The Silent Other Shore

Lin Xiuzhi, a retired teacher of sixty-five, raises her grandson Chen Haoyu on her own. She gets up at five every morning to cook him porridge, only to be met with his cold, retreating back. Except when he asks her for his monthly allowance on the first of the month, he barely says a word to her. Then, during a spring cleaning, she finds her grandson's elementary school diary and discovers that the boy who once wrote, “Grandma is the most amazing person in the world,” has long since shut himself off from everyone, a lonely island shaped by his parents' divorce and the pressure of school. She tries to reach him in her own clumsy way: returning his diary, learning to play chess, and holding an umbrella over him in a downpour. When he accidentally discovers the heart disease diagnosis hidden in her tin box, a crack finally appears in that iceberg. One late night, they finally speak the truths they should have shared years ago. Her love had felt so heavy that he felt indebted to her; his silence had run so deep that she thought he no longer needed her. From his second year of high school through the college entrance exams, across more than five hundred days and nights, a bowl of porridge, a game of chess, and a hand-knitted sweater help them relearn, in the simplest ways, how to love and be loved. This is a story of distance and reconciliation, reminding us that love is never absent. Sometimes it simply needs a little time to reach the other person's shore.