Letters from Overseas: Love Notes Still Feel Like a Spring Breeze

“Mama! When is Papa coming home?”

“Your father went overseas to Siam. Once he’s made a lot of money, he’ll come back and take us there with him!”

The heroine isn’t called Shurou, and the man who went overseas to the South Seas isn’t called Musheng.

With a son and daughter to care for, Wu Hongmei makes do with the family’s only plot of land back home, raising the two children while also looking after her elderly parents-in-law.

It is 1948, and the country is in turmoil. Families like theirs, living in the mud-brick houses passed down by their ancestors, are everywhere in this era of upheaval.