In 1985, with heavy rain on the way, Lin Xiu’e has been without her husband for three years. She struggles to feed three children who have grown gaunt with hunger, facing a failed harvest and creditors lying in wait. In an era when a woman’s reputation mattered more than her life, she knocks on the door of the village’s most notorious bachelor, desperate to get enough food to survive and take her daughter, burning with fever, to the hospital...
From then on, she is the “thoroughly rotten” woman everyone in the village talks about, and a disgrace her children dare not acknowledge. The spiteful gossip of busybodies can drown a person; the contempt of relatives can cut to the bone. But Lin Xiu’e never looks back. This is a tragic song of a mother sinking willingly into disgrace, driven by the need to lift her children toward a future when survival seems impossible. When morality collides with hunger, she is a sinner, but also the only one who can save them.
The better, the drier, the better. Not bad.