There Are No Echoes on the Riverbank

On the night of the Mid-Autumn Festival in 1948, a deserter named Li Shouyi found a baby girl at the Wangchuan River ferry crossing. A piece of cloth embroidered with plum blossoms fell from her swaddling. It was stitched exactly like the work of the woman he loved, Shen Qing. He looked toward the opposite bank. In the fog, someone knelt and bowed repeatedly, then raised a hand missing its ring finger and waved to him. He called her name, but no one answered. When the fog cleared, the opposite bank was empty.

He didn’t know that Shen Qing was lying in the reeds, watching him board the boat. Her throat had been damaged by an artillery blast, leaving her unable to call out. She waited like that for sixty years.

She opened a general store on the other side of the river and watched him raise the child, marry someone else, and see his son marry her daughter. She watched her granddaughter be born and grow up. She made twelve sets of baby clothes and secretly left them by the door. She hid her medical records in a crevice by the river, waiting for someone to find them one day.

In 2012, documentary filmmaker Li Niangui returned to her hometown to shoot a film. She found a tin box in the ruins of the old house, then came across a water-damaged medical record at a secondhand market. The first page read: “Infant Su Hui, rescued August 15, 1948. Birth mother: Shen Qing.”

Su Hui was her mother’s name.

The secrets hidden for sixty years began to surface, one by one. It turned out someone on the other side of the river had watched over their family for an entire lifetime.