For three lives, I was trapped under that locust tree.
"I have been waiting for you under the tree of time for a long time" - this curse has been reincarnated for thousands of years.
In her first life, in the late Qing Dynasty, she was the wise heart in the nunnery.
In the ashes of the burning Old Summer Palace, she met Lin Mo, a scholar whose family was ruined and who went north to seek relatives. Across Chai Fei and Qing Gui, my heart beat unexplained. He promised to return when the locust trees bloomed, but he was forever buried in the troubled times after the fall of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. She spent her whole life waiting silently in front of the ancient Buddha of Qingdeng to carve out her first obsession.
In the second life, during the Republic of China, she was Gu Qingying from Peiping.
In the wave of the "December 9th Movement", she met Shen Shumo, who gave up his teaching position in Cambridge and returned to China to protect his books. The locust flowers are as bright as the snow. He promised to "return home one year after victory", but he died in the Changsha fire in 1938 in order to save the national treasure on the Fenghuo Road where cultural relics were moved south. For the next twelve years, in the occupied Peiping and the turmoil of the civil war, she guarded the old locust tree, waiting for someone who would never come back. Until the spring of 1949, she received the last letter eleven years late.
In the third life, the present day, she is Su Nian, a cultural relic restorer.
In 2023, when she was restoring a diary of the Republic of China, she touched the dried locust flowers, and also touched the memories and heartache that spanned time and space. She began to dream about life and death in her previous life, and her body also experienced inexplicable failure. At the same time, she met documentary director Lu Shishen, a man who had similar nightmares to her and had a sophora flower-shaped birthmark on his wrist.
They found that they were being bound by a "curse of waiting" that originated in the late Qing Dynasty, was entrenched in the Republic of China, and has haunted them to this day. In every life, "he" died young due to the great waves of the times; in every life, "she" died alone under the locust tree. Is this endless reincarnation the fate of eternal love, or the ghost of historical trauma?
Today, obsession has become a function, and memory has become a disease. Su Nian and Lu Shishen face the ultimate choice: obey reincarnation and repeat the destined tragedy; or use this life as a bet, break into the maze of time, hold a dangerous ceremony when the Sophora japonica flowers are in full bloom during the Qingming Festival, and personally cut off the red thread that has entangled three generations?
What they have to fight is no longer fate, but the weight of history itself. What they want to pursue is not only personal liberation, but also the reconciliation of all those who have been drowned by the torrent of the times and waiting silently.
This is the history of waiting written by three women with their lives.
It is also a story about a modern man and woman who, after knowing all the tragedies, still choose to love bravely and try to live.
Purpose: Through a highly contagious three-generation narrative, it completes a literary touch on individual trauma in modern Chinese history, and ultimately points to a theme full of modernity - on the basis of respecting history and carrying memory, realizing individual spiritual independence and emotional freedom, and transforming heavy "waiting" into precious "now" in the river of time. This makes the story go beyond the category of "heart-breaking" and becomes a requiem for all the unknown people in history, as well as a hymn to the tenacity and beauty of life itself.