2002 PPP Sixteen-year-old Xiao Yun lives in a small riverside town in China in 1983, where her deeply felt emotions can’t be articulated in the repressive social climate of her home and small town. When her high school teacher discovers that she is pregnant, Xiao Yun’s reputation and future prospects are irretrievably shattered. Expelled from school, her boyfriend leaves her after convincing his sister, a nurse, to help Xiao Yun give birth to her baby, then give it up for adoption. Ten years later, still labelled a ‘slut’, Xiao Yun is reduced to being the lead singer in a crass local song and dance troupe. The object of crude taunts and sexual advances of the men in town, she manages to sustain a relationship with a married man, but her only real companion is Xiao Yong, an impish young boy from across the river. After peeping into her room one day while she’s bathing, he is obsessed. He craftily insinuates himself into her life, becoming her devoted friend, servant, “little brother”, and even, a kind of pre-adolescent substitute “boyfriend”. But Xiao Yun still has to forge a future from her unresolved past. Even soulmate Xiao-Yong can’t help her make the fateful, agonising decision that will make this possible.