Lao gong zhi ai qing

A humble fruit-pedlar named Cheng, whose baskets of persimmons glow like small suns against the soot-grey alleys of a nameless riverside town, covets the doctor’s daughter—an ivory-skinned, reed-slender girl who listens to phonograph records behind lattice windows. The doctor, equal parts physician and feudal gatekeeper, demands a horde of new patients before any nuptials; love, in his ledger, must yield compound interest. Cheng therefore becomes a clandestine architect of calamity: he saws balcony railings into splinters, loosens stone steps, oils thresholds—minor sabotage that sends neighbours limping, bleeding, wheezing to the clinic. Each fractured ankle is a dowry coin; every stitched laceration, a love sonnet. Yet the scheme mutates: victims grow suspicious, the girl’s gaze turns clinical, Cheng’s own fingers blister from both work and guilt. When a child’s prank catapults down a sabotaged stairwell, the town’s patience snaps like an overstretched tendon. Cheng must decide whether to confess and lose the girl, or escalate and lose his soul. In the final reel he stands before the doctor holding not a dowry but a confession inked in coal-dust and blood; the camera lingers on the girl’s hand—will she close the ledger of filial duty or open the gate of desire?