The Poplars at Dongmen

Zhou Yilin first met Feng Yi'an when she was four. She was clutching a little bell and hiding alone in a corner, unwilling to let anyone approach or say a word. The director shook her head helplessly and said to Gan Jingling, "She was just brought here yesterday. She hasn't said a word since."

"I'll trade you this pinwheel for your bell, okay?" Eleven-year-old Feng Yi'an often went to the orphanage with her mother to play with the children.

Ouyang Zhi first met Zheng Yi in Japan. Zheng Yi and his friends had won a design award and went out to celebrate. At a club, they came across Ouyang Zhi, who had been tricked into her first hostessing job. A performance of The Nutcracker at the Tokyo Bunka Kaikan, her mother's favorite ballet, was what made him remember Ouyang Zhi dancing gracefully onstage. She was twenty that year, and Zheng Yi was twenty-five. She thought two lonely people could depend on each other for the rest of their lives. "Zheng Yi, I don't know who I am, and I don't want to know. Let's run away." "A Zhi, I can only be Zheng Yi." He loved her, and she loved him, but he had more important goals to pursue in life, while she was shackled by the weight of her past. The chains that bound her fate were locked at the other end to someone other than him. Though they understood each other's feelings, they could not save each other. A rumor brought the painful past to light, and Ouyang Zhi saw her biological mother, now insane, in a psychiatric hospital. In truth, just like Zheng Yi, she had no way to love and no way to escape. She could only be Zhou Yilin.

Feng Yi'an: "I love you. I don't care whether you're Zhou Yilin or Ouyang Zhi."