Many people probably played the game of pressing their handprints into the frost on a window as children. This story builds on that idea, ingeniously sending five children to transmigrate into a world of ice flowers, where they experience the childhood of adults and contrast the childhoods of children today with those of the past. The contrast is made vivid. The story also uses the reflections in the ice flowers to bring in the eighty-eight constellations in the sky, imagines the Big Dipper as seven wise elders, the ice flowers as a city of dreams, and the character for good fortune as a maze and a burial ground for dream garments. The five children experience it all together, giving children today a different kind of childhood memory.
