I am a young man from mainland China adrift in Hong Kong. After a night of heavy drinking, I wandered into a mansion halfway up the mountain and met Shen Qiu, a female collector. She had in her collection the wartime diaries of my grandmother, Lin Manqing. As I turned the yellowed pages, the love between an Xiamen-born beauty and a wealthy young man from Southeast Asia blossomed amid the flames of war, only to be shattered into two halves of a jade pendant under the Japanese army's invasion, sending them each their separate way. I thought my grandmother's story ended with her joys and sorrows, but then I discovered that the cloud-patterned jade pendant I wore close to my body had long since secretly intertwined the fates of three generations of our family. My adoptive mother, Chen Yuxia, spent her life holding on to another love crushed by the times: Liang Jianshe, the soldier she fell for when sent down to the countryside as an educated youth. Their different backgrounds tore them apart, and they each married someone else, only to "coincidentally" meet again a decade later, thousands of miles away. When he died in a rescue operation, she raised me alone and never spoke of it.
Three couples, three eras, a century of joys and sorrows linked by the same jade pendant. When Shen Qiu placed the water-patterned jade pendant in my palm, long-buried secrets finally surfaced. It turned out that every one of our love stories was a continuation of a tale left unfinished by our ancestors.
Premise: A story of steadfast love, love for one's country, and the light of compassion
