The rain over Suzhou had just stopped, and the red candles had yet to cool when he gave her a broken plum branch. “When it blooms again, that will be our final farewell.” Three months into their marriage, officer Su Mingyu went to the front lines of the War of Resistance Against Japan. After that, all word of him ceased.
Gu Jinxian held fast to that promise, becoming a resilient, solitary bamboo through half a century of violent upheaval. She sold her dowry to support the front lines, only to find clues that cast doubt on the news of her husband’s death in battle. She rejected the twisted “gratitude” of Xu Zhenbang, a former beggar, and sowed the seeds of the disaster that would see her nails torn out and an iron plaque hung around her neck during the Cultural Revolution. She watched her son grow up in humiliation, all for the sake of waiting for the faintest hope of his return.
