Toad Song.

Not long ago, in a rush to leave, I grabbed a pair of socks at random. They had a hole, yet I wore them out anyway. Throughout the day, the discomfort nagged at me, and upon returning home, I found the hole had worsened, frayed by my shoes. Recently, I came across a survey revealing that in China, 5.34% of the homosexual population has chosen to enter into marriages of convenience. Among these couples, 30.6% desire children, which means approximately 1.1 million such families intend to raise children. This figure, calculated through layers of percentages from a vast population, represents a reality whose accuracy is beyond my reach—a "small" hole that perhaps isn't so small after all. In recent years, our cinemas have over flowed with films on homosexual themes, which has led to narratives about deceptive marriages. These societal issues, much like the hole in the sock, remain unpatched; we continue to pretend they do not exist. We carry this hole with us, greeting friends with our usual smiles, even as the skin underneath becomes inflamed from the friction of our journeys, maintaining our smiles despite thepain. By chance, I learned that a friend had entered a marriage of convenience and had a child who, at two or three years old, remains unaware of the challenges that lie ahead. I wonder, if I were that child, how curious and confused I might be about myself, my family, and society. I do not intend to criticize but to acknowledge this unfillable hole, to reveal the hidden pains beneath our forced smiles. Thus, I was inspired to create this story— a child helping a tadpole find a home, a story of a child growing up in a marriage of convenience and defining what 'home' means to them.