Director: Mao Junyi

Synopsis

His brakes fail, and an old man falls by a small bridge next to a century-old tree. Trembling, he sits down under the tree and, seeing that no incense has been offered to it for a long time, feels sorry. A warm baked rice cake is handed to him; a simple-minded villager grins and gestures for him to take it, then is gone in an instant, and a rice cake has also appeared beneath the tree. Cicadas shrill in the summer heat, ducks squawk on the water, and the current flows upstream. Eating the cake, the old man pedals on. At the stone bridge on the riverbank, the slope grows steeper and the tricycle runs out of control. He hurriedly throws the cake aside and squeezes the brakes hard, finally stopping at the bottom of the slope: half of the rice cake has wedged under the wheel and stopped the slide. The villager is nowhere to be seen. Looking at the village and the distant mountains, the old man is filled with homesickness. He pushes the battered tricycle along a long dirt road, passing Mount Jianglang, made of three giant rocks shaped like the legendary Stone of Three Lives. In a daze, he hears a bell ring softly as his younger self rides past on a tricycle. Memories flood back: back then he burned incense by the old tree and offered rice cakes. Seeing the villager hanging on the tricycle frame to tease the puppies in the cargo bed, he smiled and handed him a cake, and watched him spin around laughing with it. At home, his wife was fanning the children to sleep for their nap with a cattail fan, and the rice cakes he brought back were still steaming. The young man went out but turned back, grinning as if his plan had worked: he had secretly brought the puppy home to surprise the children, and the house filled with laughter. Going out to work, even his wheel tracks seemed to smile. In the fields, sweat soaks his neck as soon as it is wiped away. A whistle sounds; the young man looks at the train in front of him, which turns into a high-speed train, and he turns into an old man in an instant. The sound of the tricycle overturning on the small bridge sets the dogs barking again. It was all just a memory, and the passage to the next world.