From Republican-Era China to the Modern Day: Yiping's Awakening

On a winter night in 1986, as Yiping draws her final breath, her fingers are still clutching an old, yellowed photograph. He Shuhuan's smile in the picture is as dazzling as the crystal chandelier in the Lu family's living room. Her soul doesn't pass on. Like a dead leaf caught by the wind, she drifts through the world for forty years. During those four decades, she watches alleyways turn into skyscrapers and black-and-white television give way to color. All the while, the knot in her heart grows tighter: Why had she softened and forgiven Lu Zhenhua, who had driven her mother to the brink? Why had she let pity sway her into helping Wang Xueqin out of her predicament? Worse still, she never saw through He Shuhuan's “being torn between two sides” act before she died. It was nothing but a sugar-coated knife. Then one day, she drifts into a family's living room, where Romance in the Rain is playing on the television. Onscreen, “Yiping” sings “Little Enemy” in a Shanghai dance hall, “He Shuhuan” makes passionate vows, and even Lu Zhenhua's ending is softened with a touch of “the prodigal returns.” Staring at that happy ending, she trembles from head to toe. So her whole life, given heart and soul, was nothing more than a story written by someone else; her shattering pain had become “romance” in the eyes of the audience. The obsession she'd carried for forty years explodes in that moment. She wants to rush forward and tear apart that false screen, to scream at the laughing people in the room, “That isn't me! That isn't my life!” But her voice can't even stir a breeze. She changes the version of herself written by someone else, only to return to the beginning of every story. This time, she will rewrite her own.