On a rainy night in the 26th year of the Republic of China, Su Yanci found a bronze mirror engraved with complex patterns in the attic of his old house. The moment his fingertips touched the mirror, he felt dizzy. When she opened her eyes again, she was already in another time and space - a small northern town in the early days of the founding of the People's Republic of China. Since then, the bronze mirror has become a passage connecting different modern times. She has traveled through the Shili Foreign Market in the Republic of China, the collective farms in the 1960s, and the Southern Special Administrative Region in the 1980s.
Every time you travel, you are looking at the ills of the times: the sharp confrontation between the rich and powerful families in the Republic of China, the stinking of wine and meat, and the freezing roads, the struggle of lower-class women to survive in the cracks of feudalism and war; the helplessness of individual wills being eliminated in collective life, the repression of human nature behind blind obedience and silence; the opportunism and moral decline that arose under the wave of market economy in the early days of reform and opening up, and the idealists' encounters and compromises in the face of reality.
Su Yanci tried to record all this as a bystander, but he couldn't help but lend a helping hand out of empathy many times. But she gradually discovered that small interventions were either swallowed up by historical inertia, or triggered unexpected chain reactions - she saved the girl displaced during the war, but made her fall into another kind of shackles; she reminded the educated youth on the farm to avoid risks, but caused them to miss the opportunity to change their destiny.
Su Yanci's self-perception was constantly deconstructed and reshaped in the time and space switching. She began to reflect on the light and shadow of each era. The criticism was not based on the accusation of separation, but a deep inquiry into the true nature of human nature and social fairness. Carrying the memories and scars of different eras, she is looking for a way to survive that is neither humble nor arrogant.
