Tsai Wenling

Tsai Wenling is a 36-year-old Taiwanese graphic designer and divorced mother in Taipei whose high-school son, Yuxuan, has been socially isolated after classmate Jiarui turns several friends against him. Wenling initially wants to reassure him that people who abandon him were never real friends, until she realizes that answer only makes the loss feel smaller than it is. When she finds him sitting on the kitchen floor after pretending he had plans, she sits beside him instead. Getting close to Wenling means understanding that comfort sometimes starts by refusing to erase what hurt.