Lurking in the Taiwan Strait

In 1950, on the eve of the liberation of Shanghai. Chen Yanqiu, an underground member of the Communist Party of China, was forcibly taken to Taiwan by his superiors at the airport. Across the crowd, he saw that his wife Liu Cuiyun, who he thought had been sacrificed, was still alive. This glance became the last face of the revolutionary couple. In Taipei, Chen Yanqiu used the alias Zhou Wenyuan and sneaked into the Kuomintang intelligence center. In order to protect his identity, the organization arranged for him to marry Shen Wantang, who had returned from studying in Japan. In the Japanese-style house at the foot of Yangmingshan Mountain, the two acted out a fake show of treating each other as if they were guests. When he was debugging the radio station late at night, she would silently bring her midnight snacks; when she encountered suspicion from secret agents, he could always calmly rescue her. Time has allowed fake dramas to give birth to true feelings, but in Chen Yanqiu's heart, the figure looking back at the airport has always been hidden. Across the strait, Liu Cuiyun found out that she was pregnant after getting the information. She remained anonymous and raised her daughter alone. Every Qingming Festival, she would take her daughter to the top of the mountain, point to the southeast and say, "Dad is doing very important things over there." This would last forty years. Chen Yanqiu experienced white terror, cross-strait artillery war, and diplomatic changes in Taiwan. The information he sent changed the direction of history, and he also watched his colleagues disappear into the night one by one. In 1987, the first time the two sides of the Taiwan Strait opened up family visits, the gray-haired Chen Yanqiu set out on his way home. In front of Liu Cuiyun's grave, he put down a handful of soil he brought back from Taiwan. "Straits" tells not only a spy war, but also a story about commitment and waiting. Some people turn their lives into codes, guarding the most affectionate echoes with silence in the stormy waves of the times.