Still That Year

This is a story about growth, escape and return. In 1985, on a winter night in a water town in northern Jiangsu, a baby girl was born in tragedy and was adopted by another family in a white lie. Her name is Liu Yiran, and she spent her childhood among the reeds and rice fields. However, fate was never really kind to her. When she was sixteen, an old secret shattered the entire world she had built. With pain and anger, she fled the land where she was born and raised, and went to Shanghai alone, using disguise and hard work to find a foothold in this bustling city. At the age of twenty-two, she ran away again, this time to a further place - Northern Europe, Sweden. Under the aurora of Stockholm, she met love and her true self. From rural areas in northern Jiangsu to urban Shanghai, from China to Sweden, from 1985 to 2025, Liu Yiran spent forty years completing a long journey of self-salvation. She saw through the complexity of family ties, the true meaning of love, and the preciousness of friendship, and finally found her own happiness and meaning in the tide of the times. This is a history of the growth of young girls amid the changes in China's urbanization. It is also an epic of the times about the rapid development of China's society over the past forty years.