conflicting rumors. No one intended to do any harm. Yet, countless well-intentioned, unintentional, or self-serving remarks, when put together, ultimately led to the destruction of an old street and ruined the rest of a silent old man’s life.