The Spinning Wheel with a Broken Thread

The story begins during high school in the late 1990s and spans the years up to around 2018. Han Ershui buries his youthful crush deep in his heart. Forced to leave school and find work because his family is poor, he later has to marry a girl from a neighboring village with an intellectual disability in a marriage exchange, after his father becomes seriously ill. Xiao Zhai drops out because of family upheaval and her own rebellious nature, then heads south alone. She is swept along by the tides of the times, eventually having a child out of wedlock and becoming a single mother. Years later, the two reunite amid the ruins of their hometown. Confronting a past crushed by urbanization, they realize that their fates, which never truly crossed, are themselves the era's deepest irony.