The Story
Cuicui, orphaned in earliest infancy, grows up beside her only family in the world, the old ferryman — her grandfather — who has spent decades faithfully running a free public ferry crossing near the remote border town of Chadong, their life poor, solitary, and steeped entirely in the quiet rhythms of the river.
Every year Chadong's Dragon Boat Festival pulls the whole town down to the riverbank, where duck-catching contests amid drums, firecrackers, and cheering crowds turn the most skilled young boatmen into local celebrities, the entire community mingling together in shared, boisterous festivity.
At one such festival, dockmaster Shunshun's two sons, Tianbao and Nuosong, stand out as the town's star boatmen, admired and cheered by everyone gathered along the riverbank. Young Cuicui, watching shyly from the crowd, is playfully teased by Nuosong, and something warm and quiet in her begins, almost without her noticing, to like him.
Years later, grown into a young woman, Cuicui draws quiet notice from both brothers, so her grandfather grows increasingly anxious about securing her future, since he is her only family in the world and knows too well how quickly a girl's fortunes can turn.
Watching her carefully, grandfather cannot help remembering Cuicui's mother — his own beloved daughter — who once loved a soldier stationed nearby, a match strictly forbidden by his military duty, since desertion or open disgrace would have followed either of them had they ever tried to marry.
Unable either to marry openly or to bear parting from her, the soldier chose to take poison and died by his own hand. Grief-stricken, Cuicui's mother carried the pregnancy to term but died herself shortly after giving birth, leaving grandfather entirely alone to raise the newly orphaned infant.
Having already watched one daughter's love end in death, grandfather now lives in quiet dread that the same fate awaits Cuicui, so every glance she draws from Tianbao or Nuosong fills him with as much fear as hope for her happiness.
Yang Mazi, an old family friend and former soldier, plays the suona at every festival Chadong holds, his music threading through each celebration and marking him as a familiar, steady, warm presence throughout the ferryman's long and otherwise solitary life.
Long before, Yang Mazi himself had courted Cuicui's mother and lost her to the soldier instead, which is exactly why his quiet devotion to the ferryman's family has never once faded, even decades after her early, tragic death.
Tianbao decides to court Cuicui the proper, formal way, sending a matchmaker to speak with grandfather on his behalf — the method his wealthy father Shunshun considers respectable and fitting for a dockmaster's eldest son.
Grandfather is overjoyed by the proposal, since marrying into Shunshun's prosperous family would finally secure Cuicui's future beyond any doubt — yet Cuicui herself shows no real interest in Tianbao at all, her heart already quietly and stubbornly given to Nuosong since that long-ago festival.
Nuosong, for his part, chooses the older folk custom instead of a matchmaker: he comes at night to sing beneath Cuicui's window, trusting that his own voice, honestly offered, might win her heart better than any formal arrangement could.
When the brothers discover they both love the very same girl, they refuse to let bitter rivalry come between them as brothers. Instead they agree that singing to Cuicui, night after night beneath her window, will let her own true feelings decide the matter honestly, not force or a fight.
One night Nuosong sings from the riverbank below, his voice carrying beautifully across the dark water. Grandfather, overhearing from a distance, is deeply moved by the song but cannot quite tell which brother it belongs to.
Misreading the moment entirely, grandfather wrongly concludes that Tianbao must have been the singer, so he begins treating Tianbao as Cuicui's likely match and frontrunner, unaware that he has the brothers' true situation completely reversed.
Anxious to settle the matter properly, grandfather goes directly to Shunshun to ask which son is truly courting Cuicui, but Shunshun, sensing the tangled feelings beneath the question, offers only vague, evasive, noncommittal answers.
The confusion finally clears when Tianbao himself comes to realize that Cuicui's heart truly belongs to Nuosong all along, so he accepts, painfully but without bitterness or resentment, that he cannot and will not compete against his own younger brother for the woman he loves.
Rather than linger in a rivalry he has already lost, Tianbao chooses to leave Chadong altogether, boarding a trading boat bound downriver to seek his fortune and put real distance between himself and the whole painful situation.
The river offers no mercy for his escape: Tianbao's boat capsizes violently in the dangerous rapids downstream, and he drowns there, his generous, self-sacrificing exit from the brothers' love triangle ending not in relief or fortune, as he'd hoped, but in sudden, senseless death.
News of Tianbao's death utterly devastates Shunshun, and in his overwhelming grief he turns cold and distant toward the old ferryman's entire household, blaming the tangled courtship — however unfairly — for having set his beloved son on that fatal downriver journey in the first place.
Nuosong is consumed by guilt, believing that his own feelings for Cuicui indirectly drove his brother away to die on that river journey, so he finds himself torn painfully between his lasting love for her and his loyalty to his grieving, increasingly embittered father.
Wanting a securer match after so much loss, Shunshun pressures Nuosong to marry the miller's daughter instead, whose dowry includes a genuinely valuable mill — a far more practical union, in his eyes, than one with a penniless ferryman's granddaughter.
Nuosong refuses the arranged match outright, unable to let go of his feelings for Cuicui despite his father's pressure and despite the heavy guilt that has weighed on him ever since his brother's drowning.
Yet guilt over Tianbao's death and open conflict with his father keep Nuosong from ever reconciling openly with Cuicui or her grandfather, so the courtship that once seemed so close instead stalls into painful, unresolved silence.
Grandfather makes repeated, anxious visits to Shunshun's house, trying again and again to settle Cuicui's prospects plainly and honorably before it is too late, but each time he is met only with coldness or evasive half-answers, and the strain steadily wears the old man down.
Unable to resolve any of it, and unwilling to keep causing pain to everyone involved, Nuosong finally leaves Chadong for good, traveling downriver toward distant Taoyuan without giving Cuicui or her grandfather any real promise of his eventual return.
Soon afterward, a violent storm sweeps over Chadong, thunder cracking and rain lashing the riverbank through the entire night as the whole town huddles indoors, sheltering from the sheer fury of the weather outside.
Worn down by long years of grief, worry, and unresolved anxiety over Cuicui's future, the old ferryman dies quietly alone that very night, his heart simply giving out amid a storm he had weathered so many times safely before.
Cuicui wakes the next morning to find her grandfather dead beside her, the only family she has ever truly known now gone in a single night, leaving her utterly and suddenly alone at the ferry crossing she has always called home.
That same storm topples the town's old white pagoda, a landmark that had stood watch over Chadong for generations, its sudden collapse marking the night as one of shared, unusual loss for the entire town.
In time the townspeople rebuild the pagoda themselves, brick by patient brick, and ordinary daily life gradually resumes its old familiar rhythms, the restored tower standing afterward as a quiet symbol of continuity surviving loss.
Yang Mazi, the old family friend and former suitor of Cuicui's mother, comes to bury grandfather properly and afterward simply stays on, moving in to become both Cuicui's guardian and her steady new partner in running the ferry crossing day after day.
Over time Shunshun's coldness toward the ferryman's family gradually softens, and he quietly begins supporting Cuicui in small, practical ways, though the full reconciliation their two families once seemed close to never actually arrives.
Nuosong himself remains away downriver toward Taoyuan, alive but absent, and nothing in the story ever confirms whether he will choose, someday, to come back to Chadong or to Cuicui at all.
The story closes with Cuicui still standing at the ferry crossing, tending it now alongside Yang Mazi, waiting patiently for a man who, as the narrator gently suggests, may come back to her tomorrow — or, just as easily, may never come back to Chadong at all.
What it means
This double blow ends the only world grandfather ever gave her and orphans Cuicui a second time, echoing her own parents' thwarted love story before her — proof that in Shen Congwen's border country, tragedy needs no villain at all, only silence, mistimed words, and an indifferent, ever-flowing river.
🎧 Read-along audio is being prepared — text-only for now.
