A 39-year-old woman who has spent fifteen years working hard in Shanghai, she is one of the many outsiders who came to make a life in the city. Back in her hometown, she was once the child everyone thought had the brightest future: she got into a prestigious university, stayed in a big city, and landed a job at a foreign company. But at 39, she gets laid off, dumped, and told her rental lease is up. Then a phone call summons her back to her hometown in Hunan: her grandmother has fallen and been hospitalized.
Returning to Qingzhu Town after many years away, Lin Wanqiu finds that everything has changed, and somehow nothing has changed at all. The things she once desperately wanted to escape, the neighbors’ gossip, her parents’ nagging, and the town’s small-mindedness, have become the warmest refuge just when she is at her most vulnerable.
