Book of Embers

In the late autumn of 1946, the Wing Tai Pawn Shop in Hong Kong was burned down. Cheng Yanqiu, who returned from studying abroad, faced his father's charred corpse and ruins. He found half a broken account book among the ashes, and uncovered a shocking transaction that transcended life and death—— What is pawned here is never gold and silver, but "shame, conscience, and even living names." The remaining pages of the account book point to the three pawnbrokers like a curse: Bai Feng, who lost her sense of shame and transformed into a business tycoon, redeemed a bottle of cheap perfume that symbolized her first night; Zhou Shichang pledged his conscience in exchange for power, but the secret account revealed that what he was trying to redeem was actually his daughter's abducted childhood; The nameless ones sealed up their vocal cords and went to die, the gramophone film played Chopin in the air-raid shelter on the night of the fall, and the unredeemable names floated in the sound of gunfire. Cheng Yanqiu launched a pseudo-documentary investigation as a reporter, and his writing wandered between real files and fictitious confessions. As she got closer to the truth about the arson, her own handwriting appeared on the last page of the remaining account: "Pawn: The Life of a Father." In 1978, the camera focused on Cheng Yanqiu, who was undergoing self-trial. The flames she lit on fire revealed the common mastermind behind the three pawns— A soul who uses the death of his loved ones to cleanse the wounds of war has already turned the air-raid shelters on the night of the fall of Hong Kong into the last auction house of human nature. When survival becomes the highest morality, is it a crime to pawn your soul? Those who take chestnuts from the fire will eventually have embers burning through their palms.