4 ideas
The child narrator Yingzi befriends Xiuzhen, a neighborhood 'madwoman' who mourns a student lover who never returned and the newborn daughter taken from her. Yingzi realizes her playmate Niuer, an adopted girl beaten by her foster parents, is that lost daughter, and reunites them. Mother and daughter flee in the rain to find the father and are killed by a train, so the child's act of kindness completes a family and destroys it in the same night.
Yingzi keeps asking adults to sort people into good and bad, then meets a thief hiding in the weeds who steals to pay his younger brother's schooling. She becomes his friend, and her innocent talk helps the police catch him. The book holds that 'good' and 'bad' are categories a child borrows from adults, and they fail when she actually knows the person. It also shows that a child's trust can hurt the very person she has come to understand.
The five linked episodes are each built around a departure: a death, an arrest, a lover's escape, a servant going home, and finally a father's death. Each loss takes away a piece of the child's protected world.
On the day of her primary-school graduation, Yingzi's father is too ill to attend. He had once disciplined her harshly for being late and had taught her to face hard things alone. She goes to the ceremony by herself and comes home to find his oleanders fallen and learns he has died. She tells herself she is no longer a child, so adulthood arrives not gradually but at one moment of forced responsibility for her mother and younger siblings.