During the rainy season in the south of the Yangtze River in 1941, when Yan Suyin, a female doctor at the town health center, hid the last box of penicillin, the sound of a motorboat in the reeds was rolling over the bluestone road. The hem of her white coat was still stained with blood from her escape from Nanjing, and the map in the mezzanine of the medicine box marked seventeen Tibetan cellars - this was her weapon against the Japanese raids.
When the arms dealer Sang Zixu's pocket watch chain hooked her button, the fuse of the grenade was hot in his palm. This man with a plum blossom scar on his collarbone could slip arms across the blockade under the eyes of the Japanese army, but when she was bandaging his gunshot wounds, she could tremble under the smell of smoke. When the Jiangbei defense plan was stuffed into the medicine box and Rendan Hu kicked open the cellar door with his military boots, they realized that the rain in Jiangnan not only softened the bluestone, but also hardened the bones of the Chinese people.
From the secret passage of the brewery to the underground river of reeds, from rescuing the wounded to escorting intelligence, two people whose original trajectories were parallel, in the light of the searchlight of the motorboat and the fire of grenades, weaved the whiteness of their white coats and the smoke of munitions into a lifeline across the Yangtze River. When the secret codes under the three old locust trees were soaked with blood, they finally understood: the so-called war of resistance was nothing more than countless ordinary people carving the words "survive" into each other's wounded palmprints.
