Quote by Zhang Ailing: “What happened cannot be undone. You can only look ahead, not behind.”

This means that dwelling on past mistakes or events is futile because they are irreversible. True wisdom lies in accepting the past and focusing your energy on moving forward, toward the future.

This novel powerfully portrays a woman trapped by circumstances, showing the irreversible consequences of past choices within a restrictive patriarchal society.

Chinese writer and novelist of the mid-twentieth century, considered one of the greatest writers in modern Chinese literature. Born in Shanghai in 1920 to a once-wealthy family in decline, her fiction captured the texture of urban Chinese life under colonial and wartime conditions with psychological precision. Her novella Love in a Fallen City and the novel The Rice-Sprout Song are among her most celebrated works.