The Secret of the Blue Cloth Umbrella

During the plum-rain season, rain threads the air. Chen Wan crouches in the storage room of the old house and opens the oil-paper package her mother left her on her deathbed, with the instruction, “Don’t open it until you’ve thought it through.” Inside is a blue cloth umbrella. It was part of her mother’s dowry, and twenty years ago, when her father died in a construction-site collapse, it had sheltered mother and daughter from wind and rain.

Now Chen Wan finds a note tucked inside the umbrella’s ribs. Following its instructions, she finds a key hidden inside the third rib and uses it to open an abandoned bicycle shed downstairs. Amid the smell of mold and rust, she finds her father’s death certificate and a photograph of a strange man.

Over the next three days, Chen Wan pieces together the hidden world her mother had kept to herself. Before his death, her father had been a safety inspector at a building materials company, documenting problems on numerous construction projects. Her mother had helped copy down the “warning signs.” The key hidden in the umbrella opens a USB drive concealed in a compartment of her father’s toolbox. It contains video evidence of twenty-seven shoddy construction projects spanning thirty years.

On another stormy night, Chen Wan stands beneath the city’s Construction Commission building, holding the blue umbrella as she plays the videos from the USB drive. In the footage, her father rushes toward a dangerous building and cries out, “People are going to die!”

The next day, “Truth Behind a String of Collapses from Twenty Years Ago Exposed” makes the news headlines. Someone photographs Chen Wan standing outside the cordon, using her umbrella to shield a folder of documents. She finally understands her mother. A so-called “protective umbrella” is a roof held up by a person’s backbone, and a belief in protecting others.

The blue umbrella remains in the storage room. Chen Wan tightens the red cord around its tip. She takes up her mother’s “umbrella,” offering one to Grandma Wang downstairs, sheltering a child caught in the rain, and passing on warmth so it won’t be drenched by the rain.