Every discovery is a new pang of pain for the youth and his first love. He has no idea of the girl’s relationship to them, or the reason for her seeming sexual availability. Wang has no choice but to stay in De Lan’s house with her family, an old blind lady and her lame son. Unlike his father, he has no people skills and the locals take an instant dislike to him. Harvest time is far away and the villagers have no cash. When they reach the village, Wang awkwardly attempts to collect old debts, but it’s hopeless. All Wang knows is that she, too, is looking for a missing relative and has taken out a large loan to find him. Since dialogue is rarer than palm trees in the mountains, their relationship remains quite formal. Brashly overconfident and a bit hard-hearted, Wang keeps his rations to himself, but during the multiday journey on foot, he develops respect for De Lan. It’s the first indication of the distrustful attitude of the Han Chinese, to which Wang belongs, towards the non-Han minority living in the mountains. De Lan (De Ji) is familiar with the treacherous mountain path and will help him journey safely, but he shouldn’t give her food, or she will run away. Wang is told to escort a girl back to her village. The catch is that he must assume his father’s uncollected debts, which will take him 10 years of hard work to repay. He was a loan officer for the local co-op, practically the sole banker in that remote area. He has been missing for three months, since venturing into the surrounding mountains. In a gray little town, young Wang (Dong) waits despondently for his father to return. Once again Liu returns to Yunnan province, the setting of his festival globetrotters Courthouse on Horseback and Deep in the Clouds, populated by China’s ethnic minorities. The time is 1984, and the place is the remote outback of China.

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