A Heart Full of Children and Grandchildren

This story explores aging and life from the perspective of elderly parents who move away from home to help raise their grandchildren. They are the protagonists. Like fallen leaves, they arrive in the autumn of their lives and scatter across cities throughout China. Walk down the street and look up, and you will see one of them. They may be holding a child's hand or carrying a basket of groceries, speaking in a strange tongue that is neither standard Mandarin nor the local dialect. They miss home and struggle to adapt to life in an unfamiliar city. Loneliness is a challenge they will face for the rest of their lives. But for their children, they endure and stay on. After their children leave for work, they are like children at kindergarten, making unfamiliar friends and trying to fit into an unfamiliar city. They come to another place for various reasons: some to help care for their grandchildren, others because they can no longer live independently and cannot find suitable care in their hometown. This is a social phenomenon in modern China that cannot be ignored. But no matter how hard things get, with their children by their side and their love for them, they become warm-hearted elderly drifters.