Children find their destiny

New film shows Mongolian families willingly reach out to orphans buffeted by winds of fate, Xu Fan reports.

Even for a gifted linguist, it would be a seemingly impossible mission to learn the film script of a different language in about two weeks. However, actress Ma Su agreed to such a challenge without a moment's hesitation when she received an invitation from Derek Yee Tung-sing, a prestigious Hong Kong director, who was seeking the lead for his movie, In Search of Lost Time.

Based on real-life stories, the movie, which was released domestically in early September, revisits a heartbreaking chapter of New China's early history: Thousands of undernourished children from orphanages in Shanghai and surrounding southern provinces were adopted by local herders in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region between the late 1950s and early 1960s.

During this extremely harsh time when most of China's southern regions were stricken by lengthy droughts and severe food shortages, many starving parents, the majority from Zhejiang, Anhui and Jiangsu provinces, left their children — some were even babies or toddlers — at orphanages in Shanghai, hoping the big city would provide them with a better chance of survival.