A personal epic spanning forty years, it describes the deepest love and the most painful regrets of an era.
In the spring of 1937, under the crabapple flowers in the Humble Administrator's Garden in Suzhou, Lin Nianzhen, a young lady from an aristocratic family, and Chen Haisheng, a progressive young man, met by chance. She is a lady who is proficient in music, chess, calligraphy and painting, and he is an ideal student. A conversation between Keats and Nalan Xingde made the two souls recognize each other in an era of war.
However, the gunfire at Marco Polo Bridge interrupted all the romance. In the ensuing historical torrent of the war of resistance against Japan, the isolated island of Shanghai, the civil war between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party, and the isolation between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait, their love experienced four encounters and three separations.
From Suzhou gardens to Shanghai alleys, from farms in northern Anhui to military villages in Taipei, they are trapped by the times and cannot help themselves. He became a cultural cadre, struggling between ideals and reality; she became a "rightist" and traded her dignity for survival in a labor camp; and her Kuomintang officer cousin Lu Tianyu, who had always loved her deeply, became a wealthy businessman on the other side of the Taiwan Strait and spent his life watching for a hopeless love.
This book is not only a love story, but also a map of the destiny of a generation of Chinese people.
