Thinking of You at Dawn

Kunming, 1990. Chen Housheng, a ragpicker, finds an abandoned baby by Cuihu Lake. He raises her with a bowl of rice porridge, a battered tricycle, and the cry of "Scrap metal, old books, cardboard—bring it out to sell!" The girl, Xiaoman, grows up to become the singer Manxing. She changes her name, reinvents herself, and leaves her adoptive father behind in the old house in the old quarter. He saves a biscuit tin full of slips of paper bearing the character "Man," waiting for her to return. The day she rushes back, dawn is just breaking, the door is ajar—and he is already gone. Some love arrives too late, only after you finally hear it.