Director: Ding Ruoyun | Lin Xuanyi

Synopsis

Li Jiajia, a fourth-grader, keeps saving money by doing other people's homework, walking dogs and selling scrap, hoping to buy a plane ticket abroad to visit her father, who, according to her mother, works overseas and has not been seen for three years. When she learns that first prize in a speech contest comes with 500 yuan, she prepares with all her effort. Her mother falls ill, and while fetching documents Jiajia sees the word "widowed" in her mother's household register. Young as she is, she only half understands what it means, but she has stored up too many complicated feelings. At the speech contest, Jiajia recalls eating candied haws as a little girl: she ate only the sugar coating and left the sour hawthorns, and her father told her something then. Only now does she truly understand it: life is like eating candied haws; only by tasting and accepting both the sour and the sweet is it complete.