In July 2020, I returned to my hometown of Harbin after six years away. At the age of 24, the trajectory of my life came to a sudden halt, and I began to reflect on how I had been shaped by the currents of life. “New Moon” is the name my mother gave herself, derived from the beauty she gazed upon amidst pain and chaos. It guides me to look back at the 1990s, the decade of my birth, and examine the eternal entanglement between the beauty of aspiration and the harsh reality.