Opposite Shadow

In 1990, on the Longdong Plateau, Chen Jiabang failed the high school entrance examination and headed south to Guangzhou carrying his old shadow puppets. On the assembly line, he met Yin Fangfang, a girl from Hubei. When registering his marriage, he unexpectedly discovered that his place of birth was "Shashi, Hubei Province"—the parents he had called for twenty years were not his biological children. A box of shadow puppets reveals the secret past of two generations: the brief love between Zhou Wenbin, an educated youth from Hubei, and Qiao Cuicui, a woman from Longdong, and the silent protection of his uncle Chen Shouyi for twenty years. When the truth was revealed, one father gave him life and the other gave him his last name. From the Loess Plateau to the Jianghan Water Town, a journey of finding roots across the north and south. In the sound of love, the buckwheat flowers bloomed and withered. Those who were crushed and put back together by the times used the clumsiest way to protect the most precious things.