In the original setting of the story, Li Meng dies of “pain”—the pain that women experience during their growth and almost throughout their lives, from menstrual cramps at the first sign of adulthood to the pain of having sex for the first time, vaginal dryness due to age, and the pain of giving birth to children. These aches and pains are deemed light because they are experienced by only women. These pains act on Li Meng like scratches on the skin, always itching. They don’t heal with time; instead, they come back. So one day, she can’t take them anymore. I had no intention of making it a lesbian film, but based on everything above, I suddenly realized that people who could fully empathize had to be women too. Because these are physical, flesh-and-bone experiences of ours. So there has to be Xiaobai. And I didn’t want to limit myself to LGBTQ themes. The eye connects me to the screen, forming a corridor in which something indefinable travels at the speed of light. And it pries up memories, pries up the rain, the smell of grass. This is the feeling that the medium of the movie always brings to me. That’s why I wanted to make a movie about the golden-colored millennium with the blazing sun in my childhood memories. The millennium is like a dream. So in a way, the death of Li Meng was also like the death of the golden millennium for me. As well as the ending where Xiaobai floats on the water, that’s what I felt in my mind at the shaky moment. After the film wrapped, I wrote a note: “Now I’m just lying on the water, but it’s as if I’m hearing the sound of an airplane’s whirring engine in my ears. I think I must be hallucinating. Obviously, I’m in the water, but I always feel like I’m at the top of the mountain. high altitude.” So does the emotion between the two—the cause of the death of Li Meng—really matter? I think it is not important to me; that belongs to the two of them in space and time. But I hope that what the shallow pool can bring to you is to be seen, whether it is the “itch” that Li Meng can’t bear, Xiaobai’s floating in the water, or the so-called dream of the millennium. If someone can feel “I am seen,” then I have accomplished my purpose.