3 ideas
Guanglin's younger brother Sun Guangming drowns while saving another child from a river. Their father, Sun Guangcai, grieves only briefly before scheming to have the death officially recognized as heroism. He fantasizes about the rewards, status and even a new life in the city that a hero's family might receive. The episode shows extreme poverty converting a child's death into a bargaining chip for survival and status.
The narrative is arranged by association: an event surfaces when an emotion, image or sound pulls it up, not when it happened. Seen this way, a remembered life is organized around unresolved emotional charge, so childhood fear or abandonment sits beside events from years apart. The order in which memories arrive shows what still matters to the person remembering.
In a household at the edge of subsistence, parents, children and elderly relatives are valued by what they cost and contribute. The grandfather is passed between sons as a burden, and a child who was given away returns to find no place held for him. Affection does not vanish in these conditions, but it gets subordinated to calculations of who can be fed.