In 1974, Shanghai girl Shen Qiuhe went to the countryside to join the Liuhe Brigade in southern Anhui. She was clumsy and heartless. She was bitten by fleas and cried when frightened by leeches, but she still happily carried the hoe to work every day.
Everyone in the village said that this girl was short-sighted.
Until that evening, she met a man by the river who had just walked out of the water - his shoulders were like mountains, his eyes were like knives, and there was not a trace of extra flesh on his body.
His name is Gu Xiaoyuan. He left Liuhe when he was twelve years old and came back fourteen years later with scars all over his body. No one knows what kind of soldier he was. They only heard that he fought his way out of a tight siege alone in the rainforest of southern Xinjiang.
No one knew that this iron-clad soldier could sit by the river for an hour, enduring mosquitoes, just to wait for an educated youth to take a bath.
He applied all his thoughtfulness, caution, and patience to her.
That summer, the cicadas were chirping noisily and the rice flowers were fragrant. A young educated youth who was so simple that it made people laugh, and a soldier who was so silent that it made people feel distressed, had a thrilling love affair by the Liuhe River.
Later, someone asked Shen Qiuhe: "Why did you fall in love with him back then?"
She blushed all day and finally said, "He pinched the leech off my leg."
After Gu Xiaoyuan heard about it, he smiled rarely and said nothing.
He just took out a square blue and white plaid handkerchief from under the pillow - it was still stained with soap stains and mud spots that could not be washed away.
He kept it for forty years.
