Exquisite Red Beans

Red beans on a delicate dice, lovesickness sunk to the bone. Do you know? Linglong was born with a leg condition and did not begin school until she was ten, only to be forced to drop out because of her gender and physical limitations. At sixteen, she fell in love with Su Wenyuan, a painter from the provincial capital, but their relationship ended because of the gulf between their families. Later, she married officer Zhao Zhenguo at her parents’ arrangement. They had a daughter, Mingyue, but her husband died young, and Linglong raised the girl alone. As an adult, Mingyue fell in love with Lin Qinghe, a poor fisherman. Despite her mother’s objections, she married him and moved to his fishing village. But when he was lost at sea, she became mentally ill and eventually drowned herself in grief. Three-year-old Haiyin was left an orphan and taken in by her grandmother, Linglong. Haiyin’s eyes closely resembled her mother Mingyue’s, and for years Linglong could not face the bond of blood between them. Grandmother and granddaughter drifted into a long emotional estrangement. Then, when Haiyin fell gravely ill at fifteen, Linglong stayed by her side day and night, and feelings frozen for years began to thaw. Over the years that followed, Linglong gradually opened her heart to Haiyin, telling her the stories of her own life and her mother’s, and passing on her understanding of “the courage to love” before she died. Carrying this legacy with her, Haiyin steps into her own future. The novel’s recurring image of “red beans” ties together the emotional secrets of three generations of women across time: the red beans Linglong received as a young girl, the red beans she gathered year after year but never sent, and the red bean tree in the courtyard that accompanied three generations as they grew up.