Smoke and Mist Again

In an age caught between the old and the new, Great-Grandfather fought against the tide. He even borrowed a corpse to fake his death, only to come back to life again. From the son of a wealthy family, he fell to the bottom rung of the city, and so began a pursuit filled with anxiety and conflict. There were women from the lower classes with fierce material desires, elegant local wives of foreign men, and wealthy young ladies returning from overseas to complete their homecoming... Yet among all these lives, there was no trace of the rosy clouds Great-Grandfather sought. Father had once lived through an era of renewal and innovation. His simple abandonment was nothing more than a desire to obtain a kind of possession unlike anything before, but it was destroyed by a storm, ending a love he had never been willing to relinquish, even in death. Yet in the face of the survival ethics of a great age, returning home left Father wavering and resolute in equal measure, caught in his own contradictions. The Jiangnan country girl and the wife he did not love were unavoidable sources of conflict and entanglement in Father's life. His daughter-in-law's unruliness and his son's rebellion, in turn, made him repeatedly negate and affirm himself, but to his dying day he could not dispel the rosy clouds in his heart. For reasons rooted in both the times and himself, his son's pursuit became a farce of crossed purposes, yet he never stopped chasing the rosy clouds that belonged to him. But within the context of a great age, survival ethics became hopelessly disordered amid upheaval and reconstruction. A woman from a mountain village concealed her feelings and lived simply to survive, eventually finding a place of her own. An old maid who kept the reserve of a country girl yet longed to win love did not live for love alone, but was ultimately destroyed by it... And among all these lives, there was no trace of the rosy clouds the son sought. A confused yet clear-eyed "sage" used the desires of a mind convinced of its own wisdom to prolong one way of existing, yet in the end still possessed a vision of rosy clouds, both real and elusive.